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Everyone the Father Gives Me Will Come
Where We Are
Alleluia! Wednesday of the Third Week of Easter continues the Bread of Life discourse as Jesus deepens his teaching about the Father's will. The crowd is still struggling to understand how Jesus can claim to be bread from heaven. Today he speaks of the Father's initiative in salvation: no one comes to Jesus unless the Father draws them, and everyone whom the Father gives to Jesus, he will not lose. In Acts, the persecution that follows Stephen's death scatters the believers throughout Judea and Samaria. Philip, one of the seven deacons, goes to Samaria and preaches with great joy. What was meant to destroy the Church becomes the engine of its expansion.
The Word
In Acts, a great persecution breaks out against the Church in Jerusalem after Stephen's martyrdom. All except the apostles are scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. But those scattered go about preaching the word. Philip proclaims Christ in Samaria with signs and healings, and there is great joy in that city. In John's Gospel, Jesus declares, "Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will certainly not cast out. For I came down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of the one who sent me: that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father: that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life."
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Reflect
"I will certainly not cast out." These words from Jesus are among the most consoling in all of Scripture.
Whatever your history, whatever you have done, whatever shame or failure you carry, if you come to Jesus, he will not turn you away. This is not a promise based on your worthiness; it is a promise based on the Father's will. The Father gives. The Son receives. No one is lost.
Jesus speaks here of a divine initiative that precedes human decision. "No one can come to me unless the Father draws him." This does not diminish our freedom; it grounds it. Before we ever thought to seek God, God was already seeking us. Our journey of faith is a response to an invitation that was extended before we were aware of it.
The language of being "raised up on the last day" appears four times in John 6. Jesus is not offering a temporary fix or a feel-good philosophy. He is promising resurrection, real, bodily, eternal. The bread of life is bread for the long journey, bread that outlasts death itself.
The Acts reading demonstrates this truth from another angle. The persecution that scatters the Church from Jerusalem would seem, from a human perspective, to be a catastrophe. Stephen is dead. The believers are refugees. Everything they built is gone. And yet, Philip arrives in Samaria and "there is great joy in that city." The scattering becomes a sowing. What the persecutors intended as destruction, God uses as seed. This is the pattern of Easter: death leads to life, scattering leads to spreading, loss leads to finding.
Living It
If you have ever felt that you have gone too far, sinned too deeply, or wandered too long for God to want you back, hear Jesus today: "The one who comes to me I will certainly not cast out." Take him at his word. Come as you are. If you have been avoiding prayer, confession, or community because of shame, today is the day to return. Also notice where God may be using a scattering in your life, a disruption, a loss, a forced change, as a sowing. Like Philip in Samaria, carry the joy of the Gospel into the unexpected places where life has taken you.
Prayer
Father, you draw us to your Son, and your Son promises never to cast us out. We come today with all our doubts, our failures, and our wanderings. Receive us. Raise us up. Use even the scatterings of our lives as seeds of joy, just as you used the persecution of the early Church to spread the Gospel to Samaria. We trust that nothing the Father gives to Jesus will be lost. Nothing. Not even us. Alleluia. Amen.
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