The Sign of the Loaves (III): The One who is from God
The Sign of the Loaves (III): The One who is from God
Proper 14/12th after Pentecost: John 6:35, 41-51
As Jesus speaks to the crowd in the aftermath of the miraculous feeding, suddenly they are renamed as “the Jews” (v.41). This terminology raises, not the first time, a challenging aspect of reading John. There is no sense that a different group has arrived on the scene, but calling Galileans “Jews” (or perhaps “Judeans”) is unusual in John, for whom this term usually means the Jerusalem elite.
The Greek word Ioudaioi which is used here does not however quite mean “Jews,” not least since Jesus and his disciples—and in all likelihood John and the original readers too—were also Jews. The term can have a more specific geographical meaning: Ioudaioi often meant “Judeans,” the inhabitants of the area around Jerusalem, not all otherwise thought of as “Jews.” And there were others—such as Samaritans (see chapter 4)—who were Israelites too, but not Judeans.
Yet Ioudaioi could also apply to Jewish people generally, and came to do so more and more over time. Something(s) had taken place between the ministry of Jesus and the composition of this Gospel that made it possible to name Jesus’ Jewish opponents in this too-generalized way. The Synoptic Gospels make it clear that Jesus had enemies among his own people, but also that these were largely vested interests or local elites, as well as some religious competitors—and not the Jewish people as a whole. Sectarian struggles between followers of Jesus known to John and other Jewish groups may have led the emergent Christian movement to abandon and stigmatize that name, but we do not know. Regardless, when we read these texts we must face the burden of many centuries of misuse of this language, and of Christian anti-semitism.
Yet the shift of language about ethnicity has a particular significance in this passage, highlighting ancestry and identity. The long discourse about the bread of life through John 6 obviously stems from the story of Jesus feeding five thousand, but even more fundamental to this exchange is the old story of the Israelites being given manna during the Exodus (Exod 16). So this new reference to the identity of the crowd as “Ioudaioi” highlights the question of ancestry which had also come up a few verses earlier, in last week’s reading: “Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness…” (v.31). Jesus’ comment about the crowd complaining (v. 43) is also an allusion to the behavior of the ancient Israelites (see Exod 16:2) regarding the manna diet.
And as soon as the crowd has become more ethnically or geographically defined, Jesus is labelled by origin too: “‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?’ (v.42). This eye-roll at Jesus’ ancestry has its parallel in Mark 6 which was read a few Sundays ago, about the origins and honor (or lack thereof) of the prophet. For John though, this exchange concerns what can be learned about someone because of where they come from. And as may now be expected in John’s story, a misunderstanding is at work. For the reader knows that Jesus’ apparent ancestry (certain that of a Jew) is not the answer to his real origins.
Jesus now sketches an outline of divine call and favor which is still grounded in the ancient call of Israel, but is not so much limited to it genetically so much as exemplified in it behaviorally. His initial response to the complaints is thus not to assert his own heavenly origin, although this is still in the background; it is to assert how God’s salvation works. This is not to disparage the experience of the ancient pilgrims and eaters relative to the present ones, but rather to reclaim the real meaning of what God had done in calling them to freedom and feeding them on the way.
The crowd thinks in terms of descent and birthright, but Jesus suggests that God’s call to new life is what is important, both in the Exodus and in the present, and is not to be constrained by our own assumptions or by our ancestry: “It is written in the prophets, “And they shall all be taught by God.” Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” (v.45). So God’s unlikely initiative—just as in the Exodus—is the theme here, and Jesus asserts that God’s grace is the point rather than any genetic connection with the older story. This quotation of Isa 54:13 also represents Jesus suggesting that his own approach to the question of call is really the more traditional and biblical, and hence of course more (actually) Jewish.
There is a hint here of what may have been a dispute between John’s readers and the Ioudaioi known to them, in the quip: “Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father “ (v. 46). This—and the implied reference to Moses (cf. Exod 3, 34)— echoes the Prologue of John’s Gospel, where we read “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (1:17-18). While John holds Moses in the traditional respect accorded to Israel’s greatest prophet, this may be combatting a view that Moses himself was a quasi-divine revealer.
Christians reading John 6 now need to hear the same encouragement and possible reproach that John’s Jesus offers that ancient crowd. Part of the point in this Gospel is that people called to have faith in Jesus could be inheritors of divine promises regardless of biological descent or social background. Yet that also means that being Christian—i.e., being an inheritor of a religious tradition— is no more a guarantee of faithfulness to God than being “Jewish” is in this passage. Thus Christian anti-semitism is the very embodiment of missing Jesus’ point.
Jesus repeats the remarkable claim: “I am bread of life.” “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel—this is the first—with predicates like bread, door, shepherd, vine (see 6:35, 8:12, 10:7 and 11, 11:25, 14:6, 15:1), are ways Jesus reveals the nature of God’s promises to those who receive him. The “I am” part also hints at what Moses had once heard God saying from the burning bush (Exod 3:14); the presence of Jesus is divine presence.
In asserting (and repeating) that he himself is the true bread of life, Jesus is not entering into a competition about religious truth: he is making an invitation and a promise. Just as the manna was on offer in the desert as a means of sustaining life and ensuring that God’s plan for liberation could be made real, so too Jesus is now present and made available to the crowd, and to the reader. He is not offering himself as a cause to advocate or a label to adopt, but as what we really need to survive.
As this section ends, Jesus expands his self-identification as bread in a confronting and profound way: “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (v.51). The temptation to following Jesus as a question of power, advantage, or competition is swept away by Jesus’ striking revelation that his power and his gift will only to be made known in the paradox of his own self-giving love.