Thursday, May 8, 2025

8 May 2025 - taught by God

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him,
and I will raise him on the last day.


Jesus did not mean that if one did not feel drawn they should on that account give up, assuming that the necessary prerequisite of the Father actively drawing them was absent in his case. Rather, Jesus said this because people were trying to understand him and test his teachings according to their conventional paradigms. 

They thought they were testing a potential prophet. But they acted more like they were testing a salesman, to determine whether or not he could deliver on his promises. Both prophets and salesmen required testing, lest one be deceived. How would one test a prophet on the one hand and a salesman on the other? One needed humility when one approached a potential prophet. Otherwise one would be likely to reject him either for telling him what he did not want to hear or else for not telling him what him did want to hear. With an open heart one could recognize the legitimacy of a prophet on the basis of the works God performed through him. But if one was confined by his ego the works would be misinterpreted so that people would only accept prophets that affirmed how they were and what they already thought. The crowds, however, treated Jesus more like a salesman. They tried to trick him into revealing that he couldn't deliver on his promises. They responded with active hostility because they considered not so much whether he was truly from God or whether his message was true, but rather whether or not he could give them what they wanted. They generally weren't even open to the possibility that he could give them more. Unlike with a prophet it wasn't so much he or his message that they sought to validate as whether or not he could be useful to them. And as they began to suspect that he could not (or would not) be useful to them they sought to invalidate him as a deceiver.

Was the problem that they weren't being drawn by the Father? No, the problem is they weren't responding to the Father's movement in their hearts. They weren't sufficiently humble or lacked enough inner silence to be moved by the Father. They were too preoccupied with their own insufficient forms of investigation, too full of their own preconceptions. They thought they had the resources to answer the question either in the affirmative or the negative. But Jesus reminded them that this was not what God intended.

They shall all be taught by God.

To let oneself be drawn to Jesus meant having the humility and openness to let oneself be taught by God. It meant seeing the same signs and hearing the same words as others in the crowd heard but recognizing those signs as works of the Father and those words as his living Wisdom. The flesh had the tendency to resist, because it quickly learned that it, in the world, it was easily deceived. It had all kinds of barriers against the docility appropriate to the teaching of God. But God was the one person in whose presence we are entirely safe, against whom any barriers do not protect us, but prevent him from loving us as he desires. We have a will weakened by the sin of our first parents who wanted to decide for themselves what constituted good and evil. But Jesus himself proposed that we eat the fruit of a different tree, the tree of life.

I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give
is my Flesh for the life of the world.


The more Jesus said the more it became increasingly clear that human understanding would inevitably fall short. Even Peter, who was praised for his openness to the revelation of the Son by the Father, didn't immediately understand when Jesus spoke of necessity of eating his Flesh and drinking his Blood. He, unlike many in the crowd, had the humility to remain with Jesus anyway, whether or not he could fully comprehend him. He looked at Jesus and allowed himself to be drawn to see one who revealed the Father, one whose words were Spirit and life, regardless of his own limitations.

 

Matt Maher - Lord, I Need You

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