You may have heard a saying that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. The Gospel of John tells its story forward, but John tells us many things were only understood backward.
The first understood-backward thing was back in Chapter 2: “Thus when he was raised from the dead his disciples remembered that he said” that his body was the temple. (John 2:22) Another one is here, at the end of Chapter 6. The whole of the Gospel of John is a road leading to the ultimate event of this type: the cross. The Gospels are histories written forwards, but they only come together in the light of the body of Christ raised to new life.
Chapter 6 opens with five thousand people being fed and Jesus walking on the water, but it ends like this: “At this many of his disciples departed, going back, and no longer walked with him.” (John 6:66)
The rejection by the leaders in Chapter 5 is echoed and amplified here by the rejection of the crowds, of thousands of people, in Chapter 6. This chapter fits with Christmastime in that it’s all about gifts and giving – but the gifts are only received by a few.
We are still in the north country of Galilee, and the story ends in the northern town of Capernaum, on the verge of the story shifting to Jerusalem. In Galilee for the last time, Jesus is followed by crowds, and multiplies a boy’s lunch into food for thousands. John labels this as the fourth sign, and even this most popular of signs is badly misread:
“Therefore the people, seeing the sign he had performed, said: ‘This is surely the Prophet who is coming into the cosmos.’” (John 6:14 DBH)
So, with the impeccable illogic of crowds, they start to plan how to seize Jesus and make him King! Once the crowd decides it wants something — more bread, more stuff, Jesus as King — the desire grows and metastasizes, as greedy as a Black Friday mob.
Never mind that, while the Messiah was supposed to be King and Judge, he was never supposed to be a Prophet. God strictly separated the offices of Prophets, Priests, and Kings in the Old Testament, and King Saul got in a lot of trouble for acting like a priest in 1 Samuel 13. Only in the light of the resurrection were those three offices combined in one person, when that pivotal event changed and merged the meaning of all three, putting them together in Christ.
So again Jesus withdraws. He will not be caught this way. The crowds never get another sign, not until the Son of Man is lifted up at the end of the gospel. But his disciples see another sign that very night, when Jesus comes back to them, emerging from a storm in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Sea of Galilee! “It is I, do not fear,” Jesus says. (John 6:20) They obeyed his command not to fear, at least enough to receive him into the boat, an improvement over the others who had received him not.
The next day, the crowds catch up with Jesus (a little puzzled on how the boat situation doesn’t add up). They want something like manna, but Jesus has food they don’t know about (see also John 4:32), food truly from heaven — himself. The manna was also a sign, pointing to Jesus, the reality behind the sign. They keep asking for bread, and Jesus says “I am the bread of life,” (John 6:35) not the corruptible life of starch and gluten that breaks down and dissipates, but inner life deeper than atoms, life that endures.
The people keep demanding more signs, more bread, but their minds are fixed on more of the same stuff they are surrounded by. Jesus offers something much more than mere “stuff.” What Jesus offers is his immaterial Word, which you can live on if you just take it in. But they don’t want it.
Jesus builds on his statement from John 5 that his voice will raise the dead, both in the future and in the present. This is no mere metaphor – the dead will be literally raised in a few chapters. The life that raises them has already entered the world. For this life to enter you, you must eat it, receiving it into your body, so it invisibly replaces you down to the atoms, down PAST the atoms.
The result of this, the end of this story, is life, even life after death. Jesus keeps talking about resurrection, like a drumbeat of hope. Four times, in verses 39, 40, 44, and 54, he promises that those who do the will of the Father will be raised up on the last day. But you have to rely on this word of an itinerant miracle worker who’s not much to look at. What’s from heaven is not known by how it looks, but by how long it lasts. It’s known by the end of the story, reading backwards. And to read it you must participate in it, doing the Father’s will, eating the bread from heaven.
Living in light of what hasn’t happened yet is hard. When Jesus is handing out bread, it’s easy to ask for more, but when he says that he is the bread you must eat, I murmur with the disciples, “This word is hard; who can listen to it?” (John 6:60) I want bread on my terms, on my timing.
I have to admit, I’m prone to wander. I turn away. But I test everything, including my own turning away. “Who can listen to it?” Can I?
When I listen, I hear faint music. (Is it just ringing in my ears?) Something in me resonates with the life in Jesus’s words, the words that carry this life from above, raising me up above the waves, until I turn again and start to sink, and the cycle starts again, daily, hourly.
But in all my fluctuations, He is constant. The end is the Word who was there in the beginning. I find that everything I want to say was already said by Peter: “Lord, to whom will we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68)
IMAGE: Tabgha mosaic
