Jesus feeds all who come to him in John 6
The lectionary gospel reading for Trinity 10 in Year B is John half dozen.35, 41–51 which continues our exploration of the 'Bread of Life' discourse from last calendar week, following on from the feeding of the 5,000. Once again, we take an odd selection of passage: we are given only eleven verses, since the intermediate verses John 6.36–forty are cut out, either on the grounds that they are effectively repeated in the verses that follow, or maybe that the passage introduces too many large ideas for 1 sermon. I am not sure either reason is persuasive; if anyone can make sense of this, do comment below.
When reading the afterwards, 'Cheerio' discourses earlier in the lectionary cycle, we noted the way that Jesus' speech in this gospel has a distinct quality to information technology. The argument does not move in a linear manner, only appears to circle around, and one idea is linked to another by a word or phrase, rather than following as a logical progression. (Nosotros should perhaps notation in passing that this is no reason to retrieve it is less historically plausible; much of Jesus' pedagogy in the Synoptics is highly abbreviated, and this style is not unlike what we know of Jewish teaching from the time.) Of import words are returned to and repeated, and oft make connections both with previous episodes and speeches, too as being picked upward later in the narrative. Jo-Ann Brant lists the repeated words in the discourse:
Through Jesus' speech and his dialogue with his interlocutors, these ideas are revisited, combined and developed.
Every bit I previously noted in relation to John half dozen.35, the general nature of breadstuff as nutrient and sustenance is again emphasised by Jesus' use of parallelism: 'who comes to me/shall not hunger/who believes in me/shall never thirst', the latter of which connects us back to the woman at the well in affiliate 4. It also makes clear what began this dialogue: that 'feeding' on Jesus is primarily a metaphor for believing in and trusting him. If and when we eat bread and beverage vino as a sign of this, information technology is a sign of our receiving him, of 'feeding on him in our hearts, by faith, with thanksgiving'.
The switch of vocabulary in Jesus' side by side comment to the question of 'seeing' and 'believing' appears to be a change of field of study. Information technology is not entirely obvious what previous comment Jesus is referring back to, but well-nigh probable his statement in v 26 that the people have seen the signs yet non understood, and focussed only on the mundane reality of eating bodily bread. True eating means believing in Jesus, and true seeing ways receiving him equally God's tabernacling presence.
The connection betwixt seeing and believing will be expounded at length in chapter 9 with the healing of the homo built-in blind contrasted with the 'blindness' of the Pharisees who exercise not believe. But it reaches its climax in the episode of 'doubting' Thomas in John 20, with the wording that runs in close parallel to Jesus' annotate here:
You have seen me and withal do non believe (John 6.36)
Considering you take seen me you accept believed (John 20.29a)
Blest are those who take non seen and yet have believed (John twenty.29b)
Information technology is quite hard for us, contemporary readers, to become over the feeling that, if only we could run across Jesus in the flesh, many of our problems would be solved. Not then! the Jesus of this gospel tells us. Seeing with the eyes does not lead to faith, and is not a pre-requisite for faith.
Again, Jesus' adjacent comment does non obviously follow on, every bit he switches from the response of his audition to the call of God. The maxim hither forms a pair with verse 44 in our reading: whomever the Father gives to Jesus will come up, but no-1 tin can come up unless the Father draws him.
Viewed from the human side, those who come to Jesus are those who believe in him, but viewed from the divine side, they are those who my father has given to Jesus (Colin Kruse, TNTC, page 193).
The double reading of human and divine agency occurs all through the gospel: in John ane.12–13, those who believe are the ones who receive Jesus, but are also the ones given new nativity by the Male parent. Jesus tells Nicodemus that no-1 can see the kingdom of God unless they are given new birth by the Male parent, however the climax of that discourse is found in the invitation to 'believe' in his merely Son.
The thought that Jesus has 'come downward from heaven' frames the whole shape of this gospel; the Word who was with God and was God has been made flesh and dwelt among us, and Jesus 'has come from the Father and is returning to the Male parent' (John 16.28). Although the language of 'descending' is distinctive to the Fourth Gospel, it is not very far from the repeated 'I have come…' sayings in the Synoptics, and is conspicuously found in Paul, in the 'Christ hymn' of Phil two.5–11 and the discussion of gifts brought by Jesus in Eph 4.ix–fourteen.
Every bit the discourse progresses, we run into the accumulation of ideas: start, Jesus is the bread of life; so Jesus has 'come downward from heaven'; so, in the words of 'the Jews', Jesus is the 'bread that has come downward from sky'; and finally (v 51) Jesus is 'the living bread that came down from heaven'. The alignment of the will of the Son with the will of the Father looks back to a similar statement in the previous discourse in John 5.19; simply the idea that Jesus 'will lose nix of all that [the Father] has given him' is revisited in Jesus' prayer to the Father in relation to the Twelve, 'not 1 of them has been lost' (John 17.12).
The phrase 'I volition enhance it/him on the last day' is very striking. It is repeated twice in our omitted verses, once again in our reading (John 6.44), and once again in next calendar week's reading (John vi.54), demonstrating how 'circular' this discourse information technology. But the most striking matter is that information technology is an anticipation of the final resurrection at the cease of age, when Jesus returns—an expression of 'unrealised' eschatology which is very unusual in this gospel, where for the about function the kingdom and eternal life has comenow, into the present. It is a reminder that, though the gospels might have different emphases, they are ultimately working within the same theological framework. (Older readers will remember the rather awful 1970s charismatic song, whose chorus 'And I volition rai-ai-se him up…' completely misappropriated this language, since information technology felt thatwe were raisingJesus up in our song, rather than the other mode around!)
The last new thought in our omitted verses is that 'looking on the Son' is tantamount to 'believing in him', a concept that surely reminds us of the discussion of the Son lifted up equally was the serpent in the desert in the wilderness Num 22, and that all who looked on it/him were healed/saved.
Allusions to the wilderness go along as the narrator describes 'the Jews' equally 'grumbling', using the onomatopoeic verbgonguzo,verb used in the Seventy to describe the Israelites complaining; Jesus agrees with the narrator when he repeats the verb in John 6.43, and Paul also characterises the desert complaints with this verb in 1 Cor 10.10.
This is the get-go fourth dimension that the crowd in conversation with Jesus are described as 'the Jews', a term oft used to mean 'the Jews who did not believe in Jesus' rather than 'the Jews' in general (since of course most of those whodobelieve in him, including the Twelve, are themselves Jews!). At this point in the narrative, we might suppose that, of the mixed Jew/Gentile crowd whom Jesus fed, it is merely the Jews who object to Jesus' claim to exist superior to Moses and the manna. Nonetheless, at the end of the discourse we are given a (over again, typical) retrospective explanation—'He said these things in the synagogue teaching in Capernaum' (John vi.5)—which connects dorsum with the topographical reference at the start ('they went to Capernaum' John 6.24). Jesus has moved from the open up air into the synagogue at some indicate, and the narrator just informs usa subsequently the upshot.
Role of the objection of 'the Jews' arises from their familiarity with Jesus and his family. Though he is in Capernaum and non Nazareth, the allegation hither is the same as that found in his hometown in Luke four.22, where he is also described as 'Joseph's son', and the parallel rejection in Mark 6.3, where he is instead described every bit 'Mary's son' (with Joseph remaining unmentioned in that gospel). We noted there the ability of familiarity to make us sceptical. It is a curious thing that a visiting speaker who comes from elsewhere tin announced to speak with more authorization than someone we know from our own context—and conversely it is sometimes easier to government minister 'away from home'. In the context particularly of the 4th Gospel, this is the paradox of the incarnation: God comes to us through a human being life, through that which is everyday and familiar, rather than in the spectacular epiphanies that we observe in much of the Sometime Attestation—and the promise is that he will go on to do and then, to meet united states of america in the everyday.
The quotation from the prophets appears to be from Is 54.13:
All your children will be taught by the LORD, and great will be their peace.
It is role of the vision of promise following a render from exile; it follows on from the description of the suffering servant in affiliate 53, and, like other descriptions of the stop of exile, develops into a hope of terminal, eschatological, deliverance past God from all evil. The description of the jewels that decorate the restored urban center of Jerusalem eventually find their way into the description of The Stop in Revelation 21.
If the people are to be taught by God, then they either demand God to come to them, or they need someone who has been in the presence of God, who has seen God, to come and teach them. Here Jesus picks upwardly the logic of the Prologue of the gospel, echoing its words:
Non that anyone has seen the Male parent except the one who was with God; he has seen the Father (John 6.46)
No one has ever seen God, but the i and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Male parent'south side, has made him known (John 1.18)
Having started this section with staff of life, and circled through questions of seeing and believing, the Father drawing those who will believe in the Son, and the Son losing none of them, the shared will of Father and Son, the promise of resurrection on the final day, Jesus coming down from heaven and bringing the presence and knowledge of God to the people, we finally render to the themes we started with—eating the bread that gives truthful life.
This final section is over again introduced by Jesus' solemn formula maxim: 'Amen, amen, I say to you lot…' The close parallel betwixt 'whoever believes has eternal life' and 'I am the bread of life' again shows that 'eating' is a metaphor for 'assertive and receiving' Jesus. Jesus returns to the implicit parallel of the feeding of the 5,000 which has been fabricated explicit by his Jewish opponents in verse 31, and sets out a stark contrast: 'they ate manna and died'. Although the manna came from the sky ('heaven') and was provided past God, information technology was not the spiritual food that they would need to give them life that endures. Once again Jesus is cartoon on the dissimilarity we saw in our terminal reading—the unlike between nutrient that perishes, eaten past people who perish, and food that endures, eaten by people who have eternal life. One time more, you are what you consume.
Jesus also offers a word play on 'bread of life'/'living bread'. Bread that brings life has life within information technology; bread that you swallow isn't 'live', so how tin it give you life? Jesus, however, is living bread, so that when you lot 'eat' him you have his life within you. This pun runs parallel to the pun Jesus makes well-nigh water in John 4.10: 'living water' is the equivalent of our 'running h2o', in that as information technology flows along it looks alive (and it is actually a amend descriptive metaphor). Just the living water that Jesus offers really carries life within it, so information technology is not only living but life-giving.
Given the complex of ideas, and the circularity of their presentation in their reading, how do we in practise become nearly preaching on this passage? I have had this challenge concluding week, and this, and volition do so the week subsequently as well, then I need to practice in my preaching what I preach in my writing!
The cardinal is to retrieve that the task of biblical preaching (and the order or service and the doctrine of the Church of England assumes that preaching will be biblical) is not to tell the congregation everything at that place is to know almost the passage in question! Instead, it is to reply the question:
What is God saying
to these people
at this time
through this text?
That means that, having piece of work through the text in this way, seen the range of dissimilar ideas expressing the central truth that we need to receive Jesus by assertive that he is who he claims to be, and understood the details of the connections with the passage and with other parts of this gospel and the rest of the New Testament—we at present need to ask: of all this, what is God saying to the people I am preaching to this week? I cannot answer that question for you, but I hope this exposition gives the resource from the text that yous demand to answer that question in your own context.
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