appreciate (and which none but a Jewish reporter would have inserted in his Gospel), the Saviour makes quite different, yet to them familiar, application of the manna. Moses had not given it, his merits had not procured it, but His Father gave them the true bread out of heaven. 'For,' as He explained, 'the bread of God is that [1 Not as in the A.V. of ver. 33: 'He Which cometh down from heaven.' The alteration is most important in the argument as addressed to the Jews: the one they could understand and would admit, not so the other.] which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.' Again, this very Rabbinic tradition, which described in such glowing language the wonders of that manna, also further explained its other and real meaning to be, that if Wisdom said, 'Eat of my bread and drink of my wine,' [c Prov. ix. 5.] it indicated that the manna and the miraculous water-supply were the sequence of Israel's receiving the Law and the Commandments [d Shem. R. 25.], for the real bread from heaven was the Law. [e Comp. Chag. 14 a.] [2 In the Midrash on Eccl. ii. 24; iii. 12; viii. 15, we are told, that when in Ecclesiastes we read of eating and drinking, it always refers to the Law and good works.]
It was an appeal which the Jews understood, and to which they could not but respond. Yet the mood was brief. As Jesus, in answer to the appeal that He would evermore give them this bread, once more directed them to Himself, from works of men to the Works of God and to faith, the passing gleam of spiritual hope had already died out, for they had seen Him and 'yet did not believe.'
With these words of mingled sadness and judgment, Jesus turned away from His questioners. The solemn sayings which now followed [a St. John vi. 37-40.] could not have been spoken to, and they would not have been understood by, the multitude. And accordingly we find that, when the conversation of the Jews is once more introduced, [b ver. 41.] it takes up the thread where it had been broken off, when Jesus spake of Himself as the Bread Which had come down from heaven. Had they heard what, in our view, Jesus spake only to His disciples, their objections would have been to more than merely the incongruity of Christ's claim to have come down from heaven. [1 After having arrived at this conclusion,! find that Canon Westcott has expressed the same views, and I rejoice in being fortified by so great an authority.]
3. Regarding these words of Christ, then, as addressed to the disciples, there is really nothing in them beyond their standpoint, though they open views of the far horizon. They had the experience of the raising of the young man atNain, and there, at Capernaum, of Jairus' daughter. Besides, believing that Jesus was the Messiah, it might perhaps not be quite strange nor new to them as Jews, although not commonly received, that He would at the end of the world raise the pious dead. [2 But not here and there one dead. In general, see vol. i. p. 633, where the question of Jewish belief on that subject is discussed.] Indeed, one of the names given to the Messiah, that of Yinnon, according to Ps. lxxii. 17 [c Sanh. 98 b.], has by some been derived from this very expectancy, [d Midrash on Ps. xciii. 1; Pirke de R. Eliez. 32, ed. Lemb. p. 39 b.] Again, He had said, that it was not any Law, but His Person, that was the bread which came down from heaven, and gave life, not to Jews only, but unto the world, and they had seen Him and believed not. But none the less would the loving purpose of God be accomplished in the totality of His true people, and its joyous reality be experienced by every individual among them: 'All that (the total number ) which the Father giveth Me shall come unto Me (shall reach Me [3 So Canon Westcott; and also Godet ad loc.]), and him that cometh unto Me (the coming one to Me) I will not cast out outside.' What follows is merely the carrying out in all directions, and to its fullest consequences, of this twofold fundamental principle. The totality of the God-given would really reach Him, despite all hindrances, for the object of His Coming was to do the Will of His Father; and those who came would not be cast outside, for the Will of Him that had sent Him, and which He had come to do, was that of 'the all which He has given' Him, He 'should not lose anything out of this, but raise it up in the last day.' Again, the totality, the all, would reach Him, since it was the Will of Him that sent Him 'that everyone ( ) who intently looketh [1 Mark the special meaning of as previously explained.] at the Son, and believeth on Him, should have eternal life;' and the coming ones would not be cast outside, since this was His undertaking and promise as the Christ in regard to each: 'And raise him up will I at the last day.'[a St. John vi. 40.]
Although these wonderful statements reached in their full meaning far beyond the present horizon of His disciples, and even to the utmost bounds of later revelation and Christian knowledge, there is nothing in them which could have seemed absolutely strange or unintelligible to those who heard them. Given belief in the Messiahship of Jesus and His Mission by the Father; given experience of what He had done, and perhaps, to a certain extent, Jewish expectancy of what the Messiah would do in the last day; and all this directed or corrected by the knowledge concerning His work which His teaching had imparted, and the words were intelligible and most suitable, even though they would not convey to them all that they mean to us. If so seemingly incongruous an illustration might be used, they looked through a telescope that was not yet drawn out, and saw the same objects, through quite diminutively and far otherwise than we, as gradually the hand of Time has drawn out fully that through which both they and we, who believe, intently gaze on the Son.
4. What now follows [b St. John vi. 41-51.] is again spoken to 'the Jews,' and may have occurred just as they were entering the Synagogue. To those spiritually unenlightened, the point of difficulty seemed, how Christ could claim to be the Bread come down from heaven. Making the largest allowance, His known parentage and early history [2 This is not narratedin the Fourth Gospel. But allusions like this cover the whole early history of Jesus, and prove that omissions of the most important facts in the history of Jesus are neither due to ignorance of them on the part of the writer of the Fourth Gospel, nor to the desire to express by silence his dissent from the
accounts of the Synoptists.] forbade anything like a literal interpretation of His Words. But this inability to understand, ever brings out the highest teaching of Christ. We note the analogous fact, and even the analogous teaching, in the case of Nicodemus. [a St. John iii. 3 &c] [1 Canon Westcott has called attention to this.] Only, his was the misunderstanding of ignorance, theirs of wilful resistance to His Manifestation; and so the tone towards them was other than to the Rabbi.
Yet we also mark, that what Jesus now spake to 'the Jews' was the same in substance, though different in application, from what He had just uttered to the disciples. This, not merely in regard to the Messianic prediction of the Resurrection, but even in what He pronounced as the judgment on their murmuring. The words: 'No man can come to Me, except the Father Which hath sent Me draw him,' present only the converse aspect of those to the disciples: 'All that which the Father giveth Me shall come unto Me, and him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out.' For, far from being a judgment on, it would have been an excuse of, Jewish unbelief, and, indeed, entirely discordant with all Christ's teaching, if the inability to come were regarded as other than personal and moral, springing from man's ignorance and opposition to spiritual things. No man can come to the Christ, such is the condition of the human mind and heart, that coming to Christ as a disciple is, not an outward, but an inward, not a physical, but a moral impossibility, except the Father 'draw him.' And this, again, not in the sense of any constraint, but in that of the personal, moral, loving influence and revelation, to which Christ afterwards refers when He saith: 'And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Myself [b St. John xii. 32.]
Nor did Jesus, even while uttering these high, entirely un-Jewish truths, forget that He was speaking them to Jews. The appeal to their own Prophets was the more telling, that Jewish tradition also applied these two prophecies (Is. liv. 13; Jer. xxxi. 34) to the teaching by God in the Messianic Age. [c Is. liv. 13 in Ber. R. 95 on Gen. xlvi. 28; Jerem. xxxi. 34 in Yalkut vol ii. p. 66 d.] [2 For other Rabbinic applications of these verses to the Messiah and His times, see the Appendix on Messianic assages.] But the explanation of the manner and issue of God's teaching was new: 'Everyone that hath heard from the Father, and learned, cometh unto Me.' And this, not by some external or realistic contact with God, such as they regarded that of Moses in the past, or expected for themselves in the latter days; only 'He Which is from God, He hath seen the Father.' But even this might sound general and without exclusive reference to Christ. So, also, might this statement seem: 'He that believeth [3 The words 'on Me' are spurious.] hath eternal life.' Not so the final application, in which the subject was carried to its ultimate bearing, and all that might have seemed general or mysterious plainly set forth. The Personality of Christ was the Bread of Life: 'I am the Bread of Life.' [a ver. 48.] The Manna had not been bread of life, for those who ate it had died, their carcasses had fallen in the wilderness. Not so in regard to this, the true Bread from heaven. To share in that Food was to have everlasting life, a life which the sin and death of unbelief and judgment would not cut short, as it had that of them who had eaten the Manna and died in the wilderness. It was another and a better Bread which came from heaven in Christ, and another, better, and deathless life which was connected with it: 'the Bread that I will give is My Flesh, [1 The words in the A.V., which I will give,' are spurious.] for the life of the world.'
5. These words, so deeply significant to us, as pointing out the true meaning of all His teaching, must, indeed, have sounded most mysterious. Yet the fact that they strove about their meaning shows, that they must have had some glimmer of apprehension that they bore on His self-surrender, or, as they might view it, His martyrdom. This last point is set forth in the
concluding Discourse, [b vv. 53-58.] which we know to have been delivered in the Synagogue, whether
