John 6:43-44

“ Jesus therefore answered and said to them: Murmur not among yourselves: 44. No one can come to me except the Father who sent me draw him; and I will raise him up at the last day. ”

In other words: “A truce to these murmurs; it is not my word that is absurd; it is you who are incapable of comprehending it, and all your “ hows ” will serve no purpose, so long as you remain in this moral condition.” Jesus goes back again to the source of their discontent; the spiritual drawing which results from the inward teaching of God is wanting to them. This is what John 6:37-40 already made known to us. The word οὐδείς, no one, is the antithesis of πᾶν, all, John 6:37. There, Jesus said: all that which is given shall certainly come: here, nothing which is not drawn shall succeed in understanding and believing. This second declaration has a direct application to the hearers.

The drawing of the Father designates the same fact as the gift (John 6:37), but this term serves to explain the mode of it; the gift is effected by means of an inward drawing which makes itself felt in the soul. We shall see at John 6:45 that this drawing is not a blind instinct, like the natural inclinations, but that it is luminous in its nature, like God Himself from whom it proceeds; it is a teaching. This teaching should have been accomplished by means of the writings of Moses taken seriously (John 6:46-47), by the Word of God inwardly received (John 6:38). The law by making the Jew feel the insufficiency of his obedience and the opposition between his feelings and the Divine will, and prophecy, by exciting the expectation of Him who should remedy the evil, make Jesus a being known and desired, towards whom a profound attraction cannot fail to make itself felt as soon as He appears. Weiss sees in the drawing and teaching of the Father the divine testimony by means of miracles, John 5:36, rendered efficacious in the heart by the Holy Spirit. This seems to me too external; and why then exclude the principal divine witness, that of the Word mentioned also in chap. 5?

We must observe the correlation between the subject he that sent me and the verb draw; the God who sends Jesus for souls, on the other hand, draws souls to Jesus. The two divine works, external and internal, answer to and complete each other. The happy moment in which they meet in the heart, and in which the will is thus gained, is that of the gift on God's part, of faith on man's part. Jesus adds that, as the initiative in salvation belongs to the Father, the completion of it is the task of the Son. The Father draws and gives; the Son receives and keeps, and this even to the glorious crowning of the work, the final resurrection. Between these two extremes is included the entire development of salvation. The sense of the last words is: And I will bring the whole to its end.