I SHALL explore the theme of the “bread of life” next week, because it covers two Sundays. It is not the only lesson in these 11 verses worth reflecting on this week.
John often uses repetitive phrasing, circling around key ideas to drive them home. Here, he emphasises two verbs by repeating them. One appears three times: “Come to me.” The other is used four times: “Come down.”
The Greek word for “coming down”, katabasis, can refer to a mythical journey into Hades, the shady world of the dead. Hades is similar to Sheol in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. In Classical mythology, Odysseus, Aeneas, and Orpheus make a katabasis. Two of them are heroes, boundary-breakers. The third does it for love — but the boundary between life and death is not so easily breached. Mortals cannot confound death.
Jesus makes a katabasis by coming down from the Father at his incarnation. While the mythical characters made their journey from light down into darkness (and back up again into light), Jesus’s first “coming down” is from a greater light into the lesser light that is the realm of mortals. We usually think of light as “better” than darkness. But darkness can be a place of encounter, where we must “walk by faith, not sight” (2 Corinthians 5.7).
God’s eternal Word does not belong to the realm of ordinary light. He is himself the Light (John 8.12); so, when he comes down from heaven, he does so as the Light shining in darkness (John 1.5-9).
In our mortal existence, we human beings are earthbound. We cannot plumb mythological depths by coming down to the abode of the dead. Neither can we soar up to the Christian heavens: we do not yet belong there, either. In their mythology, the Greeks had Icarus to warn them against that unwise ambition. In our scriptures, we have the tower of Babel and its consequences (Genesis 10.4) to deliver a similar warning.
We cannot “come down”. We cannot “come up”. But there is a third option, and it is full of power for Christians. We can respond to Jesus’s invitation, as spoken three times in this lection: “Come to me.”
Both here and earlier in John, Jesus associates “coming to me” with “having life”. That revelation of meaning is taking place on two levels. First, the individual person must truly, freely, choose to change their circumstances: to accept moving from one state of being to another.
From the divine perspective — the eternal “now”, in which time does not exist — this free choice looks different. The Father, whose will it was that his Son should “come down”, is the originator of every human impulse to “come to” Jesus. So, every genuine response to God’s call is of divine origin. We can call this “double perspective”, or “double motivation”.
John’s theology is often complex, but his message is usually simple. If we want to come to the Lord, we must change. Our old selves (Ephesians 4.22) will not do. It may happen in the twinkling of an eye (1 Corinthians 15.52), or it may be the work of a lifetime. It could even be both. But we must change (active), and be changed (passive), and change ourselves (reflexive), if we are to be always with the Lord (1 Thessalonians 4.17).
Active change means that we modify how we live. Passive change means letting God change us. Reflexive change refers to our inner process of challenge and dialogue — the battle of heart and mind, soul and spirit — to find the place where there will be no more need for change.
As so often, Jesus confounds expectation. His first “coming down” means coming out from God, to come among us, but he has another coming down, a second katabasis. The New Testament includes references to it, and it is recorded in the Apostles’ Creed, too: “he descended into hell” (modern translations say, “to the dead”).
That creed refers to the place of descent as “the lowest place of all”. It is confirmation of our Christian hope: Christ has pervaded the entire cosmos, infiltrating every corner of every part of every possible place, to which we can come, or from which we may return. Thanks to him, our resting-place will be in the “highest place” — in excelsis: in heaven. His invitation is eternal: “Friend, come up higher” (Luke 14.10).