John 6:67Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

See with what wisdom He speaks. He did not say, “Go away,” for that would have meant driving them away. Rather, He speaks in the form of a question: “Do you also want to go away?”

By this He shows that He removes all violence and compulsion, and wants them to remain with Him not out of any shame, but from a sense of gratitude.

By not reproaching them openly, but touching them imperceptibly, He showed how one must practice wisdom in such cases.

But with us the opposite happens, and this is understandable, because we do everything for our own glory.

Therefore we think that our well-being is diminished when those who serve us go away. But Christ neither flattered nor drove them away. He only asked.

This was not because He despised the disciples, but because He did not want to keep them with Himself by force and compulsion. To remain for that reason is the same as to depart.

Notice how prudently He spoke. He did not say, “Go away,” for that would have meant driving them off. Rather, He asks, “Do you also want to go away?”

In this way He grants full freedom either to follow or not, showing that He wants them to follow Him not from shame before Him, but from the awareness that by following they will receive grace.

Thus the Savior said to His disciples something like this. If you immediately obey My words, and if, ceasing from doubt and accusation, you finally receive the mystery with the simplest faith, then I will look gladly on your presence with Me.

If the charge that My words are harsh is unpleasant to you and full of no small bitterness, and if you refuse to speak with the Jews, saying, “How can this Man give us His Flesh to eat?” (Jn 6:52), then I will dwell with you joyfully.

I will love you as My lawful children. But if you resolve to think alike with those who have fallen back, then I allow you to depart together with them and justly drive you away with them.

For I will not lack worshipers, since the preaching of the Gospel must not be confined to Judea alone. It is already spreading throughout the whole world.

From everywhere it calls men as into one assembly and swiftly gathers them to the knowledge of the truth.

“Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God” (Rom 11:22), as Paul says: severity toward the disobedient, but goodness toward those who are to know Him, “if they continue in His goodness,” as the same Paul attested.

Otherwise they too will be cut off, for He who did not spare the natural branches will not spare the grafted ones either (Rom 11:21, 24).

Therefore let the one who limps in faith through his own lack of understanding know and learn from this. If he does not wish to put an end to such sickness, he will go backward.

Having no Guide to eternal life, he will descend into dreadful Hades and will lament his senselessness. For there, it is said, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Mt 8:12).

But it seems that Jesus also indicates something else useful to us through His words to His disciples: “Do you also want to go away?”

He asks this beneficially so that they would not think they too were departing with Jewish ignorance, falling with the disobedient, or somehow accusing Him with them of teaching harsh things and trying to instill impossibilities in His hearers.

He asked whether they wished to depart with them, so that through this He might call them forth to the confession of right and pure faith. And this indeed happened.

In the name of all the Apostles, Simon Peter answered: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” There is no other teacher to whom we could pass over.

Thou, and Thou alone, teachest such doctrine as will lead those who believe in Thee to eternal life. Thou hast the words of eternal life.

No, we shall not go away from Thee. We have believed and known that Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Peter spoke this way for all the Apostles. But Jesus, penetrating the soul of each of them, corrected Peter, saying that not all of them had such faith.

One of them was as hostile to Him as the devil. Jesus did not say who this one was. But the Evangelist explains that He was speaking of Judas Iscariot, who afterward betrayed Him.

When the criminal thought of betraying his Teacher first entered Judas’s soul is unknown. From the later narrative of John the Evangelist we know that Judas was treasurer of the small community of Christ.

That is, he carried the box into which believers in Jesus placed their donations. He paid all expenses for the modest needs of Jesus and the Apostles.

We also know that this treasurer was a thief (Jn 12:6). He appropriated for himself from the money box what belonged to the common property.

Having become a thief, did Judas remain among the twelve only because he found it profitable for himself? Had he long since planned to betray Jesus to His enemies, who followed Him wherever He went?

If this question must be answered affirmatively, then Jesus, by pointing to one of the twelve as His traitor and enemy, revealed His omniscience.

If at that time Judas had not yet thought of betrayal, then Jesus, by speaking in this way, proved that the future also was known to Him.

In either case we see in Jesus the manifestation of properties that belong only to God.

After the discourse on the bread of life, Jesus left Capernaum and walked in Galilee. John the Evangelist, narrating the miraculous feeding of the people in the wilderness, said that Passover, the feast of the Jews, was then near.

Jesus always went to Jerusalem for this feast. But now He did not go, and in general He did not wish to be in the region called Judea.

This was because the Jews, that is, the scribes, Pharisees, and elders of the people, had already conceived a violent way to get rid of Him. They were only seeking an opportunity to kill Him (Jn 7:1).

Jesus did not avoid death on the Cross. He Himself went to meet it when this was necessary for fulfilling the will of Him who sent Him.

But that time had not yet come. Therefore He did not go to Jerusalem, but continued to preach in Galilee.

The mystery of Jesus’ birth was unknown to His enemies, and to speak of it now would have been pointless. But it was necessary to indicate the path that can lead to faith in Christ.

For this purpose the Lord said: “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (Jn 6:44).

When these words are understood literally, one is involuntarily faced with a question. If only those whom the Father draws to Christ can come to Him and be saved, then how are those guilty whom the Father has not drawn?

How are they guilty if the Father does not wish to draw them to Him? In answering this question, we must remember that God the Father, in His boundless love for the human race and His unlimited goodness, desires all people to be saved.

For this purpose He sent into the world His Only-begotten Son. For this purpose He calls all to the Son.

He calls them by the works which He gave the Son to perform openly before all the people.

With such conceptions of God, founded on the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, one cannot say that the Father draws to the Son not all, but only whom He wishes.

And if one cannot speak this way about the Father, then one also cannot understand literally the words of Jesus Christ quoted above.

How, then, should these words be understood? I think that they speak not about the Father, toward whom all people by nature should have an attraction.

Rather, they speak about people. Some have a natural and innate attraction to their Creator. Others, having clouded their mind and hardened their heart, have stifled this natural attraction within themselves.

If this explanation is accepted, then the true meaning of the Lord’s words is this. Whoever has no attraction to God the Father, whoever does not love Him and does not strive to fulfill His will, will not go to the Son.

In a word, whoever is indifferent toward the Father, and whom nothing draws to Him, will understandably not go to the Son either.

The Father has been revealed in the Son. If people are not interested in the Father, will they be interested in the Son?

Yes, no one will come to the Son if he does not feel a natural attraction to the Father. We see this almost every day in our age of unbelief.

People who reject the existence of God, or are indifferent to the question of His existence, are not interested in the Gospel at all.

Why should they know Christ, in whom the God they reject has been revealed? God, in whose existence they do not believe, does not draw them to Himself.

This is why they do not go to Christ. But people who seek God, and therefore have an attraction to Him, first of all take up the Gospel.

That is, they go to Christ and strive to know God in Him.

Thus the Lord’s thought, expressed in His words quoted above, should be understood in this way: No one comes to Me unless he has an attraction to the Father who sent Me.

The correctness of this understanding of the Lord’s thought is confirmed by His own words: “Everyone who has heard from the Father and has learned comes to Me” (Jn 6:45).

The proposed choice concerned Judas especially. He wished to appear as one of the best. It would surely have been better for him to leave Jesus then than to be brought by vainglory and greed to the role of betrayer.

“Simon Peter answered: Lord, to whom shall we go? We have believed and known that Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

The disciples did not yet understand much in the words of the heavenly Teacher. Yet the foundations of faith were already in them.

They already believed that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God. Later, under the light and moisture of the Holy Spirit, this seed would unfold into a beautiful tree.

St. Cyril remarks: “They had to believe and to know. For if faith already receives the divine, it does not thereby refuse all inquiry.

“On the contrary, it must strive to raise itself to a certain knowledge, a knowledge, according to Paul, in a mirror and in an enigma.

“They also speak well by not putting knowledge first and faith afterward. They set faith first and leave knowledge to follow it. For knowledge comes after faith, not before faith” (In Ioh. lib. VI, c. 29).

Instead of “the Son of the living God,” the best Greek manuscripts read “the Holy One of God.” The origin of the first reading is clear. It was taken from Simon’s confession spoken at another time, Mt 16:16.

In Daniel’s prophecy, Dan 9:24, the Holy One of God is the Messiah, who elsewhere is called the Righteous One, Is 53:11.

“Jesus answered them: Did I not choose you, the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.”

Jesus not only adds no approval to Peter’s confession, but even gives an admonition. Why is this so?

“Otherwise the disciples who remained with Him, while others had left Him, might have imagined that He would flatter them” (Chrysostom).

At that moment there was need not for encouragement, but for admonition. The Lord’s love had distinguished the twelve disciples with special attention and a special honor, the name of messengers.

Therefore it had every right to expect that the confession uttered by Peter was the inward and inalienable possession of all twelve.

To the sorrow of love, it turned out that one of them was very far from the desired perfection. For the benefit of those beloved, love declares: “One of you is a devil.”

There is no doubt that Judas, of whom, as the Evangelist notes in verse 71, Christ was now speaking, was at first a good and pious man.

In many respects he did not yield to the other chosen ones. Otherwise he would not have been numbered among the twelve chosen.

The leader of the apostate spirits, at the beginning of his existence, belonged to the higher and better creations of God. But afterward, by his own will, he became leader of spirits disobedient to God, who abandoned their appointed service, Jude 6.

In exactly the same way Judas did not retain his high dignity, being carried away by pride and love of money.

He is called a devil in the sense of an enemy and adversary of Jesus. Thoughts wholly opposed to Peter’s confession lay hidden in his soul.

Judas the betrayer is also called Iscariot in the other Gospels, Mt 10:4; Mt 26:14; Lk 22:3. What is this name?

One may think that Iscariot is the same as ish Kerioth, a man from the town of Kerioth, a native of Kerioth. Some manuscripts read: ἀπὸ τοῦ Καριώτου.

Kerioth was a city of the tribe of Judah, Josh 15:25. But then one would have to see in Greek ἀνὴρ Καριώτης.

Otherwise it is impossible to point to an example where ish, joined with the name of a place, is used without translation.

Therefore it is considered more probable that Iscariot is a nickname given from Judas’s occupation. It means bearer of the box, steward. In the Syriac translation, skariuta means steward.

This occupation of Judas is indicated in the Gospel, Jn 13:29.

The very betrayer of Christ was from among the apostles. Are we surprised if some leave certain of His churches, when the fact that we endure what Christ Himself endured shows us to be Christians?

He said, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us” (1 Jn 2:19).