John 12:32 is often used as a prooftext for showing God has no particular love for a specific people. Many employ the verse to show that God equally loves all people by equally drawing “all men” to himself.
“And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself.”
Is this what Jesus is communicating? Is there an immediate context regarding “people groups” that should be acknowledged when interpreting this verse? D.A. Carson addresses the text in his commentary on John:
The consequence of this passion/glorification, this death/exaltation, is that Jesus will draw all men to himself – not to his cross, considered abstractly, but to himself, precisely as the incarnate Word who suffers and dies and is glorified in order to draw all men to himself. On the verb to ‘draw’, cf. notes 6:44. There, the one who draws is the Father; here, it is the Son, but nothing much should be made of this (5:19). But the scope and efficacy of the drawing in the two places are quite different. There, the focus is on those individuals whom the Father gives to the Son, whom the Son infallibly preserves and raises up at the last day. Here, ‘all men’ reminds the reader of what triggered these statements, viz. the arrival of the Greeks, and means ‘all people without distinction, Jews and Gentiles alike’, not all individuals without exception, since the surrounding context has just established judgment as a major theme (v. 31), a time for distinguishing between those who love their lives (and therefore lose them) and those who their lives (and therefore keep them for eternal life, v. 25). The critical event in Jesus’ ministry that sanctions his drawing of all people without distinction, and not Jews only (cf. 10:16; 11:52), is his cross/exaltation, his being ‘lifted up’. This is the impicit answer to the Greeks: the hour has come for him to die and be exalted, and in the wake of that passion/glorification they will be able to approach him as freely as do the children of the old covenant.
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D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 444.
