43 Jesus answered and said to them, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day.
Jesus now addresses the crowd for a second time and tells then to stop their grumbling. Then he repeats the saying of v.37, but in a slightly stronger form. In v.37 the word “come” (hēxei) is future, active voice and means that the person (subject) will be in the process of “coming.” But in v.44 the subject is God who will helkysē (draw, haul by force – EDNT v.1:435) the person to him. Continue reading
41 The Jews murmured about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” 42 and they said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
In 
This coming Sunday,
This coming Sunday, 
“But these are written that you may (come to) believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name.” (Jn 20:31)
The year is 1221 and at the request of the “cardinal protector” of the friars, Cardinal Hugolino, Francis and several of his brothers have taken up the task of writing a formal rule of life. It was not clear that the Franciscans were actually a “religious order.” When Francis visited Pope Innocent III in 1209, the pope verbally approved (or did he?) a Rule of Life that was written down in few words. In 1216, the 4th Lateran Council ruled that no new religious orders could be formed: all new groups would be absorbed into existing religious orders. Hugolino recognized the uniqueness of the charism of St. Francis and his brothers and was determined that it not be lost to the church. 
Is the Bread of Life Discourse (John 6), metaphor or sacramental? There are many commentaries and religious traditions that insist on a metaphorical interpretation of “eat” and “drink” and thus “eat” and “drink” as metaphors for belief. There are some Catholic commentators (e.g. LaGrange) who insist there is no metaphor, that the entirety of Jesus’ discourse is sacramental/Eucharistic. As Fr. Raymond Brown and Fr. Francis Moloney point out, the truly Catholic position is “both-and.” What begins in John 6:22-50 as metaphor for belief, is ultimately answered in John 6:51-58 as Eucharist. With that in mind let us consider (a) a “big picture” view of this core question of John 6, but (b) fair warning: it does get a bit technical and dense in places. But give it a go!! 
Off the shores of the Philippines, a fisherman discovered a very large, misshapen pearl. It was not pretty.
When I left my home in Orlando to attend the US Naval Academy back in 1970, I arrive in a completely foreign land inhabited by football teams about which I had no knowledge. My plebe (freshman) year our first game was against Colgate. The place where Colgate toothpaste was invented? It had a recognizable name so I assumed it had a reasonable football program. What did I know? I knew that there was SEC football and who cares. Saturdays in the South are about as sacrosanct as Sundays. Football is tradition, loyalty, identity, passion an, to borrow a title from the 
friarmusings 