John 6:47Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

I mean that by every path that summons to life, He re-educates for the better those who have chosen to think something unreasonable. Being eternal life, He promises to impart Himself to believers. This is what the Apostle’s words mean: “that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Eph 3:17).

He Himself explains this and opens to us what He said: "Everyone who has heard from the Father and has learned comes to Me."

He immediately added what we could understand: "Not that anyone has seen the Father, except Him who is from God; He has seen the Father" (Jn 6:45-46).

What does His saying mean? "I have seen the Father. You have not seen the Father.

Yet you cannot come to Me unless you are drawn by the Father. And what does it mean to be drawn by the Father, if not to learn from the Father?

What does it mean to learn from the Father, if not to hear from the Father? What does it mean to hear from the Father, if not to hear the Word of God, that is, Me?

Therefore, after I said to you, 'Everyone who has heard from the Father and has learned,' do not suddenly say among yourselves, 'But we have never seen the Father.

How can we learn from the Father?' Hear Me: 'Not that anyone has seen the Father, but He who is from God has seen the Father.'

I know the Father. I have My being from Him. Yet it is as the Word exists from the One whose Word He is.

It is not the word that sounds and disappears, but the Word that remains with the Speaker and draws the hearer."

The words that follow exhort us: "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has eternal life."

He wished to reveal Himself, who He was. For He could have said briefly, "He who believes in Me has Me."

For Christ is Himself true God and eternal life.

"He who believes in Me," He says, "comes to Me. And he who comes to Me has Me. What does it mean to have Me? It means to have eternal life."

Eternal Life took death upon Himself. Eternal Life wished to die, but from you, not from Himself.

From you the Son received that by which He could accept death for you. Indeed, He received flesh from men, yet not in the same way as men.

For having a Father in heaven, He chose a Mother on earth. There in heaven He was born without a mother, and here on earth without a father.

Thus Life accepted death, so that Life might kill death. For, He says, "He who believes in Me has eternal life."

Not openly, but hiddenly. For eternal life is the Word. It was in the beginning with God, and the Word was God, and life was the light of men (cf. Jn 1:1, 4).

He Himself, eternal life, gave eternal life also to the flesh He had assumed.

He came to die, but on the third day He rose. Death, which lay between the Word who had assumed flesh and the risen flesh, was trampled down.

It is because, He says, no one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, as was foretold already in the Old Testament. Therefore, because of the hardness and unworthiness of the Jews who heard Jesus Christ, the gracious action of the Father, calling to salvation, had not yet touched their hearts. Without it, man, blinded by sin, cannot see the light of truth. But lest anyone misunderstand Isaiah’s prophecy (54:13) about direct teaching from God, Jesus Christ says that this prophecy must not be understood as though any man could ever see God and converse directly with Him. Nor can man know the essence of God through immediate vision and contemplation. God acts invisibly upon men by His grace. Immediate vision of the divine essence belongs only to His Son. Therefore, only through the Son can men receive the full light of the knowledge of God needed for salvation, and through it eternal life (17:3). Therefore: “Amen, amen, I say to you, he who believes in Me has eternal life.”

Then the Savior, with irresistible directness and clarity, revealed to them that He is the source of eternal life sent down from heaven. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. The bread which I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.” By these words, on the one hand, He pointed to the coming great work of redeeming sinful mankind through the offering of the flesh of the Son of Man for the life of the world. On the other hand, He pre-established the Mystery of Communion, which would serve as the means by which later generations of the faithful would partake of Christ’s redeeming work.

The general sense of the verses under consideration is this. Do not murmur. Your murmuring will clarify nothing for you. The truth remains unshaken in the highest degree.

That truth is that I am the bread of life for you and for the whole world. This is such bread that the wondrous manna in the wilderness, which you recall, cannot be compared with it.

Your fathers ate that wondrous bread in the wilderness and nevertheless died. The wondrous character of that bread did not prevent their death.

But he who eats the bread of which I speak will never die, but will live forever.

"He who believes in Me," and so forth: see the note on Jn 6:40 and the parallels. "I am the bread of life": see the note on Jn 6:35.

"Your fathers ate the manna." The Jews themselves had earlier pointed to the wondrous manna, wishing to see a similar miracle from Jesus (Jn 6:31).

The Lord points to this and explains that the bread of which He speaks is more wondrous than manna and surpasses it in its action upon man.

This is shown by the fact that those who ate manna in the wilderness died, whereas the one who eats this bread will not die.

Death here means both bodily and spiritual death, but in different applications.

Those who ate manna in the wilderness all died bodily. Those also died spiritually who saw in that food only bodily food and did not abide in faith.

Those who partake of Christ's bread will die bodily, but they will be alive spiritually in communion with God through faith.

Then they will rise on the last day (Jn 6:39-40, 44) and will live forever in blessed life, in union with God.

But those who do not have such communion with God through partaking of this bread will, even after rising, remain in spiritual death.

They will remain in alienation from God, as those condemned (Jn 5:29).

"I am the living bread." The expressions "living bread" and "bread of life" differ from one another.

The first denotes life as a property of the bread itself. The latter denotes life as the effect produced by it in the one who partakes.

This effect, of course, depends on the fact that the bread itself has such a property. Therefore these expressions complete one another.

They ate manna in the wilderness and died, because manna was not living bread. The one who eats Christ's bread will not die, because this bread is living.

"And the bread is My Flesh," and so forth. Here is the essential supplement to the former discourse about bread, given by a particular explanatory feature.

The Lord suddenly resolves His enigmatic discourse by this feature, which completely astonished His hearers (Jn 6:52).

Until now, under the image of bread, He had spoken generally about His Person as the object of faith.

Now He speaks clearly, precisely, and definitively. The bread of which I speak is My Flesh.

"Here He speaks clearly of the mystical communion of His body" (Theophylact).

Flesh is the same as body, the bodily composition of the God-man. Here the word must be understood in a strictly literal sense, since there is no reason to understand it figuratively.

The word bread in this whole discourse plainly has a figurative or non-literal meaning, since it denotes here the Person of Christ in general.

By the word Flesh, a precisely determinative and concrete meaning is given to it.

The word manna, which concretely defines the general concept of the bread that once fed the Hebrews in the wilderness, plainly has a literal and direct meaning.

So too does the word Flesh, which defines the general meaning of bread.

"Note that the bread which we partake of in the mystery is not an image of the Lord's body, but is the very Flesh of the Lord.

For He did not say that the bread which I will give is an image of My flesh, but, 'is My Flesh'" (Theophylact).

"Which I will give for the life of the world." This is figurative speech about the Messiah's sacrifice on the Cross.

The Lord's Flesh was offered by Him on the Cross as a true sacrifice to God for the redemption of the sins of the whole world.

So too the typological sacrifice for sin under the law of Moses cleansed the sin of the one who offered it.

Since this sacrifice of the Cross on Golgotha was still ahead, the Lord speaks of it in the future tense: "I will give."

"For the life of the world" means so that the world may live, spiritually alive in union with God, who has been reconciled by this sacrifice.

The means for attaining this life is faith in the redemptive death of the Messiah, the God-man.

By the power of this faith the whole world would have received this life if the whole world had believed.

For Christ offered the redemptive sacrifice for all, for the whole world, and for the life of the whole world.

Until then the world had been alienated from God, and therefore in spiritual death because of sin.

For that sin, the reconciling sacrifice had not yet been offered by the Son of God.

Here one already clearly sees the Lord's reference to the paschal lamb, which His hearers were soon to eat at the approaching feast of Pascha (Jn 6:4).

In the following section (Jn 6:53 and following), this reference is still clearer and more decisive.

The Lord teaches about Himself as the true paschal lamb, who takes upon Himself the sins of the whole world.

The paschal lamb was only a type of this Lamb.

Before Pascha, the Lord was now giving His hearers to understand that the time of types is passing away and the truth itself is coming.

The eating of the paschal lamb will be replaced by the eating of Christ's body, offered in sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

How this discourse of the Lord affected His hearers is seen from what follows.

The bread which I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.” The connection of verse 51 with the preceding verses is as follows. Jesus Christ speaks, as it were, in this way: “My words offend you. You do not want to believe that I, who have revealed to you the will of My Father, feed those who hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God. Therefore I call Myself the bread that came down from heaven. What then will you say when I reveal to you the greatest mystery, which you cannot now even understand? Only those who believe in Me will understand it, and even they will understand it not now, but later. What will you think if I tell you that I have given My Body for the salvation of the world? And what if I tell you that this Body of Mine will be the true bread that gives eternal life?”

More than this, because they resisted the will of God, they experienced God’s wrath (Ps 94:10-11; Ps 77:33; 1 Cor 10:5). Such is everything utilitarianism devises for man. Is it worth troubling oneself greatly at its instruction, when all its inventions and exhausting labors do not save from death? No. That would mean thinking far too lowly of one’s soul and of oneself. It would mean condemning oneself to the lot of a working beast (Ps 89:3-6).

Of the greatest importance in the Lord’s final words is the expression that the one who tastes the bread of life will not die. This expression is set against another divine saying, pronounced by God at the creation of man, when the Lord first gave him a commandment: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die” (Gen 2:17). Sin committed brought death into the world. Yet then the Lord God promised man a Deliverer in the “seed of the woman.” But only he will not die who is joined to Christ and to His most pure flesh and blood, according to His commandment, by approaching to partake of them. For by them sin is washed away and man is saved.