This coming Sunday is the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time.  45 It is written in the prophets: ‘They shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. 46 Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47 Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.

In v.44 Jesus has restated the central theological themes of the preceding discourse: God’s initiative in drawing people to Jesus and the promise of resurrection on the last day. At the beginning of v.45 he gives those themes scriptural support by appealing to “the prophets.” The OT verse cited in seems to be a paraphrase of the LXX of Isaiah 54:13, although its content also recalls Jer 31:33. The citation underscores God’s initiative in making faith possible and the universality of God’s actions (“they shall all be taught …”). The emphasis on God’s role and the appeal to Scripture build on the list of witnesses developed in 5:31–40 (John the Baptist, the signs, the Father, and the Spirit). Jesus’ claims are grounded in God’s work of the sign and in Jesus’ relationship with the Father. They cannot simply be dismissed as Jesus’ own, unfounded assertion.

At the end of the verse, Jesus alludes to another theme of 6:36–40: the faith response. “Hearing” (akouō) and “learning” (manthanō) in v. 45 function analogously to “seeing” and “believing” in vv. 36 and 40; they are metaphors for human receptivity to what God offers. Verse 45 states that God’s teaching is offered to all, but the latter part of the verse suggests that only those who hear and learn what God teaches will come to Jesus. As in 6:36–40, God’s initiative toward humanity is held in tension with human decision and response. The emphasis on teaching, hearing, and learning in vv. 44–45 suggests that the reason for the crowd’s grumbling lies in their perception, not in Jesus’ claims. God has taught them (v. 44), but they do not hear and learn (cf. 5:37).

Yet even those who learn from the Father do not see the Father. Verse 46 reasserts Jesus’ unique relationship to God, recalling the conclusion of the Prologue 1:18 (“No one has ever seen God. The only Son, God, who is at the Father’s side, has revealed Him.”). For the Fourth Evangelist, it is through Logos-Jesus alone that the believer has access to God the Father (5:23, 38, 42–43; 14:6–9) and access to eternal life (v.47).

Image credit: The Feeding of the Five Thousand by William Hole (1846-1917) | Edinburgh University Library | PD-US