The unreasonableness that devours those who want to be blind

Their rejection of Christ's teaching was culpable. He gave them enough to make their duty clear.

Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ

Jun 27, 2026

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Their rejection of Christ’s teaching was culpable. He gave them enough to make their duty clear.

Editor’s Notes

In this piece, Fr Coleridge tells us...

Why the Jews rejected Christ’s heavenly claims, despite the miracles and promises set before them.
How faith requires the Father’s interior grace, corresponding to the outward witness of Christ’s works.
What Our Lord’s gentle reply reveals, directing unbelievers to seek the grace they lacked.

He shows us that God’s grace alone enables souls to recognise and embrace Christ by faith.

For more on this series, see Part I.

Faith in the Son of Man

The Training of the Apostles, Part IV

Chapter X
St. John vi. 25–72; Story of the Gospels, § 74
Burns and Oates, London, 1885.
(Read on Corpus Christi)

Murmuring of the Jews

‘The Jews therefore murmured at Him, because He had said, I am the Living Bread which came down from Heaven. And they said, Is not this Jesus the Son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How then saith He, I came down from Heaven?’

All our Lord’s words about faith, and the giving of the Father, and the life everlasting, and the raising up at the last day, were lost on them.

They went back to the difficulty created by their own dulness and incredulity, the difficulty founded on His human nature and apparently common origin. The sublime doctrines contained in the few last sentences of our Lord were all nothing to them.

They seem to have caught at His words about the Living Bread, and to have understood Him to say that it was He that came down from Heaven, as indeed the same meaning is conveyed by His words that He is the Bread of Life and that He came down from Heaven not to do His own will, but that of His Father. What He might mean by the Bread of Life, they did not ask, nor whether the wonderful miracles which He had wrought did not give Him a right to their faith, even if He seemed to claim some dignity or power which they did not understand.

Thus all the evidences of His Divine Mission and character are set aside, and they fix on the evidence, as they think, that He is a mere man like themselves, and that therefore He could not have come down from Heaven. He is to them Jesus the Son of Joseph, whose father and mother they know. He is not even John the Baptist risen from the dead, or the prophet that should come into the world, or Elias, who had been caught up into Heaven, and so might have come down again, He is only the Son of the carpenter of Nazareth.

So unreasonable are men when they are determined to make objections to supernatural truths. They shut their eyes to the evidences which reason ought to force them to admit, and they take no account of sublime doctrines, however full of promise and beneficence to themselves. When He had spoken to them of the Bread of Life, they had cried out, ‘Lord, give us always this Bread,’ and now that He has told them of the will of the Father, and of all the blessings which He is bound by that will to procure for them and impart to them, it might be expected that they would say, Lord, let Thy Father give us to Thee, Lord, let us have this everlasting life, Lord, raise us also up at the last day!

But they say nothing of the kind, for they are blinded by their grovelling prejudices that in Jesus the Son of Joseph there can be nothing great or wonderful, however inexplicable may be His miracles, however unearthly the power of His words.

Answer of our Lord

‘Jesus therefore answered and said to them, Murmur not among yourselves. No man can come to Me except the Father Who hath sent Me draw him, and I will raise him up at the last day.’

The murmuring among themselves could only be rightly founded on the supposition that He had said something impossible or wrong, in claiming to have come down from Heaven.

But the truth was that He had not claimed anything at all for which His miracles might not have prepared them, and which they ought not to have been ready to receive on His word, if they had made due use of the evidences which had been accumulated in His support by the Providence of the Father, Who was also ready to supply that which was necessary to make the evidences take hold of them and produce in them the required faith, namely, to give them His Divine interior grace corresponding to the external witness of the miracles and the other proofs of His Mission.

Their not receiving the truth which He had asserted concerning Himself, did not depend on the weakness of the proof or on the impossibility of the thing to be proved, but on the absence in their minds and hearts of the grace requisite for faith.

If this was the thing wanting, then the proper remedy for their difficulty was not to murmur against Him Who had said the truth, but to seek to repair in themselves the deficiencies which prevented them from closing with the truth which He asserted. This could only be done by the working of the Father, and therefore the proper means for them to take would have been the earnest supplication to the Father to have mercy on them, and to enlighten them.

Addressed to their present needs

Thus our Lord’s words most perfectly answer to the present needs of their souls.

He might have reproached them with their dulness, with their unreasonable obstinacy, with the moral faults, the worldliness, and the like, which fastened their hearts to the ground, as it were, and prevented in them the formation of the first elements of faith. But He does not reproach them or rebuke them, except indirectly. He only points out to them the way by which they might even yet be brought to a better mind.

‘No man can come to Me, except the Father Who hath sent Me draw him, and I will raise him up at the last day.’

He speaks of God as the Father Who has sent Him, as if to imply that it belongs to God, when He sends a prophet or a messenger into the world, also to act on the souls of those to whom the messenger is sent. The doctrine and the messenger may both be Divine, and yet there is still the work of grace to be done in the hearts of men, without which the good seed will have been cast abroad in vain.

And it cannot be thought of God, that He would ever send external means of grace, without also being ready to give the interior graces corresponding thereto to those in need of them. But, when the Father has thus drawn men to His own envoy, that will take place which He has already said would follow, namely, that the Son Whom they see and believe in, will execute His commission for which He was sent, and raise them up at the last day.

And so, though they might think of Him only as the Son of Joseph, His word would certainly be verified, and He would raise men up at the last day as He had said, and this would be in itself a sufficient proof that He was the Bread of Life which came down from Heaven.

Faith in the Son of Man

Previous Chapter:

The Discourse in the Synagogue

From:
The Training of the Apostles, Part IV

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