4. What now follows [3458] 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 [3459] 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. [3460] [3461] 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.' [3462]
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. [3463] [3464] 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 [3465] 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.' [3466] 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, [3467] for the life of the world.'