John 6 - The New International Commentary
1 “After these things”* (see 5:1, 14) picks up the thread of the narrative, but the connection to what precedes is far from clear. We are told that “Jesus went across the lake of Galilee, or Tiberias,” but from where? Conventional wisdom has it that the narrative originally had a quite different setting, in which Jesus was already in Galilee somewhere near the lake, just as in each of the synoptic accounts of the feeding of the five thousand (see Mk 6:32 par.). This may very well be true, yet it does not help us to understand what a reader of John’s Gospel who was unacquainted with the Synoptics would have made of it. Jesus was last seen in Jerusalem, in the temple (5:14), even though his long discourse (5:19–47) was linked to no specific location. Now all at once he is in Galilee, crossing from one side of lake of Galilee to the other. That is why, as we have seen, a number of interpreters have proposed reversing the order of chapters 5 and 6. Jesus might then have crossed the lake from Capernaum, and this would have been natural because when he crosses back again his destination is Capernaum (v. 17). Yet in chapter 4 Jesus never reached Capernaum, or the lake, performing the miracle from a distance at Cana, “where he made the water wine” (4:46).
If we keep the chapters in order (as we have done), we have two options. One is that the point of reference is Jerusalem, and the author is simply saying that Jesus traveled from Jerusalem to an undefined location “across”* lake Galilee, that is, somewhere along its northern shore. If John’s Gospel was written for an audience well outside Palestine,* this would not be strange. Such an audience would have viewed Jerusalem as the center of the land, with other areas (even quite distant ones) seen in relation to it.* Just as Bethany was “beyond* the Jordan” in relation to Jerusalem (1:28; 3:26), so the far north of Palestine could have been viewed as “beyond” or “across” lake Galilee from Jerusalem. But this would place the events of the first part of the chapter somewhere near Capernaum on the northwest side of the lake, raising the question why Jesus would have had to cross the lake again to reach Capernaum (see vv. 17, 24, 59).
The more likely possibility is that the long discourse in 5:19–47 was understood to have no geographical setting at all, so that when Jesus shows up at the lake of Galilee (by default, as it were) it comes as no surprise. From the start he was known to be a Galilean (1:45), returning to Galilee for a wedding (2:1–12), and spending time at Capernaum with “his mother and brothers and his disciples” (2:13; see also 6:42, where “the Jews” who are there claim to know his father and mother). The reader is able to negotiate the abrupt transition with an awareness that the unnamed “festival of the Jews” that brought Jesus to Jerusalem (5:1) is over, and that he is now back in “Galilee,” the region known to have been his home. A crossing from Capernaum, on the north shore of the lake, to a point near Tiberias in the south would then make sense. This could help explain why the lake is given two names here, “Galilee” as well as “Tiberias.”* At the same time, the double name also lends a degree of support to the hypothesis that the account to follow may have once had a different literary setting. The lake is consistently called “Galilee” in the synoptic Gospels (once Gennesaret, Lk 5:1), but the only other reference to it in John’s Gospel calls it “the lake of Tiberias” (21:1), after the town located on its southern shore (see v. 23).* The double name could be a tacit acknowledgment of the use of the name “Galilee” in another (possibly earlier) version of the story.
E. Across the Lake and Back (6:1–21)
After these things, Jesus went across the lake of Galilee, or Tiberias, and a large crowd was following him because they could see the signs he was doing for those who were sick. And Jesus went up on the mountain, and there he sat with his disciples. And the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. So when Jesus lifted up his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him, he says to Philip, “Where shall we buy loaves so that these may eat?” This he said testing him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii’s loaves are not enough for each of them to get [even] a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, said to him, “A child is here who has five barley loaves and two pieces of fish, but what are these for so many?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down to eat.” Now there was a lot of grass in the place, so the men sat down to eat, about five thousand in number. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he gave them out to those who were seated, and of the fish, as much as they wanted. And when they had had their fill, he said to his disciples, “Gather the leftover broken pieces, so that nothing is lost.” So they gathered, and filled up twelve baskets with pieces left over by those who had eaten of the five barley loaves. Then the men, seeing what he had done as a sign, said that “This is truly the Prophet who is coming into the world.” So Jesus, when he found out they were going to come and seize him to make him king, withdrew again, he alone, to the mountain. But as it grew late, his disciples went down to the lake, and got in a boat and were on their way across the lake to Capernaum. It had already gotten dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them, and the lake was rough, with a strong wind blowing. Then, having advanced about twenty-five or thirty stadia, they could see Jesus walking on the lake and coming near the boat, and they were afraid. But he said to them, “It is I. Don’t be afraid!” Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached land right where they were going.
Abruptly, we find Jesus no longer in Jerusalem but back in Galillee, crossing from one side of the lake to the other. The scene is familiar to anyone acquainted with the other Gospels: a crowd follows him, apparently because of his ministry of healing the “sick” both in Galilee (4:43–54) and Jerusalem (5:1–9), and he retreats to a mountain with his disciples. But the accent, at least at first, is not on the crowd’s “hunger” for miraculous “signs” (v. 2), but on its literal hunger, as he multiplies five barley loaves and two fish into enough food to feed the whole crowd of five thousand—with twelve baskets left over! At this point, the crowd’s fascination with “signs” takes over. Jesus is seen as “the Prophet who is coming into the world,” and an attempt is made to seize him and make him king by force (vv. 14–15). He withdraws again to the mountain, while his disciples embark across the lake back to Capernaum. The notice that it was dark and that “Jesus had not yet come to them” (v. 17) raises the reader’s expectation that he will in fact do so, and he does, walking on the water even though the lake is rough, and calming “their fears” with the announcement, “It is I. Don’t be afraid!” (v. 20). He has made good his escape. Even his avoidance of kingship is miraculous!
2–3 The “large crowd” introduced here can only have been “following” Jesus across the lake by boat, just as they will do again (in the opposite direction) later in the chapter (v. 24). The writer never addresses the logistical problem of how many boats such a crowd (at least “five thousand,” as it turns out, v. 10) would have needed, or what happened to the boats. “Following” implies at least curiosity and at most a kind of allegiance to Jesus (see 1:37–40, 43), because they could see “the signs* he was doing for those who were sick.”* The reader knows of two such signs, one in Galilee (4:54) and the other (not explicitly called a sign) in Jerusalem (5:1–9), both for someone explicitly described as “sick” (4:46; 5:7). Because the second of these was described as one example of things Jesus commonly did “on the Sabbath” (see 5:16), we may well infer that he had repeatedly healed “the sick” both in Jerusalem and in Galilee. Beyond this, any reader familiar with the synoptic tradition (in any form) would have found the picture of “large crowds” pursuing him because of his healings a very familiar one. Equally familiar is the picture of Jesus retreating from the crowds in order to be alone, or at least alone with his disciples. At the same time, Jesus is commonly seen teaching or healing the crowds even under these difficult circumstances.
Here in John’s Gospel, “Jesus went up on the mountain, and there he sat with his disciples” (v. 3). Three things are noteworthy about the scene. The first is the accent on place: Jesus is “there”* on “the mountain” just as earlier he was “there” at Cana (2:1), Capernaum (2:12), Judea (3:22), Sychar in Samaria (4:6, 40), and the Bethsaida pool (5:5). This time it is a definite (though unnamed) mountain in Galilee, with all that a mountain implies in the Bible as a place of divine revelation.* The second is that Jesus is again joined “there” by his disciples. We have heard nothing of them since his encounter with the Samaritan woman at Sychar (4:31–38). We can assume that they accompanied him to Cana of Galilee (4:46) and on to Jerusalem (5:1), but we do not know for certain.* The third is a striking resemblance between this mountain scene and two incidents in Matthew, one just before the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus “On seeing the crowds went up on the mountain; and when he had sat down, his disciples came to him; and he opened his mouth and began teaching them” (Mt 5:1–2), and the other in a setting similar to the present one, in which Jesus “came along the lake of Galilee, and went up on the mountain and sat there” (Mt 15:29).
In Matthew, Jesus “sat” either to “teach” his disciples (5:2) or to “heal” the crowds (15:30). In John’s Gospel we are not told why he “sat,” but it may have been for similar purposes. Not only was the crowd following him precisely because of his healings (v. 2), but, as we have seen, the account comes right after Jesus’ parting question to “the Jews” at Jerusalem, “How will you believe my spoken words?” (5:47). How indeed? The answer will come in this chapter (see below, 6:63), as attention continues to focus on what interpreters have called the “sapiential” theme of Jesus as teacher, and on the necessity of believing the words he speaks.*
4 The writer pauses to tell us that “the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.” Every other time we encounter such a notice in this Gospel, whether about Passover (2:13; 11:55) or some other festival (5:1; 7:2), its purpose is either to bring Jesus to Jerusalem or to remind us that he is there (see 10:22). Only this once does Jesus stay away from Jerusalem during a Jewish festival. Possibly the principle introduced a chapter later is already in effect, that is, that Jesus “was walking in Galilee, for he chose not to walk in Judea because the Judeans were trying to kill him” (7:1). But why then mention Passover at all? What does the brief notice accomplish for the reader at this point? The most likely answer is that the mention of Passover evokes Moses, keeping alive in the reader’s mind the conclusion of the preceding discourse (5:45–47; also 5:37–40), and anticipating further controversy over Moses and the provision of manna in the desert (see below, vv. 30–32, 49, 58). Yet it is only a momentary notice, and should not be allowed to govern the interpretation of the entire chapter.*
5 When we last saw Jesus with his disciples (4:30–38), it was similar to the present situation in that a crowd of Samaritans was “coming to him” (4:30). “Lift up your eyes and look at the fields,” he had said, implying that he himself had already done so, and adding that “they are white for harvest” (4:35). This time he himself “lifted up his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him.” Now as before, what he sees and what his disciples can see present a challenge: “Where shall we buy loaves so that these may eat?” he asks Philip. Food was part of the earlier scene, and food is crucial to the story here as well. Back then, the disciples had just returned from buying food (4:8, 27), and they urged Jesus, “Rabbi, eat” (4:31). He refused, because “My food,” he said, “is that I might do the will of the One who sent me and complete his work” (4:34). Food, we learned, was a metaphor for hearing and doing the will of God. Yet undeniably food was also food. The disciples’ little foray into the village was significant enough to keep them off center stage throughout Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, and its purpose was to buy real food for a real journey. Now it is Jesus who thinks of food,* and again it is a matter of “buying” it,* not just for himself and his disciples this time but for a “large crowd” of potential disciples.* His question to Philip is the first time he has spoken to an individual disciple since his parting words to Nathanael at the end of the opening scene (1:50–51). Philip is not reintroduced or further identified. The reader is expected to remember who he is (see 1:43–44). In contrast to all three synoptic Gospels, John contains no hint that they are in a “deserted place” (Mk 6:35 par.), and no proposal that Jesus should “dismiss” the crowd (Mk 6:36 par.) to buy food for themselves in neighboring villages. Instead, Jesus seems to want to incorporate the crowd into the existing group of itinerant disciples, buying food along the way and eating together as a community. Despite the notice that Passover was “near” (v. 4), there is no evidence that a Passover celebration was in view. That will come later.* “Loaves” would be insufficient for a Passover meal in any case.
6–7 The Gospel writer steps in, characteristically, with a narrative aside explaining to the reader: “This he said* testing him,* for he himself knew what he was going to do.” “Testing” is commonly used in the Gospel tradition in a negative way, when those who opposed Jesus tried to trap him in his words (see 8:6; also Mt 16:1; 19:3; 22:15, 18, 35; Mk 8:11; 10:2; 12:13, 15; Lk 11:16). Such incidents recall the demand of Jesus’ opponents for a “sign” at the first Passover in Jerusalem (2:18), and again later in the present chapter (v. 30). Does Jesus have a similarly hostile intent toward his own disciples? At this point it seems unlikely,* yet as the chapter unfolds, unbelievers among Jesus’ disciples are weeded out as they take offense at his words (see vv. 60, 64, 66). Possibly the notice about “testing” them is a hint that this process has already begun. Still, this would not mean that Jesus was testing his disciples in quite the way he himself is tested elsewhere in the Gospel tradition. His tone is more playful, as when he told his mother at Cana, “What is that to me or to you?” (2:4). There, his mother pointed out a wine shortage and he brushed it off. Here, he feigns anxiety about a food shortage in order to elicit a reaction from his disciples. In both instances he “knew what he was going to do,” but this time the writer tells us so explicitly. If Jesus was in any way “testing” his mother—and nothing to that effect was said—it was a playful kind of test, and she passed with flying colors (2:5, “Do whatever he tells you”).
7 How was it with Philip? Did he pass the test or not? His answer was, “Two hundred denarii’s loaves are not enough for each of them to get [even] a little,” echoing the disciples’ incredulous question in Mark’s account: “Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii’s loaves, and give them to eat?” (Mk 6:37; see above, n.
8 Philip has had his turn, and now Andrew speaks. Andrew, unlike Philip, is formally introduced (actually reintroduced) as “one of his disciples,” and “the brother of Simon Peter.” He was first introduced as “the brother of Simon Peter,” and “one of the two” who had heard John’s testimony and followed Jesus (1:40). The formal introduction here could imply that Philip was not one of Jesus’ disciples, but that can hardly be the case given the account of Philip’s call, and his role in recruiting Nathanael (1:43–51). The discrepancy appears to be random, for in a later incident (12:21–22) Andrew is left unidentified, while Philip is said to be “from Bethsaida of Galilee” (in keeping with 1:44).* Here, Andrew is not called “one of the Twelve,” as are both Judas Iscariot (6:71) and Thomas (20:24), because “the Twelve” have not yet emerged as a distinct group (see 6:67, 70). Rather, like Judas in one instance (12:4), and the beloved disciple in another (13:23), he is simply “one of his disciples.” A further possibility is that by again identifying Andrew in relation to his brother, Simon Peter, the Gospel writer is setting the stage for Simon Peter’s decisive confession at the end of the narrative (6:68–69). Andrew is never alone in this Gospel, but always part of a matched pair, whether with his brother Simon Peter or with his compatriot Philip.
9 Andrew volunteers the information that, “A child is here who has five barley loaves and two fish,” but adds, “what are these for so many?” The “child,” whether a boy or a girl, small child or teenager, or a young slave,* is unidentified,* a shadowy figure who, like the bridegroom at the wedding (2:9) or the royal official’s son (4:52), makes a cameo (non-)appearance and is not heard from again. But the child is “here” (
10 “Make the people sit down to eat,” Jesus told his disciples. “Sit down to eat” is literally “recline”* as if at tables, when there were no tables. Instead, the writer explains, there was “a lot of grass,”* enough to accommodate the “large crowd” (vv. 2, 5) that had gathered “in the place.” Grass need not have been mentioned, yet it seems to have been part of the story from the start, perhaps already in oral tradition (see Mt 14:19; also “green grass,” Mk 6:9). In our Gospel, “grass” qualifies to some extent the notice that they were “on the mountain” (v. 3), helping the reader to visualize them on its gentle slopes, not at the very top (see v. 15, where Jesus will retreat again “to the mountain”!). Jesus speaks of the crowd as “the people,” but the writer tells us that they were in fact “men”* just as in the other Gospels, and that they numbered five thousand.* The explicit (and extraordinary) number gives concreteness to Andrew’s “so many” (v. 9), and credibility to Philip’s judgment that “two hundred denarii” would not be enough to feed them (v. 7). Neither disciple had time to count them, but the all-knowing narrator makes a quick—and we presume accurate—estimate, in agreement with the three synoptic accounts. The reader’s natural question whether women and children were on the scene in addition to the five thousand men is left unanswered,* but the presence of at least one “child” (v. 9) implies that they were. This would bring the number well above five thousand, making the miracle greater, but it does not interest our writer, nor does he call our attention to the irony that the “child” who had the food may not even have been included among the five thousand. “The men,” we are told, “sat down to eat” on the grass, in compliance with Jesus’ orders to his disciples. We can infer women and children if we wish, but that is up to us.
11 Jesus performs his first “hands-on” miracle. At the Cana wedding, he merely gave orders and let the servants do the miracle for him (2:7–8). The royal official’s son and the man at the pool of Bethsaida he healed with a word: “Go, your son lives” (4:50), and “Get up, pick up your mat and walk” (5:8). This time he “took the loaves” in his own hands, “and when he had given thanks, he gave them out to those who were seated, and of the fish as much as they wanted.” “Taking” bread* is a natural part of all the feeding stories,* and of the synoptic accounts of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples.* “Giving thanks” belongs to the second feeding story in Matthew and Mark (see Mt 15:36; Mk 8:6), but not the first, where “blessing” is the verb used (see Mt 14:19; Mk 6:41; Lk 9:16). “Giving thanks”* is also at home, as we might expect, in the Lukan and Pauline accounts of the last supper, or institution of the “Eucharist” (see Lk 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24).* In contrast to all the synoptic accounts both of the feeding of crowds and the institution of the Eucharist, Jesus is not explicitly said to “break” the loaves here, yet we can assume that they were broken, given the reference to “pieces of fish” to begin with (v. 9) and to broken “pieces”* left over when the meal was finished (v. 12).* The decisive act that accomplishes the miracle is the act of “giving thanks.” This is what the writer remembers when he refers back to the miracle from a later vantage point (see v. 23, “after the Lord had given thanks”). Its closest analogy in John’s Gospel is not at Jesus’ last meal, nor at the lake when Jesus gave his disciples bread and fish (21:13), but at the raising of Lazarus, where thanksgiving works like petitionary prayer. Jesus “lifted up his eyes and said, ‘Father, I thank you that you have heard me, and I know that you always hear me’ ” (11:41–42), and the miracle followed (vv. 43–44). Here too “giving thanks” shows Jesus’ dependence on the Father, and consequently the five thousand were fed.
As soon as he gave thanks, Jesus “gave out” the loaves to “those who were seated,* and of the fish, as much as they wanted.” In contrast to every account in the other Gospels, in this one Jesus gives the food directly to the crowd, not to the disciples first to distribute to the crowd. “As much as they wanted” seems to refer grammatically to the “pieces of fish,” but its placement at the end of the sentence makes clear that the crowd had all they wanted of fish and bread alike.* The phrase anticipates what we learn explicitly in the next verse, that their hunger was more than satisfied, with plenty left over.
12 The actual meal is not described, but buried in a subordinate clause, “when they had had their fill,” in much the same way that the transformation of water into wine at Cana was buried within a participle (see 2:9).* Attention focuses instead on “the leftover broken pieces,” just as in the synoptic Gospels,* and in the bibical account of Elisha and the twenty barley loaves (“they ate and had some left, according to the word of the
At one level, this is a perfectly natural aspect of the narrative. Jewish custom dictated that no food be wasted after a meal.* But why is it worthy of mention? Is our Gospel merely providing a plausible reason for what the other Gospels describe? Jesus’ intention seems to run deeper, reflecting God’s intention for human beings, not just their food supply. The only previous use of the verb “to be lost” came in his programmatic statement that God “gave the One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not be lost but have eternal life” (3:16). Later, returning to the subject of food, Jesus will draw a contrast between food that runs out or is “lost” and that which “remains” (that is, “to eternal life, which the Son of man will give you,” 6:27). An implied parallel between food and human beings could help explain Jesus’ urgency in insisting that nothing be “lost.” Tradition bears this out. A eucharistic prayer in the Didache, from the second or perhaps even the first century, gives thanks for the “broken bread”: “As this broken bread* was scattered on the mountains, but was gathered and became one, so let your Congregation* be gathered* from the ends of the earth into your kingdom, for yours is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever” (Didache 9.4). While this text exhibits no direct dependence on John 6:12, it does show acquaintance more generally with the Gospel stories of the feeding of large crowds and probably with the Gospel of John as a whole.*
13 Even though the urgency centered on nothing being lost, it is also true that precisely “twelve baskets” were filled, just as in the other three Gospels. In this respect the story stays the same, and it leaves us with all the same questions. Why twelve? And what happened to the twelve baskets after they were collected? Did the disciples load them in the boat and take them back across the lake (v. 17)? Did they leave them for the crowd? (They would hardly have been enough to feed the crowd a second time.) Did they give them back to the child who supplied the five loaves in the first place? Such questions hold no more interest for our writer than for Matthew, Mark, or Luke—less perhaps, for in the other three we know by this time that there were twelve disciples (see Mt 10:1; Mk 3:14; Lk 6:13), and we can visualize each disciple carrying a basket. We have no such information here. If this is the first hint that there are in fact “twelve” disciples, it is only a hint. “The twelve” do not emerge as an explicit entity until the end of the chapter, where their existence as a group is suddenly recognized (v. 67), and Jesus claims to have chosen them (v. 70). So the question, “Why twelve?” remains (at least temporarily) unanswered, along with the obvious question of what was done with the leftover food. Consequently, the brief notice has the same function as in the synoptic Gospels, simply to underscore the greatness of the miracle by contrasting an enormous yield of “twelve baskets” of leftovers with a modest “five barley loaves.” If we remember Elisha (see n.
14 “The men”* whose reaction is now described are not outside observers, but “those who had eaten” (v. 13). On “seeing what he had done as a sign,” they acknowledged him as “truly the Prophet who is coming into the world.” “Signs” are nothing new in this Gospel, and they are always seen either as things Jesus “did” on a particular occasion, as here (see 2:11; 4:54), or as things he “was doing” on a regular basis (2:23; 6:2; see also 2:18; 3:2). Here the crowd had followed him across the lake because of “signs” done for the sick (v. 2), and now, quite naturally, they interpret his provision of food to satisfy their hunger in exactly the same way.* They are not wrong about this, nor they necessarily wrong to conclude that “This is truly the Prophet who is coming into the world.” “The Prophet” seems to have been the figure to whom Moses referred when he said, “The
15 True though it may be, the crowd’s confession is not exactly what it seems. We are allowed to see it through Jesus’ eyes. He “found out” that their real intention was “to come and seize him to make him king.” How do we get from “Prophet like Moses” to “king,” and how did Jesus learn of their intention? Moses in Jewish tradition embodied all that they expected or could expect in a messianic figure,* but “king,” for whatever reason, was what interested them here. The Gospel writer does not pause to examine the logic—in this case the illogic—of the crowd’s intention. Obviously, if Jesus were truly what they took him to be, “the Prophet who is coming into the world,” they would have every reason to respect—even fear—his power, and no reason at all to think of him as a puppet who could be manipulated to fit their agenda. As for Jesus, how did he “find out” what the crowd had in mind? Was his knowledge supernatural, like his knowledge of Nathanael, or of the Samaritan woman, or in general of “what was in the person” (2:25)? Or did he acquire it naturally, as when he “found out” that his baptizing ministry was known to the Pharisees (4:1), or how long the sick man had been lying by the pool (5:6)? The aorist participle, “when he found out,”* suggests natural knowledge,* but it is hard to be certain. The accent, in any event, is on the information itself, not on how Jesus acquired it, and the purpose of the brief notice to make sure the reader knows it.
The reader, as we have seen, is prepared to accept that Jesus was “truly the Prophet who is coming into the world” (v. 14), and even that he deserved to be called “king.” Nathanael hailed him from the start as “King of Israel” (1:49), and he will enter Jerusalem with that title ringing in his ears (12:13). Yet he will make it clear in due course that his kingdom is “not of this world” (18:36). What is jarring here is that “they were going to come and seize* him to make him king.” Such language recalls, perhaps deliberately, Jesus’ own pronouncement in Matthew that “the kingdom of the heavens suffers violence, and violent ones seize* it” (Mt 11:12). Jesus wanted no part of their scenario, but instead “withdrew again, he alone, to the mountain.” Ironically, a time will come when he will be made “king” against his will (see 19:1–5, 13–16), and when that happens it will be the work not of those who seriously confess him as “the Prophet” but of Pilate and the Roman soldiers, who mock all such claims. It will also signal his imminent death. By “withdrawing,” Jesus forestalls that eventuality, just as surely here as when he “ducked out” after healing the man at the pool (5:13), or later when he repeatedly escaped capture (7:30; 8:20, 59; 10:39). The vocabulary is different here, more like Matthew’s Gospel than John’s,* but Jesus’ action is thoroughly in character, and consistent with earlier notices that “the Jews began pursuing Jesus” and “kept trying all the more to kill him” (5:16, 18).
The notice that Jesus withdrew “again to the mountain” recalls the beginning of the story, when the “large crowd” first followed him and he “went up on the mountain, and there he sat with his disciples” (vv. 2–3). We were never told explicitly that he came down the mountain, but evidently the grassy “place” (v. 10) where he multiplied the loaves is understood to have been at least partway down, so that he must go up “again” to escape the same “large crowd” (presumably) that now wants to make him king.* He was “with his disciples” before (v. 3), but now he is “alone.”*
16–17 The inevitable question, “Where are the disciples?” is answered immediately. They “went down to the lake, and got in a boat and were on their way across the lake to Capernaum” (vv. 16–17). This is the first mention of Capernaum in the chapter (see vv. 24, 59). If Capernaum was Jesus’ unnamed starting point (see v. 1), it is natural that the disciples might now return there. Two things are said about the timing of their departure: first, “it grew late” (v. 16), and second, “it had already gotten dark” (v. 17).* The first of these explains why the disciples went down to the lake and embarked in a boat; the second implies that after they got into the boat and were out on the lake they were still waiting for Jesus, who had “not yet come to them” (v. 17). But why would they be expecting such a thing? How could he “come to them”?* If they were expecting Jesus to join them, the notice should have come earlier, before they got into the boat. The text would have had to say, “But as it grew late—and it had already gotten dark and Jesus had not yet come to them—his disciples went down to the lake, and got in a boat and were on their way across the lake to Capernaum.” Such a rearrangement is rather forced. The whole phrase, “and it had already gotten dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them,” would have to be read as another of the Gospel’s belated narrative asides, explaining why the disciples finally (perhaps reluctantly) decided to get in the boat and go back across the lake without Jesus. More likely, the clause belongs right where the Gospel writer put it. The disciples are in the boat on the lake, it is dark, and “Jesus had not yet come to them.” “Not yet” implies that he will come. This has to be the reader’s expectation, not that of the disciples.* The writer assumes that his readers know (more or less) what will happen, just as earlier when he told them that Jesus knew what he was going to do (v. 6). Their impression is that Jesus will come. The only question is when.*
In short, we are presumed to be familiar with the basic elements of the story, whether from oral tradition or another Gospel account. Yet John’s account is different in some respects from that of the other Gospels. In Mark, for example (6:45–46), and in Matthew (14:22–23), the disciples did not get in the boat on their own initiative. Jesus “compelled” them to do so, while he stayed behind to “dismiss” the crowd,* and went up the mountain to pray (see above, n.
18 In contrast to the accounts in Matthew (14:24) and Mark (6:48), the notice that “the lake was rough, with a strong wind blowing” is introduced not to prepare us for a final calming of the wind (see Mt 14:32; Mk 6:51), but evidently for some other reason. There is no “stilling of the storm” in John’s Gospel, and this is odd because in Matthew and Mark the stilling of this storm (if we may call it that) is redundant in a way it would not have been in John. Jesus had already calmed a storm in both of those Gospels (see Mt 8:23–27; Mk 4:35–41) and would not have had to do so again. That he did reinforces, quietly and without fanfare, the principle that “even the wind and the sea obey him” (Mk 4:41). In John’s Gospel, by contrast, this is the logical (really the only) place for such an account to be introduced, yet it is not. And if Jesus is not going to calm the storm, why do we need to know that “the lake was rough, with a strong wind blowing?” The words here have a different function, adding* an element of danger to the notice that “it had already gotten dark” (v. 17) and helping to account for the disciples’ fear (see vv. 19–20).
19 It is not reassuring that by now the disciples were well out in what Mark calls “the middle of the lake” (Mk 6:47). Our Gospel is slightly more specific: “twenty-five or thirty stadia” amounts to three or three-and-a-half miles.* Josephus gives the lake’s dimensions as “forty stadia in width, and a hundred more than that in length,” thus four-and-a-half by sixteen miles.* On any reckoning the disciples were far from land and at least halfway to Capernaum by the time they “could see* Jesus walking on the lake.” This means that “on the lake”* cannot mean “by the lake” (as in 21:1).* With the boat three miles out to sea, if Jesus were merely walking along the shore,* he could hardly be seen “coming near the boat”! As he comes near the disciples are said to be “afraid” (
20 Jesus tells them, “It is I. Don’t be afraid!” the very same words he uses in both Matthew (14:27) and Mark (6:50). Jesus has used the expression, “It is I” once before in our Gospel, identifying himself to the Samaritan woman as the Messiah she was expecting (4:26). Here he is not making a christological statement, but simply reassuring his disciples by identifying himself as someone known to them, their Teacher (see 1:38), who had been with them on the mountain (v. 3), and had stayed on there alone (v. 15). To them, “It is I”* does not in itself signal either messiahship (which they have already acknowledged)* or divinity, but simply Jesus’ presence.* To the reader it hints at something more, perhaps an angelic or divine epiphany.* But this becomes a serious option only later when Jesus adds to the expression a series of designations telling what his presence means (beginning with “I am the Bread of life,” vv. 35, 47), and when he uses the expression by itself to evoke the eternal God of Israel (see 8:58). For now he is merely announcing and identifying himself.*
21 The disciples do not act as if they have just seen an epiphany or theophany. That “they wanted to take him into the boat” implies that Jesus’ words had calmed their fears. They knew he was not a “ghost” (see n.
That their wish went unfulfilled is shown by the notice that “immediately the boat reached land right where they were going” (that is, Capernaum, v. 17). The point of the notice is probably not to signal a second, gratuitous, miracle on the lake. We are not meant to infer that Jesus and the disciples were all supernaturally transported halfway across the lake in an instant. The point is rather that by the time Jesus reached the disciples, their boat had already “advanced” (v. 19) to the other side, implying that Jesus had walked all the way across the lake. The miracle was not that he defied gravity by walking on the lake’s surface without sinking (though he must have done so), nor that he demonstrated his lordship over the wind and waves like the God of Israel (see Ps 77:16–19; 107:23–30). The miracle lay in the crossing itself. How did Jesus get to where he was going? “The wind blows where it will,” he had told Nicodemus, “and you hear the sound of it, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (3:8). Now he has demonstrated to his disciples (and to the reader) that his comings and goings are indeed beyond their comprehension.* The chapter began with the simple notice that he “went across the lake of Galilee, or Tiberias” (v. 1). Where he came from then the reader did not know for certain, even though it was clearly not a miraculous crossing. All that was known was that “a large crowd was following him” (v. 2). Now he crosses back again under extraordinary circumstances. After feeding the crowd, he fled to the mountain (v. 15) and now from there back across the lake. The crowd is left to wonder where Jesus has gone. We will hear of their bewilderment shortly (see vv. 22–25). As for Jesus’ disciples, they are silent, just as his enemies were silent after his long discourse in the preceding chapter. We are not privy to their reaction, and we will not meet them again until verse 60, where we will find them more offended by his words than impressed by his actions.
22 Earlier notices that “it grew late” (v. 16) and had “gotten dark” (v. 17) prepare us for “the next day” (as in 1:29, 35, 43), and with the new day comes a change of scene. We are now back with “the crowd left standing on the other side of the lake,” and for the moment are allowed to see things from their perspective. The account is somewhat confusing, because it seems to be based not on what they literally saw “the next day,” but on what they remembered from the day before. What they saw was that there were no boats* by the lake. What they remembered was that one (and only one) boat had been there. They knew that Jesus’ disciples had left in that boat, and that Jesus had not been with them. So where was Jesus? We know from the preceding section that their plan was “to come and seize him to make him king” (v. 15), and we can assume that this was still their intention. But who were they? How many of the “five thousand men” (v. 10) were involved in that plot? There is no way to know. Nothing prevents us from assuming that all five thousand were involved, and yet the narrative proceeds as if only a small, representative group actually followed Jesus across the lake and engaged him in dialogue.
F. Jesus and the Crowd at Capernaum (6:22–40)
The next day, the crowd left standing on the other side of the lake saw that no other boat was there except one, and that Jesus had not gotten into the boat with his disciples, but his disciples had departed alone. Other boats came along from Tiberias, which was near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor his disciples, they got into the boats and came to Capernaum seeking Jesus. And when they found him on the other side of the lake, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”
Jesus answered them and said, “Amen, amen, I say to you, You are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were satisfied. Work not for the food that is being lost, but for the food that remains to eternal life, which the Son of man will give you. For he it is whom God the Father sealed.” So they said to him, “What shall we do that we might work the works of God?”
Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom that One sent.” So they said to him, “What then do you do as a sign, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the desert, as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ”
So Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, it is not Moses who has given you that bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” So they said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”
Jesus said to them, “I am the Bread of life. The person who comes to me will never go hungry, and the person who believes in me will never ever thirst. Yet I said to you that you have seen me and you do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and the person who comes to me I will never drive out, for I have come down from heaven not to do my will but the will of the One who sent me. And this is the will of the One who sent me, that of all he has given me I might not lose anything, but raise it up at the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that every person who sees the Son and believes in him might have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”
For the first time “the crowd left standing on the other side of the lake” are given a voice. Some, or even all of them, had been involved in a plot to kidnap Jesus and make him their king, and now we hear what they have to say as they become Jesus’ dialogue partners. As it turns out, they function in the narrative much like “the Jews” at the first Passover (2:18–20), or at the unnamed “festival of the Jews” in chapter 5 (see 5:1, 15, 16, 18). Unlike the latter, however, they are real participants in a real dialogue, not merely an audience for Jesus’ uninterrupted discourse (as in 5:19–47). In any event, it will come as no surprise later when they are abruptly called no longer “the crowd” (as in vv. 22, 24), but “the Jews” (vv. 41, 52). In a very real sense, even though they started out as potential disciples (see v. 2), they turn out to be the same antagonists as before. “The Jews” are “the Jews,” whether in Jerusalem or Capernaum, and so the controversy resumes.
23–24 At the beginning of the chapter, the writer showed no interest in how the “large crowd” got across the lake (v. 2), but now, having mentioned a boat (or, rather, the absence of one), he must be more specific. “Other boats* came along from Tiberias,” he explains. How many other boats? Why did they come? What passengers did they bring? We are told none of those things.* The “other boats” are in the story only to provide the necessary transportation back across the lake. The boats came from Tiberias because Tiberias was the nearest town. More specifically, it was “near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks,” for that was where the crowd was “left standing” (see v. 22). The writer takes the opportunity to remind us again of the miracle of the loaves they all had “eaten,”* the importance of the “place” where it had happened (see v. 10), and even the act of “giving thanks” by which “the Lord”* had performed the miracle (see v. 11). The miracle itself is remembered. Only the extraordinary number, “about five thousand” (v. 10), is forgotten. If we dwelt on that, we would have to ask, “How many boats are needed to transport five thousand men? A thousand? A hundred? Fifty?”
Clearly, the writer’s tacit assumption is that “the crowd” has by now dwindled to a small, manageable delegation who “got into the boats and came to Capernaum seeking Jesus” (v. 24). They did this because they “saw that Jesus was not there, nor his disciples.” That his disciples were not there was no surprise, for the crowd seems to have known that they had already left, and that Jesus had not been with them (v. 22). But why did they think Jesus would be across the lake, rather than on the mountain, or somewhere beyond it, away from the lake. Possibly because the lake was the quickest way to Capernaum, and they knew that Capernaum was not only Jesus’ disciples’ destination, but his home (see 2:12), and his family’s home (see v. 42). In any event, they looked in the direction of the lake, and as it turned out they were right (v. 25). While “seeking” him can reflect potential or actual discipleship (1:38; 13:33; 20:15), more often it signals a desire to capture or kill him (see 5:18; 7:1, 11, 19, 20, 25, 30, 34, 36; 8:21, 37, 40; 10:39; 11:8, 56; 18:4, 7, 8). Which is it here? Neither one exactly, but probably more like the second, a continuation of their earlier plan to “come and seize him to make him king” (v. 15).* The first thing Jesus will do when they find him is question their motives (v. 26), and the reader has reason to do the same.
25 “Seek, and you will find,” Jesus said in two other Gospels (Mt 7:7; Lk 11:9), and the crowd “seeking” Jesus now “found” him, just as his first disciples had done (1:41, 45). He had crossed the lake, just as they thought, but how he had done so remained a mystery. “Rabbi, when did you get here?” they asked him. The title “Rabbi,” echoing Jesus’ first disciples (1:38, 49; 4:31), exhibits their persistent desire to “follow” him (see v. 2), but like Nicodemus (3:2) they will turn out to be only potential, not actual disciples. “When [
26 Neither question is answered. Instead, Jesus unmasks their intentions with a pronouncement introduced, like several others before, with “Amen, amen, I say to you.” It is the eighth such pronouncement in John’s Gospel (see 1:51; 3:3, 5, 11; 5:19, 24, 25), and the first of four in the discourse now beginning. The ensuing discourse, like the dialogue with Nicodemus and like Jesus’ speech to “the Jews” at Jerusalem in the preceding chapter, will be punctuated with this “Amen, amen” refrain (see vv. 32, 47, 53), lending solemnity and seriousness to all that he says. Whether in Jerusalem or Capernaum the audience is much the same, and the reader senses already that the outcome too will be similar. The distinction between actual or potential disciples on the one hand, and opponents or persecutors on the other is rapidly breaking down, and we will witness this blurring process as the narrative moves along. Instead of welcoming them, Jesus immediately calls into question the “discipleship” to which they aspire. The writer could have repeated here what was said of those who had “believed” at the first Passover, that Jesus “would not entrust himself to them, for he himself knew them all” (2:24). Jesus, echoing the notice that they were “seeking” him (v. 24), uncovers their true motivation: “You are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were satisfied.”* The italicized words evoke the biblical complaint of the Israelites against Moses in the desert: “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread” (Exod 16:3, NRSV). The circumstances, to be sure, are quite different. The crowd is not complaining—not yet, at least (though see vv. 41, 43, 61)—and Jesus is not attributing to them any complaint. But they are, he claims, thinking only of themselves and their appetite for food, not for what he now offers. The stage is being set already for an explicit demand for “bread from heaven,” comparable to Moses’ “manna in the desert,” to satisfy their hunger (see vv. 30–31).
More surprising is Jesus’ claim that their reason for following him was “not because you saw signs.” Clearly, they had seen signs (v. 2), and one sign in particular (v. 14). The writer has told us that on that basis they identified Jesus as “truly the Prophet who is coming into the world” (v. 14), and it would have been natural to infer that this was why they crossed the lake looking for him. But Jesus’ comment trumps that of the narrator. Jesus does not deny that they “saw signs,” but he insists that signs were not their true motivation. Unlike his first disciples (2:11), they did not see his glory revealed in the signs. Unlike those at the first Passover (2:23), they did not “believe,” or even pretend to believe, because of his signs. Rather, they “followed” (v. 2) or “looked for” him (v. 24) because of his impressive healings and (especially) because he fed them. As “the Prophet who is coming into the world” (v. 14), he would teach them the truth (see Deut 18:15–18; Jn 4:25), but a king would ensure their material well-being. In wanting to make him king, Jesus is saying, they were thinking only of themselves. They “ate of the loaves and were satisfied,” and like the Samaritan woman (4:15) they wanted the abundance to continue.
27 Because the food that had “satisfied” the crowd was not food they had to work for, the subject of “work” does not come up until Jesus (rather abruptly) brings it up: “Work not for the food* that is being lost, but for the food that remains to eternal life, which the Son of man will give you.” Jesus assumes here what they all know to be true, that normally one must work for one’s food.* Food and work belong together for all who are able to work, but for no one more conspicuously than for Jesus himself, who told his disciples, “I have food to eat that you do not know about” (4:32), and “My food is that I might do the will of the One who sent me and complete his work” (4:34). “Work,” for Jesus, was not a way of earning food. Rather, his “food” was his work, the work his Father had given him to do (see 5:17, 36). Food to him is more than a physical necessity of life. It is a metaphor, and he invites the crowd to think of it in a similar way. He asks them to consider what kind of “food” they are working for, the kind “being lost,”* or the kind that “remains to eternal life,” and to choose the latter.
The strong contrast between physical and spiritual food recalls an earlier contrast between “this water” and “the water that I will give” (4:13–14). Just as those who drink from the well at Sychar will “thirst again,” so those who “ate of the loaves and were satisfied” will not stay satisfied forever. They proved that by following Jesus, looking for something more. Physical food is subject to “being lost” or “perishing,” not in the sense of being spoiled or going rotten, but in that it satisfies human needs only temporarily. Jesus implied as much in other Gospels, making the point that “whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer” (Mt 15:17, NRSV; see also Mk 7:19). His conclusion there was that food cannot defile a person, but it is just as clear that food cannot nourish a person indefinitely either, for he also said, according to Matthew, “A person shall not live by bread alone, but by every word coming from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4). What Jesus says now to the crowd lends unexpected irony to his earlier command to his disciples, “Gather the leftover broken pieces, so that nothing is lost.”* Gathering the leftovers into twelve baskets (v. 13) could keep them from being wasted, but hardly from being “lost” in the sense in which Jesus now uses the term. Literal food, however miraculously produced, is just food. When it is eaten, it is gone.
The “food that remains to eternal life” is quite another matter. “Food” abruptly becomes a metaphor again, just as it was for Jesus when he said, “My food is that I might do the will of the One who sent me and complete his work” (4:34). For the crowd, too, working for “the food that remains to eternal life” will mean doing the will of God, because doing the will of God is the way to eternal life (see 1 Jn 2:17, “And the world is passing away, and its desire, but whoever does the will of God remains forever”). The metaphor of food “that remains to eternal life”* recalls the spring rushing “to eternal life” that Jesus promised the Samaritan woman (4:14), or the crop “for eternal life” that he promised his disciples (4:36). “Eternal life” is future in all three instances.* Here it is that which “the Son of man will give you,”* just as he told the Samaritan woman of spring water that “I will give” (4:14).
Even though he speaks in the third person here, the title “Son of man” turns the discussion unmistakably to Jesus himself and his claims. It is his fifth use of “Son of man” in the Gospel (see 1:51; 3:13, 14; 5:27). The reader knows by this time that the term is interchangeable with “the Son” (see 3:14–16; 5:26–27), and that by it Jesus means himself. What follows sounds less like Jesus than like a comment by the Gospel writer, accenting and enhancing Jesus’ own “Son of man” christology: “For he it is whom God the Father sealed.”* Yet it is not a narrative aside. Jesus is still unmistakably being represented as the speaker. We seem to be back in the world of 3:16–21, where the Gospel writer speaks, but does so unashamedly through the lips of Jesus, or of 3:31–36, where the revelatory words are assigned to John. The expression, “God the Father,”* occurs only here in John’s Gospel, and has a curiously Trinitarian sound to the modern Christian ear (as in “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit”!). “God” and “the Father” are synonymous, just as in Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman (see 4:23–24). The reader understands this by now (see 5:18), and even the crowd takes it in stride, ignoring the designation “the Father,” and answering Jesus as if he had only said “God” (v. 28). But “Father” is important to the Gospel writer because it signals again that “the Son of man” is in fact the Father’s “Son,” or “the Son of God,” or God’s “One and Only” (see 1:18, 34; 3:16), and the reader is expected to pick this up.*
That God the Father “sealed” Jesus could refer to his baptism by John,* except that Jesus is never explicitly baptized in this Gospel. Earlier, the person who received Jesus’ testimony (possibly John himself) was said to have “confirmed* thereby that God is true” (3:33). The notion that Jesus is God’s Son, attributed in the other Gospels to a voice from heaven at Jesus’ baptism (see Mt 3:17 par.), is attributed in this Gospel to John at an unspecified time when Jesus received the Spirit (see 1:34). Was that gift of the Spirit “without measure” (3:34), wherever and whenever it might have been, the “sealing” to which Jesus now refers? Or was the Son (or “Son of man”) “sealed” already in heaven, before the Gospel story even began? Is it simply an aspect of the “sending” of which Jesus has spoken before* and will speak repeatedly again?* Four chapters later he will refer to himself as the one “whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world” (10:36), and “sealing” could easily be read as a metaphor for this act of consecration. It is difficult to decide between the two alternatives. The reader’s best strategy is to be patient, withhold judgment, and read on.
28 This is the first chance the reader has had to hear someone’s reaction to Jesus’ use of the title “Son of man.” Nathanael heard it (1:51), and said nothing. Nicodemus and his friends at the first Passover heard it (3:13, 14), and said nothing (chapter 3). “The Jews” at the unnamed festival heard it (5:17), and said nothing. Here the crowd finally does respond. They might have asked, “Who is this Son of man?” (see 12:34), but they do not. Bypassing christology altogether, they ignore both “Son of man” and Jesus’ accompanying reference to “the Father.” They seem to have heard only his command to “work,” and the mention of “God” at the very end of his pronouncement (v. 27). They keep the discussion going by asking, “What shall we do that we might work the works of God?”* They want to know what works Jesus has in mind that they must do to gain “eternal life” (v. 27). Their question could just as easily have come from Nicodemus and his friends in response to Jesus brief discourse at that first Passover (3:11–21). It can be read, in fact, as a belated reply to that discourse,* but if it is, it betrays a subtle misunderstanding of what Jesus said. They seem to be using “the works of God” to mean works that God requires of them for salvation, but to Jesus “the works of God” are works “wrought in God”* (3:21), that is, God’s own work in their lives or through them, revealed only when a person “comes to the Light” (see 9:3).
29 Jesus will not let them dodge the issue of christology. Still speaking of himself in the third person, he continues, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom that One sent.” With this, he identifies “the Son of man” as the one “sent,” confirming the notion that the “sealing” of the Son of man (v. 27) was indeed an act of consecration at the time of that “sending” (see 10:36). Jesus’ words here speak directly to the crowd’s question, except that he substitutes “the work of God” for their plural expression, “the works of God.” The only “work of God” that counts is God’s work in them so that they might “believe” in Jesus, whom God has sent.* Just as he said that a person’s “works” are revealed in the single act of “coming to the Light” (3:21), so a person does the “work of God” by “coming” to Jesus (see vv. 35, 37) in the sense of believing in him. Faith, as we have seen, is the touchstone by which works are judged, not the other way around. For the first time, Jesus explicitly invites the crowd to “believe”*—specifically “in him whom that One sent,” or the “Son of man … whom God the Father sealed” (v. 27).
30 What Jesus means is simply “believe in me” (see v. 35), and his hearers know it.* “What then do you do as a sign,” they ask, “that we may see and believe you?” (v. 30, my italics), and “What work do you perform?”* The emphatic “you” signals that Jesus’ christological claims have finally begun to get through to them. Their demand for a “sign” confirms the first thing Jesus had said to them, that they were looking for him “not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were satisfied” (v. 26). If they had truly “seen signs,” they would not now be asking for another sign. At the same time, it picks up the last thing Jesus had said, his invitation to “believe” (v. 29). In effect, they are admitting that the “signs” Jesus has done up to now (vv. 2, 14) have not led them to faith, and they want to see something that will. Their request inevitably recalls that of “the Jews” at the first Passover in Jerusalem: “What sign do you show us, because you are doing these things?” (2:18). The situation is becoming confrontational. They are no longer just seekers asking how they might “work the works of God” (v. 28), but antagonists like “the Jews,” issuing a challenge. Their words, “that we may see and believe you,” recall what the chief priests and Pharisees once said in another Gospel as Jesus hung on the cross: “Let the Christ, the king of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe” (Mk 15:32). That demand at least was clear: Jesus would either “come down now from the cross,” or he would not. He did not, and they did not believe. This time it is not so clear what they are asking. What sort of “sign” do they require? “The Jews” in chapter 2 did not say, and the crowd here offers only a hint.
31 The hint comes, at least partly, in the form of a quotation from Scripture (“as it is written”).* Nowhere else in the Gospel of John do we find anyone but Jesus or the Gospel writer quoting Scripture in this manner.* The crowd’s chosen text, “He gave* them bread from heaven to eat,” echoing both Exodus 16 and Psalm 78, seems to have been quoted from memory.* The crowd’s assumption is that those who ate the manna in the time of Moses were “our fathers.” They speak of their Jewish ancestors in the same way the Samaritan woman spoke of her Samaritan ancestors (4:20), but without the exclusivity of her pronouncement (“Our fathers worshiped … and yet you say,” 4:20). She had assumed that her “fathers” were not Jesus’ “fathers” because he was a Jew, but this Jewish crowd leaves the question open.
Why do they bring up “the manna in the desert”? “Loaves” (vv. 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 26), or “bread” (v. 23), or “food” (v. 27) have obviously been the main topic under discussion, and they are simply continuing that theme. What is noteworthy is not their mention of “manna,” nor the term “bread” in the biblical quotation, but rather the accompanying phrase, “from heaven.”* Their challenge recalls that of Jesus’ antagonists in the synoptic Gospels who asked for “a sign from heaven” (Mt 16:1; also Mk 8:11; Lk 11:16). “Bread from heaven” sounds like simply a particular instance of “a sign from heaven.” What exactly do they have in mind? A repeat of the manna miracle in the desert? Does “from heaven” simply mean “from God,” or does it mean a visible sign in the sky (see Mt 24:30; Didache 16.6)? Are they referring to real bread, or are they using “bread” merely as a metaphor for wisdom from on high, or even for the law?* There is no way to tell, and no evidence that even the questioners themselves know what they want. The reader may remember two examples in the narrative so far that might qualify as “signs from heaven”—one realized when John “watched the Spirit coming down as a dove out of the sky” and remaining on Jesus (1:32), and the other held out as a promise when Jesus told Nathanael and the other disciples, “You will see the sky opened, and the angels of God going up and coming down over the Son of man” (1:51). Beyond this, the reader knows that Jesus himself is “from heaven” (3:13, 31), and that he is quite able to grant, if he chooses, whatever “sign” the crowd might be asking of him. When asked for a sign before, he answered with a riddle pointing to his death, and his resurrection “in three days” (2:19). When similarly challenged in the synoptic Gospels, he referred to “the sign of Jonah” (see Mt 12:39–40; 16:4; Lk 11:29–30), more specifically in Matthew to Jonah’s “three days and three nights in the belly of the fish,” anticipating his own three-day sojourn “in the heart of the earth” (Mt 12:40). What will his answer be this time?
32 Jesus continues the discussion with another solemn pronouncement introduced by “Amen, amen, I say to you” (compare vv. 26–27). This time he builds explicitly on the crowd’s biblical citation, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.” Superficially his words sound like a correction: “It is not Moses who has given you* that bread* from heaven, but my Father gives you* the true bread from heaven.” It is not a correction, however, because the unexpressed subject of the verb in the biblical quotation (whether in Exodus 16 or Psalm 78; see above, n.
Why then mention Moses at all? Possibly because the crowd understood “the Prophet who is coming into the world” (v. 14) as a prophet like Moses, so that a comparison with Moses was inevitable. Jesus seems to welcome such a comparison, and is quite willing to build upon it (see 5:45–47). At the same time, by substituting “you” for “them” in the quotation, he recognizes and accepts the continuity (even identity) between those now questioning him and the ancient Israelites whom they call “our fathers” (v. 31). What God gave their ancestors long ago still belongs to them in their historical memory and traditions—hence the perfect, “has given,” instead of the aorist, “gave,” in the quotation (see n.
“My Father” is a phrase Jesus has used three times before, always in a polemical context. When he drove the money changers from the sanctuary, he said, “Stop making my Father’s house a house of trade!” (2:16). After healing the sick man at the pool, he said: “My Father is working even until now, and I am working” (5:17); this provoked a lengthy controversy (see 5:18), near the end of which he issued the verdict, “I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me” (5:43, my italics). This time the polemic shows through in the pointed contrast between the crowd’s use of “our fathers” (v. 31), and “my Father” on the lips of Jesus. Instead of acknowledging the common ancestry he shares with the crowd, he claims a different origin for himself, “from above,” or “from heaven” (see 3:31). Even though they are Jews and he is a Jew (see 4:9, 22), they stand in much the same relationship to him as the Samaritan woman, who spoke similarly of “our fathers” (4:20) only to have Jesus call her repeatedly to the worship of “the Father” (4:21, 23). Here the term “my Father” subtly excludes Jesus’ questioners while at the same time holding out to them a gracious and immediate gift: “the true bread from heaven.” “True”* differentiates the bread Jesus is offering from “the manna in the desert” in Moses’ day. If Jesus is the “true” Light (1:9), and if the “true” worshipers are those who worship “the Father” (4:23), it comes as no surprise that Jesus now offers “the true bread from heaven.” This, he implies, is what the crowd was asking (vv. 30–31), whether they knew it or not, and he is prepared to grant their request.
33 The phrase, “the true bread from heaven,” requires some further explanation, and Jesus supplies it: “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” By “the bread of God” Jesus means “the true bread” that “my Father” gives (v. 32), for to him “God” and “my Father” are synonymous (see v. 27b). The added comment (introduced by
The problem with this translation is that the noun “bread,”* being masculine, requires the masculine participle anyway. The pronouncement is therefore ambiguous: either translation is possible. But if it is read not as a narrative aside, but as part of what Jesus was actually saying to the crowd, then our preferred translation—“For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (my italics)—is by far the more likely. On this reading, Jesus is simply explaining to the crowd what he meant by “the true bread from heaven” (v. 32). “Bread” has not yet been personalized, but refers simply to God’s (as yet) unspecified gift of life to the world. Jesus is not yet making an overt christological claim, at least nothing beyond referring to God as “my Father” (v. 32), which, as we have seen, he has done three times before. He is simply promising “life,” just as he promised “eternal life” to the Samaritan woman (4:14), and to the Samaritans through the “harvest” carried out by his disciples (4:36). The end of that story was that the Samaritans confessed him as “truly the Savior of the world” (4:42), so that it comes as no surprise here that Jesus promises bread from God that “gives life to the world.”*
34 The crowd responds: “Sir, give us this bread always.” If verse 33 were read as the Gospel writer’s narrative aside, then they would be ignoring it (as we would expect them to if it were directed solely to the reader!) and responding simply to what Jesus said in verse 32, as if to say, “Sir, give us this ‘true bread from heaven.’ ” But if verse 33 is read as a word of Jesus, the crowd is responding directly to it, as if to say, “Sir, give us this ‘bread of God which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’ ” To them, the “bread,” of which Jesus speaks is not a person, but a metaphor for a divine gift of some kind. Their request sounds like that of the Samaritan woman: “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not thirst and have to keep coming back here to draw” (4:15). Their use of “Sir” echoes hers, their phrase, “this bread,” echoes the woman’s reference to “this water,” and their imperative, “give us,” echoes her imperative, “give me.” But there is one important difference. The Samaritan woman was still thinking of literal water (so that she would not “have to keep coming back here”), but the crowd here is no longer asking for literal food such as loaves and fish, or even manna from the sky. They have now begun to grasp that Jesus is in some way offering them “life,” or “eternal life,” whatever that might mean, and they want this gift of life “always.” The “bread” they want is what Jesus called “the food that remains to eternal life” (see v. 27), to them “a gift that keeps on giving,” if you will. They want it, yet they do not understand what it is or how to receive it. They stand on the threshold of belief, without quite believing.
35 Jesus answers at some length (vv. 35–40), and when we hear from his interlocutors again, they are no longer “the crowd” (see vv. 22, 24), but “the Jews” (vv. 41, 52). What he says in the intervening verses is decisive in bringing about this apparent transformation. Most conspicuous is his abrupt use of the emphatic “I” (vv. 35, 40), and first person verbs He begins with the “I am”* formula, which he has used only twice before, once to the Samaritan woman identifying himself as the Messiah she expected (4:26) and once to his disciples in the boat, simply announcing his presence (6:20). In those cases there was no predicate because the point of reference was obvious from the context. Here there is a predicate: “the Bread of life,”* the first of seven such predicates with “I am” in this Gospel.* “The Bread of life” is synonymous with “the bread of God” (v. 33), except that the genitive relationships are different. “The bread of God” identifies God as the source of the bread; “the Bread of life” identifies “bread” (or “the Bread”) as the source of life (in this case, “eternal life”; see vv. 27, 40). As we have seen, “the bread of God” was what the crowd meant when they asked Jesus to “give us this bread always” (v. 34), and Jesus is now responding to their request. His response is that it is not a question of giving them “the bread of God.” Rather, he is “the Bread” (hence our capitalization), which he now calls “the Bread of life” because it—or rather he—“gives life to the world” (v. 33). From here on it is not so much a question of what Jesus will give as of who Jesus is,* and that is where controversies in John’s Gospel most often begin (see for example 5:17–18).
As “the Bread of life,” Jesus does not immediately promise “life,” much less spell out explicitly what “life” might mean. He does not press the metaphor so as to speak explicitly of “eating” or “drinking” (as in 4:13–14 and 4:32–34, and even more pointedly later, in vv. 52–58). Instead, he simply promises that “The person who comes to me will never go hungry, and the person who believes in me will never ever thirst.”* Although stated negatively, the promises are quite emphatic. “Never go hungry” and “never ever thirst” are solemn assurances, putting the matter beyond all doubt.* The redundant-sounding* “ever” answers the crowd’s plea for bread “always” (v. 34).*
But for whom are the promises intended? For the crowd to whom Jesus is speaking, or for others? They are for “the person who comes to me,” Jesus says, and “who believes in me.” We have met such people before in the narrative: the disciples at the Cana wedding (2:11), all who came to Jesus for discipleship and baptism in Judea (3:26), the Samaritan villagers at Sychar (4:30, 39), the royal official at Cana and then at Capernaum (4:50, 53), and in general all who “do the truth” and “come to the Light” because their works are “wrought in God” (3:21). The crowd here “followed” Jesus (v. 2) and “was coming to him” (v. 5; see also v. 24), but Jesus questioned their motives (v. 26) and “did not entrust himself to them” any more than he did to the so-called “believers” at the first Passover in Jerusalem (2:24). Unlike the latter, they have not even claimed to “believe” (see v. 30). The assurances of this verse, therefore, are not for them but for others, a generalized invitation to all who read it to “come” and “believe.” The notice that those who come “will never go hungry” continues the metaphor of “bread” from the preceding discussion. The added notice that “the person who believes in me will never ever thirst” reverts to Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman two chapters earlier (4:14). The danger for anyone reading the Gospel for a second or third time is the assumption that Jesus is promising life through the drinking of his blood (see vv. 53–56). This is obviously not the case here, for “blood” has not been mentioned. Water is what quenches thirst, and Jesus is again promising “living water” (as in 4:10). With these words he gathers into one a promise of “bread” with the earlier promise of “water” to the woman at the well, both embodied in his own person.
36 Jesus now confirms that these twin promises are not for those to whom he is speaking: “Yet I said to you that you have seen me and you do not believe.”* “Me” is omitted in certain manuscripts, but the evidence favors retaining it.* The omission could imply that it was a matter of seeing the signs (vv. 2, 26) rather than seeing Jesus, but the two amount to much the same thing.* Both things are true: they have seen his signs, and they have obviously seen him. It is also true that they do not believe (see vv. 29–30, where he invited them to do so and they asked for yet another “sign”). What he says here is therefore not surprising.
What is surprising is his claim that he had said it before: “Yet I said to you.”* When would that have been? Commentators point to verse 26, where Jesus admits that they “saw signs,” but insists they had come looking for him only because they “ate of the loaves and were satisfied.”* This could imply unbelief, especially when he follows it up by urging them to “believe” (v. 29).* But more likely, Jesus is looking back to an earlier discussion with “the Jews” in Jerusalem, when he told of “the Father who sent me,” claiming that “You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, and you do not have his word dwelling in you, because he whom that One sent, him you do not believe” (5:37–38). Like Israel at Mount Sinai, they could not see God and refused to hear God’s voice, a voice still speaking to them through Jesus, whom “that One sent,” whom they could see but whom “you do not believe” (5:38). Now, a chapter later at Capernaum, Jesus has told the crowd to “believe in him whom that One sent” (v. 29), but has concluded that, just as he had said before, “you do not believe” (v. 36).* The similarity of vocabulary is striking. Admittedly, there is no explicit reference to “seeing” Jesus in chapter 5.* The association of seeing with believing arises rather out of the present context. They have asked to see a sign, and Jesus has told them that he is the sign. The present verse could be paraphrased, “Yet I said to you [back in 5:38] that you do not believe—and you don’t, even though you have now seen me.” The reader naturally hesitates to reach back to chapter 5 in this way because the audience has changed.* There it was “the Jews” (5:10, 15, 16, 18); here it is a (supposedly) more congenial audience, “the crowd” (6:2, 22, 24). They are “seekers” (vv. 24, 26), and we expect Jesus to be “seeker sensitive.” He is, up to a point (see vv. 27, 29, 35), but he has now reached his limit. He is the same Jesus who “knew them all,” and “knew what was in the person” (2:24–25), and here we see him doing what he has done before (5:37–44) and will do again—unmasking unbelief. The secret that he knows but the reader does not is that actually the audience has not changed. “The crowd” turns out to be “the Jews” after all, something soon to be made explicit (see vv. 41, 52).
37 If those who “come” to Jesus and “believe” in him (v. 35) are not the crowd to whom he is speaking, who are they? Instead of specifying his disciples, or those who came for baptism in Judea, or the Samaritans at Sychar, or the royal official at Cana, Jesus speaks in more general terms: “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and the person who comes to me I will never drive out.” “All”* is neuter and singular (literally, “everything”), referring to all believers corporately,* while the participle (“the person who comes”) is masculine singular,* focusing on any individuals who might “come to Jesus” in the sense of believing in him or giving him their allegiance.* God decides who they are, for they are God the Father’s gift to Jesus, and by coming to him they prove that they belong to God (or, as he put it earlier, that their works are “wrought in God,” 3:21). Jesus will make a similar point negatively a few verses later: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him” (v. 44, my italics; see also v. 65). Both here and elsewhere in the Gospel tradition,* Jesus responds to unbelief with an appeal to divine sovereignty and divine election.
It is in this framework of sovereignty and election that Jesus holds out the universal-sounding declaration that “the person who comes to me I will never drive out.” The words “never drive out”* are just as emphatic and final as “never go hungry” or “never ever thirst” (v. 35). Yet they do not add up to universalism. There is no indiscriminate “Whosoever Will,” as in the old Gospel song.* Those who “come to Jesus” are those whom the Father gave him, and no one else. In promising never to “drive out” those who come, Jesus is simply obeying the Father by accepting the Father’s gift. He confirms a principle first laid down by John, that “A person cannot receive anything unless it is given him from heaven” (3:27). The corollary is that a person must receive that which is given from heaven, and this Jesus promises, emphatically and without qualification, to do. Even more to the point, as John also acknowledged, Jesus himself is “from heaven” (see 3:31), and the Giver is his own Father (1:34; 3:35). This is clearly the case if Jesus, as “the Bread of life” (v. 35), is indeed (as he has implied) “the bread of God … which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
38 Jesus now makes explicit that he himself has “come down from heaven” by putting it in the first person: “for I have come down from heaven* not to do my will but the will of the One who sent me.” The perfect “I have come down” accents not so much Jesus’ heavenly origin as his “present location on earth,”* and his agenda in this world. He is not laboring the point that he came down from heaven—the readers already know that (v. 33), and his hearers will not accept it in any case (see v. 42). Rather, he is explaining why he came down: “not to do my will but the will of the One who sent me.” Anyone familiar with the rest of the Gospel tradition will recall Jesus’ words in Gethsemane, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Lk 22:42; see also Mt 26:39; Mk 14:36). While John’s Gospel shows some acquaintance with this tradition (see 12:27; 18:11), nothing suggests that Jesus is seriously torn between these two alternatives in the present context. Rather, the negative expression, “not to do my will,” is simply rhetorical, accenting Jesus’ positive determination to do “the will of the One who sent me.”* The point of reference is not something outside the Gospel of John, such as the prayer in Gethsemane, but two things Jesus said earlier within the Gospel narrative, first to his disciples in Samaria (“My food is that I might do the will of the One who sent me and complete his work,” 4:34), and then to “the Jews” in Jerusalem (“… because I am not seeking my will but the will of the One who sent me,” 5:30). Both previous passages leave “the will of the One who sent me” undefined, and the phrase cries out for definition, which Jesus now finally supplies.
39 Repeating the whole phrase, “the will of the One who sent me,” Jesus defines it as God’s intention “that of all he has given me I might not lose anything, but raise it up* at the last day.”* “All,” or “everything,” is again neuter singular, referring (just as in v. 37) to believers in Jesus corporately rather than individually. If anything, the impersonal or corporate quality of God’s gift to Jesus becomes even more conspicuous, with references to either losing “it” or raising “it at the last day.”* The divine intention that Jesus “not lose” that which God has given him echoes and reinforces his promise that he will “never cast out” (those who come to him) (v. 37). Earlier, he had announced God’s intent “that everyone who believes in him might not be lost but have eternal life” (3:16). If he were now to reject those who came to him in genuine faith, he would not only be denying them salvation, but he would “lose” that which his Father wanted him to have. Their loss would be his as well. This, he insists, will not happen, and the preceding narrative has given him a certain credibility: “Gather the leftover broken pieces,” he had told his disciples, “so that nothing is lost” (6:12). If he showed such care for twelve baskets of lifeless crumbs, how much more for twelve human beings (see v. 70), plus all those for whom he would finally give his life?*
It is important to appreciate the stark finality of “losing” or “being lost” in the Gospel of John. To be “lost” is not preliminary to being “found” or being “saved,” as in Matthew and Luke.* Jesus comes to Israel, but not to “the lost sheep” of Israel (Mt 10:5; 15:24). “Lost” sheep are not “found” in John’s Gospel (as, for example, in Lk 15:6). Rather, Jesus’ mission is to make sure that his sheep “will never ever be lost, and no one will seize them out of my hand” (Jn 10:29). He does not come “to seek and to save that which is lost” (Lk 19:10), but to keep people from ever being “lost.” In this Gospel a person is not first lost and then saved (as in Lk 15:24), but either lost or saved. Both are final, not temporary, conditions. Salvation is “eternal life,” and “lostness” is just as eternal.*
Later in the story we will learn that the intention expressed here that Jesus “not lose anything” did indeed come to realization. At his arrest, he tells the arresting officers of the priests and Pharisees, “I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these go” (18:8), and Gospel writer reminds us that with this he fulfilled the words spoken in chapter 6, that “of those whom you have given me I have lost none” (18:9). There, to be sure, it is a matter of the disciples’ immediate physical safety. The Gospel writer knows that eventually they—most of them at least (see 21:22–23)—will die physically, but their safety at the time of Jesus’ arrest stands as a sign that “none of them is lost” (see 17:12)* or ever will be, in the sense of forfeiting salvation. For those who die physically, the alternative to being lost is resurrection (see 5:24–25, 28–29). God’s will is not only that Jesus “might not lose anything” of what God has given him, but that he might “raise it up at the last day.” This promise, repeated three more times in the chapter (vv. 40, 44, 54),* represents the heart of God’s intention for God’s people, both in John’s Gospel and in Pharisaic Judaism (see, for example, Acts 23:6; 24:15; 26:6–8). The “last day” is that future “day” (or “hour”) when “all who are in the tombs will hear his voice, and those who have done good things will go out to a resurrection of life, but those who have practiced wicked things to a resurrection of judgment” (5:28–29). Jesus’ promise differs from conventional Jewish expectation only in his claim that he himself, as God’s Son, will be the one raising the dead. Just as the “voice” awaking the dead in his earlier discourse in Jerusalem was said to be that of “the Son of God” (5:25) or “Son of man” (5:27), so here it is “I” who will “raise it up* at the last day.” This, not the promise of resurrection as such, is what is bound to give offense to his hearers.
40 Jesus’ next pronouncement is almost a doublet of the preceding one, but with several telling exceptions. First, instead of “this is the will of the One who sent me” (v. 39), he substitutes “this is the will of my Father,” pressing once again his identity as God’s Son (see vv. 27, 32, 37). He reinforces this by explicitly identifying those “whom the Father has given him” (vv. 37, 39) as everyone who “sees the Son” and believes. Second, he shifts from the neuter to the masculine, just as he did in verse 37, from the people of God as a corporate entity to the individual—any individual who believes. It is no longer a matter of “all” or “everything” (vv. 37, 39), but of “every person”* who sees and believes, and of raising “him,”* not “it,” in the resurrection “at the last day.” Third, instead of stating the Father’s intention for believers both negatively (not being lost) and positively (being raised up on the last day) as in v. 39, he states it only positively (as, for example, in 5:24–25): first for the present (having “eternal life”) and then for the future (being raised on the last day). This time the “I” is emphatic: “And I will raise him up at the last day.” It is an unqualified promise from Jesus himself, not simply part of a statement of God’s intention, as in v. 39 (see above, n.
41–42 Just as in chapter 5, “the Jews” never speak to Jesus. There, as we saw, they “began pursuing him” (5:16), and “kept seeking all the more to kill him” (5:18) because of his actions and words, but said nothing. Here, speaking only to each other, they “murmured about him” because he had said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven” (drawing together vv. 33, 35, and 38). “Murmuring” (see also vv. 43, 61) recalls the people of Israel murmuring against Moses in the desert,* taking us back to when the crowd asked Jesus for a sign comparable to “the manna in the desert” (vv. 30–31). Yet it signals not so much unrelieved hostility against Jesus as rather confusion or conflict among themselves.* The confusion is linked to their identity as specifically Galilean “Jews.” They cannot reconcile the notion that Jesus “came down from heaven” with their own knowledge of where he came from. “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph,” they ask, “whose* father and mother we know?” (v. 42).* The comment suggests that they are not only Galileans but residents of Capernaum, and consequently on their home turf. As we have seen, the “large crowd” following Jesus at the beginning of the narrative (v. 2) may well have originated in Capernaum, to which they have now returned. Alternatively, some of them could have been from Nazareth, clearly identified earlier as Jesus’ place of origin (see 1:45–46), yet Capernaum in this Gospel is as much Jesus’ home as Nazareth,* and the confrontation here at Capernaum plays a role similar to that of his rejection at Nazareth in Luke, or at his unidentified “hometown” in Matthew and Mark.*
Here, as in the other Gospels, nothing suggests that the conventional wisdom about Jesus’ origins was incorrect. Even the two Gospels with virgin birth stories have genealogies in which Jesus’ ancestry is traced through his father Joseph, and they do not see this as in any way incompatible with a virginal conception and birth (see Mt 1:16; Lk 3:23). In John’s Gospel, as we have seen, even one of his first disciples called him “Jesus son of Joseph, from Nazareth” (1:45), and he himself will later acknowledge that “Yes, you know me and you know where I am from” (7:28), adding that “I have not come on my own, but the One who sent me is true. Him you do not know.” The reader can draw no conclusions from the remark of these “Jews” in Capernaum (v. 42) as to whether or not John’s Gospel presupposes the virgin birth. The writer is neither acknowledging that Joseph was literally Jesus’ father nor winking at the readers as if to say, “You and I both know he was not.” His point is rather that Jesus is fully human, that he “came down from heaven” (vv. 38, 41), and that these two things are not incompatible. As Jesus himself will put it later, “the bread that came down from heaven” is his “flesh” (vv. 51, 58). The reader has known from the start that “the Word came in human flesh” (1:14), but “the Jews” cannot comprehend it. “How,” they ask, “does he say now* that ‘I came down from heaven?’ ” “How” probably expresses not only confusion but skepticism, like Nicodemus’s repeated “How can it be?” (3:4, 9), a skepticism that will become explicit in their later question, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (v. 52), and in the question of his so-called “disciples” (v. 61), “This word is hard; who can listen to it?” (see also 7:15; 8:33).
G. Jesus and the Jews at Capernaum (6:41–59)
So the Jews murmured about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” And they said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he say now that ‘I came down from heaven?’ ”
Jesus answered and said to them, “Stop murmuring with each other. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they all will be taught by God.’ Every person who has heard from the Father and learned comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God, he has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the Bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the desert, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that anyone might eat of it and not die. I am the living Bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eat of this bread, he will live forever, and the bread I will give him is my flesh for the life of the world.”
So the Jews quarreled with each other, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
So Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves. The person who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink. The person who eats my flesh and drinks my blood dwells in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the person who eats me, even that person will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not as the fathers ate and died, the person who eats this bread will live forever.”
These things he said teaching in synagogue in Capernaum.
“The crowd” has no answer to Jesus’ speech claiming to be “the Bread of life” (vv. 35–40). In fact, they have not been explicitly called “the crowd” since v. 24.* We have been calling them “the crowd” for the sake of a coherent story line, but to the Gospel writer they are simply “they” (vv. 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35), Jesus’ anonymous partners in dialogue. Now they acquire a new, but not unfamiliar, identity as “the Jews.”* We have met “the Jews” three times before, first as those who sent a delegation to John from Jerusalem (1:19), then as Jesus’ hostile questioners at the first Passover in Jerusalem (2:18, 20), finally at a later festival in Jerusalem after Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath (5:10, 16, 18). So far they have been associated with Jerusalem in Judea, and some have proposed “the Judeans” as the correct translation, possibly with the motive of making John’s Gospel sound less “anti-Jewish.” Yet here they are in Galilee, and their apparent prior knowledge about Jesus (v. 42) betrays the fact that they are not Judeans but Galileans! The point is not that the Galilean “crowd” has disappeared, to be replaced by a different set of interlocutors, “the Jews,” but that “the crowd” is “the Jews.” They have shown their true colors, at least in part, by trying to “seize him to make him king” (6:15). Jesus has unmasked their unbelief (v. 36), and now they give voice to their unbelief. The scene has changed since chapter 5, but the audience is the same—not the same individuals, of course, but the same people at heart. They are the same “Jews,” for they still “do not believe” (5:38; 6:36).
43 Jesus “answered” these “Jews” even though they had spoken only to each other, not to him. The writer could have used the rare aorist middle (“gave answer” or “had an answer”),* just as in 5:17 and 19, but does not do so this time because Jesus is engaged in a real debate identified as having taken place at a specific location (see v. 59, “while teaching in synagogue at Capernaum”). Because he “knew what was in the person” (2:25), Jesus knew all the thoughts and “murmurings” of enemies and disciples alike (see v. 61), and was quite capable of responding even to unspoken questions (see above, on 4:27). “Stop murmuring” is a warning to his hearers to turn their attention away from “each other”* and toward him, and to move beyond their confusion and listen to what God is telling them. His words recall an earlier warning, “Don’t be surprised at this” (5:28), signaling more to come, to murmur and be surprised about. And in fact Jesus will now resume at some length (vv. 44–51) his controversial claim to be “the Bread of life” (v. 35) who “came down from heaven” (v. 38).
44 “No one can come to me,” he continues, “unless the Father who sent me draw him” (v. 44). The words are a negative corollary to verses 37 (“All that the Father gives me will come to me”) and 39 (“that of all he has given me I might not lose anything”), and an echo of John’s caution to his disciples three chapters earlier, “A person cannot receive anything unless it is given him from heaven” (3:27). In verses 37 and 39, the “person” who receives something “from heaven” (that is, from “the Father”) was Jesus, while here it is anyone who comes to Jesus for salvation. Those who “come to me,” Jesus says, do so because his Father “draws” them, and for no other reason. They are God’s gift to Jesus, and Jesus is God’s gift to them.* Jesus is not so much inviting these Galilean “Jews” to “come to him” as providing the reader of the Gospel with an explanation why they would not and could not come. They do not come to Jesus because they are not “drawn” or “dragged” to him.* The verb is used literally of drawing a sword (18:10), or dragging a net full of fish into a boat (21:6) or onto shore (21:11). The image is reminiscent of Jesus’ promise in the other Gospels that his disciples will “fish for people” (Mk 1:20) or “catch people” like fish (Lk 5:10). Here the Father “draws” people to Jesus, but once a person is “drawn,” Jesus claims, “I will raise him up at the last day.” He is saying this now for the third time (see vv. 39, 40). The “I” is emphatic, as in verse 40, but this time, one suspects, the emphasis serves to distinguish Jesus from the Father. The Father “draws” people to Jesus now, and Jesus’ role “at the last day” will be to “raise them up.”*
45 For the first time in the Gospel, Jesus cites a biblical text. Earlier, John had quoted what Isaiah “said” (1:23); the Gospel writer called attention to a “written” text that Jesus might have quoted but did not (2:17), and Jesus’ questioners here at Capernaum asked him for a sign like manna because, “as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat’ ” (v. 31). Now it is Jesus’ turn to quote Scripture: “It is written* in the prophets, ‘And they all will be taught by God.’ Every person who has heard from the Father and learned comes to me.”* The purpose of the quotation is to interpret the harsh metaphor of “drawing” people to Jesus (v. 44). The quotation assures us that it is indeed a metaphor. No one is “drawn” or “dragged” to Jesus forcibly or against one’s will.* Rather, a person is “drawn” by being “taught by God.”* Jesus locates the pronouncement vaguely “in the prophets,” but its precise home is Isaiah 54:13, addressed to Israel as a barren and forsaken wife, with a redeeming promise of compassion, and “all your sons taught by God.”* Jesus does not mention “sons” because in John’s Gospel he is the only “Son,” and he limits “all” to “every person who has heard from the Father and learned.” Such a person “comes to Jesus” (compare v. 44), something these Galilean “Jews” have not done. He does not invite them explicitly to “come,” but leaves the invitation implicit, and open to “all” or “every person” in general, not them in particular. They stand at no special advantage just because Jesus happens to be addressing them. His words are as much for his so-called “disciples” waiting just offstage (see vv. 60, 66), or (even more) for the readers of the Gospel as for his immediate hearers.
The question remains: How does a person “hear from the Father and learn,”* so as to be “taught by God”? Is it a voice within, like the voice at the baptism, saying “This is my beloved Son”? Is it a growing and deepening conviction planted in a person’s life by what would be called centuries later “Christian nurture”? Probably not. Rather, the point is what it was a chapter earlier when Jesus told “the Jews” in Jerusalem, “the Father who sent me … has testified about me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, and you do not have his word dwelling in you, because he whom that One sent, him you do not believe” (5:37–38). To “hear from the Father” is to hear Jesus, for the One who spoke long ago at Sinai now speaks through the Son, and only through the Son.* If they do not hear the Son, they will not hear the Father, and if they do not hear and learn from the Father, they will not come to the Son.
46 As in the earlier passage (5:37), “hearing” calls to mind “seeing.” Anticipating just such a connection, Jesus cautions, “Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God, he has seen the Father.” His claim for himself goes beyond hearing “from the Father,” or “from God.” Using the third person (as in “the Son of man,” or “the Son”), he identifies himself as “he who is from God,”* that is, as “the One whom God sent” (see 3:34). The abrupt shift to the third person hints at a different voice here, possibly another of the Gospel writer’s narrative asides to the reader, but this is unlikely, for no change of speaker is signaled. Rather, the Gospel writer wants to attribute these words to Jesus, just as he attributed 3:16–21 to Jesus, and 3:31–36 to John. So Jesus himself now articulates what the reader has known almost from the start, that “No one has seen God, ever. It was God the One and Only, the One who is right beside the Father, who told about him” (1:18). He now makes clear that he “told about” the Father because he “has seen the Father.” He hinted as much before (3:11, 32; 5:19), and he will say again, “I speak the things I have seen in the Father’s presence” (8:38). Jesus, the Word and God’s “One and Only,” now remembers his preexistence. His access to the Father was and is direct, and everyone else’s is indirect, for he is the sole mediator between God and humanity. Whether or not the Gospel (either here or at 1:18) has in mind those who claim direct visions of God is unclear.* Nothing of the kind is suggested by the context. But if it does, the point is surely that those who make such claims are deceiving themselves and others.
47–48 Jesus continues with another “Amen, amen” pronouncement, the tenth in the Gospel and the third in the present chapter. Unlike the previous two in the chapter (vv. 26, 32), it does not introduce Jesus’ answer to a question or challenge from “the crowd” (or in this case “the Jews”), but instead continues a speech already begun (as, for example, in 3:11, and in 5:24 and 25). As in several such cases, it is difficult to tell exactly what constitutes the “Amen, amen” pronouncement proper. Jesus is taking a kind of solemn vow that what he is about to say is true, but how far does the vow extend? It is tempting to limit it to the single sentence, “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life” (v. 47), but that will not do because, as we have seen, Jesus is “the Word” who was “with God in the beginning,” and everything he says is true because he has heard it “from the Father.” The “Amen, amen” formula is simply his way of punctuating the revealed truth he brings to the world in these Johannine discourses. In some instances an “Amen, amen” pronouncement can be limited to a single verse or sentence because Jesus’ speech ends and either someone else speaks or the narrative resumes (for example, 1:51; 3:3; 8:51, 58; 13:20, 21; 21:18).* But more often, “Amen, amen” should be read as introducing a series of pronouncements, not just one (see 3:5, 11; 5:19, 24, 25; 6:26, 32, and v. 53 below).
That is the case here. In itself, “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life” (v. 47) echoes 5:24, “Amen, amen, I say to you that the person who hears my word and believes the One who sent me, has eternal life” (my italics). Here it sounds like a simplified version of the earlier saying. Yet in the present context it cannot be isolated from what immediately follows: “I am the Bread of life” (v. 48). The operative metaphor for “life” in the present context has been “bread” ever since verses 31–35, leading up to the same pronouncement, “I am the Bread of life” (v. 35), with its corollary, “The person who comes to me will never go hungry, and the person who believes in me will never ever thirst.” This time there is no explicit corollary. Rather, “I am the Bread of life” is closely linked to what precedes, as if to say, “Whoever believes has eternal life, [for] I am the Bread of life.” This takes us momentarily back to the setting of verses 31–35, and the issue of “manna in the desert.” The “crowd” (vv. 22, 24) who had followed Jesus across the lake to Capernaum first raised that issue (vv. 30–31), and now that their true identity as “the Jews” is known (v. 41), Jesus resumes the discussion.
49 The starting point had been the biblical text they themselves cited, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat” (v. 31). Having identified himself as “the bread that came down from heaven” (vv. 35, 38, 41, 48), Jesus now focuses on the verb “to eat.”* “Your fathers ate the manna in the desert,” he begins, echoing and acknowledging the truth of their own words, “Our fathers ate the manna in the desert” (v. 31).* Yet he adds the troubling reminder, “and they died.” At one level, this is simply a way of saying, “That was then, this is now,” just as he said previously that it was not Moses long ago but his Father right now who “gives you the true bread from heaven” (v. 32). But the stark notice that “they died” gives the pronouncement a somber twist.
What is Jesus’ point? Is he merely reminding his hearers that their “fathers” were mortal, like the prophets or even Abraham (see 8:52–53)? Or is it that they died without reaching the promised land because of their disobedience? Other New Testament writers tell us that “God was not pleased” with “the fathers,” even though they “ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink,” and that they were “struck down in the desert” (1 Cor 10:1–5), or that God was angry at “those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the desert,” so that “they were unable to enter because of unbelief” (Heb 3:17–19). Is it legitimate to read such thoughts into the simple comment that those who ate the manna “died”? It is tempting to do so because of the references to Jesus’ audience “murmuring” (vv. 41, 43, 61), as Israel in the desert had done. But no such connection is made. All Jesus is claiming explicitly is that manna could not sustain the people indefinitely. They died, as everyone must, even Abraham and the prophets. The implication is that his hearers, “the Jews” now questioning him, will die as well. Only later will he call it “dying in their sins” (see 8:21, 24). He mentions death here only to sharpen the contrast with “life,” underscoring the claim just made that “whoever believes has eternal life” (v. 47), and “I am the Bread of life” (v. 48). The Christian reader senses that the contrast is imperfect because the death of which Jesus speaks is physical death, while the life he promises is spiritual, a new and qualitatively different kind of life. In the final analysis this is true, yet Jesus’ hearers seem unaware of any such distinction. As far as they are concerned, he could as well be promising endless physical life, and his next words will seem to them to bear this out.
50 “This is the bread that comes down from heaven,” he continues, “so that anyone might eat of it and not die.” The abrupt shift to the third person recalls verse 33, and raises a similar question. Is this still a word of Jesus or an insertion by the Gospel writer? If the latter, then the translation should be, “This man is the bread who comes down from heaven, so that anyone might eat of him and not die” (my italics). But (just as in v. 33) there is no evidence of a change of speaker. We have to assume that Jesus is still speaking, and that the above translation is correct. Having just claimed to be “the Bread of life” (v. 48), he can nevertheless still speak of “the bread that comes down from heaven” as “it,” and not “I,” something distinct from himself, momentarily distancing himself from it. Like the manna of old, it is “bread from heaven” (vv. 31, 32), but in contrast to the manna, those who “eat” of it do not die. This explains what Jesus meant earlier by calling it “the true” (
51 The alternation between the first person and the third person continues, as Jesus announces, “I am the living Bread that came down from heaven.” In the context, the phrase “the living Bread”* echoes both “the Bread of life” (vv. 35, 47) and the notion that “the bread of God … gives life to the world” (v. 33). In the larger perspective of John’s Gospel it answers to “the living water” that Jesus promised the Samaritan woman (4:10, 11).* It may in fact be modeled after the latter, because the participle “living” is appropriate to fresh water from a spring in a way in which it is not appropriate to bread.
Having shifted back to the first person, “I am the living Bread,” Jesus might have been expected to give the accompanying invitation in the first person as well: “If anyone eat of me, he will live forever,” just as he said earlier, “I am the Bread of life. The person who comes to me will never go hungry, and the person who believes in me will never ever thirst” (v. 35, my italics; see also 8:12; 11:25–26). Instead, he shifts again to the third person: “If anyone eat of this bread, he will live forever” (my italics). But the alternation between “I” and “this bread” is then resolved when he adds, “and the bread I will give him is my flesh* for the life of the world.” Conventional wisdom has it that this last clause marks a major transition in the chapter from a “sapiential” or wisdom-oriented perspective, accenting belief in Jesus’ word and being “taught by God,” to a distinctly “sacramental” emphasis on the bread and wine of the Eucharist.* Some have gone so far as to claim that while the former is authentically Johannine, the latter is not, so that vv. 51–58 must be understood as coming not from the Gospel writer but from a later hand.* Yet not only is there no textual evidence of such a break, but it is widely acknowledged that the literary style of what follows is indistinguishable from that of what precedes.*
More specifically, the comment that “the bread I will give him is my flesh” explains finally why Jesus has alternated between the first and the third person, speaking of himself and of “this bread” interchangeably. It forces the reader to go back and look at verse 50 again, where Jesus seemed to distance himself from “this bread.” On the contrary, we now realize, he was speaking of it as if it were his own body, in much the same way that Paul, for example, could refer to his own body as “this mortal,” or “this corruptible” (1 Cor 15:53, 54), or as “this” (2 Cor 5:2), or “this tent” (2 Cor 5:4), or even “these hands” (Acts 20:32). The presumption all along has been that “the bread of God” (v. 33), or “this bread” (vv. 50, 51), is Jesus himself, or more specifically his “flesh.” The notice that “the bread I will give him is my flesh” only makes it explicit. Again Paul’s language (in a very different context) is illuminating: “For I know that in me, that is in my flesh, nothing good dwells” (Rom 7:18, my italics). Jesus, no less than Paul, is his “flesh” (see 1:14), so that saying “the bread … is my flesh” is no different in principle from saying “I am the Bread of life” (vv. 35, 47). But one thing is different: for the first time Jesus promises that he will “give” this bread, that is, give himself. “I will give” recalls yet again Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, and the “living water” he promised that “I will give” (4:14). There it was not immediately clear that to give her “living water” was to give himself, but here it is evident that the gift of “living bread” is at the same time a gift of himself.* He is giving his own body, his very flesh, “for the life of the world.”*
At last he is responding explicitly to the crowd’s earlier request to “give us this bread always” (v. 34), but in an unexpected and shocking way. He will give “this bread” indeed (v. 34), but “this bread” turns out to be his own body, given up to death! “My flesh” comes to mean virtually “my death,” especially with “flesh” so closely linked to the verb “I will give” and the preposition “for.”* Jesus’ language evokes both the notion (evident in Paul) that Jesus gave himself “for” his people,* and the language of the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper according to Luke and Paul, “This is my body that is given for you” (Lk 22:19), or simply “that is for you” (1 Cor 11:24). It is customary in Christian tradition to speak of Christ’s “blood” as a metaphor for his death on the cross, but on occasion the words “body” and “flesh” (even without the verb “to give” or the preposition “for”) are used in a similar way in the New Testament.* Here too the reader knows—even though “the Jews” do not—that Jesus’ “flesh for the life of the world” is his redemptive death. There have been intimations of this already (1:29, 36; 2:17, 19; 3:14, 16), and they will become more and more explicit, often with the same preposition “for,” or “on behalf of” (see 10:11, 15; 11:52; 15:13; 17:19). Within the present discourse, the phrase “for the life of the world” explains and personalizes the earlier promise of bread that “gives life to the world” (v. 33). Jesus will personally give “life” to the “world” by giving his own “flesh” over to death, so that (as he said earlier), “everyone who believes in him might not be lost but have eternal life” (3:16), or “so that the world might be saved through him” (3:17).*
52 “The Jews,” silent since verses 41–42, finally speak again, and again their speech is directed not to Jesus but to “each other.”* This time they did not simply “murmur” (v. 41), but “quarreled” with each other, asking, “How can this man give us his* flesh to eat?” Yet despite the stronger verb, the accent is still on confusion, not hostility, whether toward Jesus or toward each other. There are no factions or stated differences of opinion among them, as there are later in the story when “the crowds” (or “the Pharisees,” or “the Jews”) are repeatedly divided by Jesus’ words or actions (see 7:12, 40–43; 9:16; 10:19–21; 11:45–46). As before (vv. 41–42), they are confused, and their confusion has deepened. Their question, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” recalls Nicodemus: “How can a person be born when he is old?” (3:4), or “How can these things be?” (3:9). Unlike Nicodemus, however, they see Jesus not as “Rabbi,” or a teacher “come from God” (3:2), but simply as “this man” (as in v. 42), perhaps with a subtle “connotation of contempt.”* What is it that confuses them? Earlier, it was his claim, “I am the bread that came down from heaven” (v. 41). This time it could have been his promise that those who eat of “this bread” will “not die,” but “live forever” (vv. 50–51). That issue will come up later (see 8:51–53), but does not engage them here. What does trouble them is Jesus’ comment that the “bread” he will give is his “flesh.” He has not yet spoken explicitly of “eating” his flesh, but they have no difficulty making the connection. If he is inviting them to “eat of this bread” (vv. 50, 51), and if he calls the bread “my flesh” (v. 51), what else are they to think?
53 Again (as in v. 43) Jesus answers “the Jews,” even though they have said nothing to him. The form of his answer matches almost exactly the form of his answer to Nicodemus three chapters earlier (see 3:3, 5): “Amen, amen, I say to you,” followed by a negative conditional sentence introduced by “unless”:* “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink [
Whatever else it may mean, the mention of “blood” confirms the notion that by his “flesh” (v. 51) Jesus meant his death, and a violent death at that. While “flesh and blood” can simply refer to humanity, the “eating” of flesh presupposes killing, and “drinking” blood presupposes the shedding of blood. The notion of eating and drinking the flesh and blood of Jesus inevitably calls to mind the Christian Eucharist, and the various forms of the words of institution found in the synoptic Gospels and Paul. It has become almost commonplace to describe John’s language as “eucharistic,” but this judgment must be qualified at least to some degree. In Matthew, for example, Jesus says, “Take, eat. This is my body” (Mt 26:26), and “drink of it, for this is my blood of the covenant poured out for the forgiveness of sins” (vv. 27–28). That is about as close as the words of institution come to Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John. The other Gospels (and Paul) lack the specific blunt commands to “eat” and to “drink,” preferring the more general “take” (Mk 14:22), or “do this” (Lk 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24, 25). In all of the accounts, moreover, the bread is Jesus’ “body,” never his “flesh,” as in this chapter. John’s language is actually more “eucharistic” earlier in describing how Jesus “took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he gave them out” (v. 11), and much later, by the same lake with his disciples, when the risen Jesus “takes the bread and gives to them, and the fish as well” (21:13, my italics).* Still, it is difficult to read the pronouncement about “eating the flesh” and “drinking the blood” of the Son of man without the Eucharist coming to mind, and through the centuries the passage has been read and reread in that light. The tendency begins even within the manuscript tradition.*
While the eucharistic interpretation makes some sense for even the earliest readers of the Gospel (who may have known and practiced the Lord’s Supper), it makes no sense at all in the literary setting of the discourse at Capernaum. “The Jews” are confused by Jesus’ reference to “eating” him, and their confusion is hardly to be allayed by referring to a Christian ritual that did not yet exist. More likely, the sacramental or eucharistic interpretation of the text belongs to the “reception history” of the text rather than to the Gospel writer’s intention (much less the intention of Jesus within the story!). The text should be read if possible from within the horizons of the dramatic confrontation being described at Capernaum, so as to speak both to “the Jews” on the scene (even if it gives offense) and to Christian readers after the fact. The theme of the discourse so far has been Jesus’ claim to give “life” or “eternal life” (see vv. 27, 33, 35, 40, 47, 51), and that to receive that life a person must “come to him” (vv. 35, 37, 44, 45) and “believe” (vv. 29, 30, 35, 36, 40, 47). Now the shocking truth emerges that the “life” he promises comes through death, and only through death. To “believe” means to accept fully the reality of death, a violent death at that, as the only way to “eternal life.” In short, the “Amen, amen” saying in verse 53, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves,” defines the “Amen, amen” saying in verse 47, “whoever believes has eternal life.” As we have seen, “to have life in yourselves” or “in oneself” is simply to have eternal life as an assured present possession.* That is what Jesus promises, but only the prospect of death makes life possible.
Whose death? His own surely, but is that the full extent of it? Quite possibly Jesus is hinting that “coming to him” and “believing” may cost the believer something as well. In biblical language, “eating flesh” and “drinking blood” evoked images of slaughter and utter desolation,* and it may be that to eat Jesus’ flesh and to drink his blood implies not only benefiting from his death but to some degree sharing or participating in that death. He says as much in the other three Gospels (see Mt 10:38–39; 16:24–25; Mk 8:34–35; Lk 9:23–24; 14:27; 17:33), and later in this Gospel he will make a similar point in illustrating the principle that “unless the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit” (see 12:24–25). Ignatius of Antioch, on the way to Rome and longing for martyrdom, seems to have read it that way, for he wrote, “Alive, I write to you desiring death.… I want the ‘bread of God,’ which is the flesh of Jesus Christ … and for drink I want his blood, which is incorruptible love” (To the Romans 7.2–3).* Yet at this point in the narrative it is impossible to be certain. Jesus’ words remain a mystery. All we know is that he is calling for a radical acceptance of his death as the only way to eternal life.* How radical that acceptance must be has yet to be determined.
54 Having spoke of “my flesh” (v. 51) and “the flesh of the Son of man” (v. 53), Jesus now switches back to “my flesh” and “my blood,” reinforcing his identity as “Son of man.” In contrast to his exchange with Nicodemus, he adds a positive corollary to the negative conditional sentence introduced by “unless.”* Balanced against the warning of the preceding verse is a promise: “The person who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” This too, we can assume, is governed by the “Amen, amen” formula (v. 53), and the phrase “has eternal life” echoes verbatim the language of the previous “Amen, amen” pronouncement in verse 47.
Much has been written about Jesus’ abrupt use of a different verb for “eat” here,* and again in verses 56, 57, and 58. This verb is said to mean “to bite or chew food, eat (audibly),” and to be used “to offset any tendencies to ‘spiritualize’ the concept so that nothing physical remains in it, in what many hold to be the language of the Lord’s Supper.”* Consequently, Raymond Brown translates the verb used in verse 53 as “eats,” and the verb here as “feeds on.”* But more likely, the verbs are interchangeable in meaning.* Therefore we have translated the two verbs identically. Verse 54 simply repeats verse 53 positively, as a promise instead of a warning. The promise is “eternal life,” not as a future reward but as a present possession, something a person “has” here and now. Yet the promise has a future dimension as well, for Jesus quickly adds, “and I will raise him up at the last day” (as in vv. 39, 40, and 44).* The emphatic “I” echoes here the emphatic “my flesh” and “my blood.”* This accomplishes three things: first, it identifies Jesus unmistakably as “the Son of man” (v. 53); second, it presses the extraordinary claim that “at the last day” this man who died a violent death will be very much alive and quite capable of raising others from the dead; finally, it also presupposes that those others are (or may be) physically dead, implying that such phrases as “not die” (v. 50) and “live forever” (v. 51) are not to be taken literally.* Eternal life, as we have seen, is not an indefinite extension of one’s present physical life, but a new kind of life altogether, resulting from a new birth. More than a future hope, it is a present possession, yet with a future dimension as well.* Because it does not exclude physical death, it is meaningless without the explicit promise of resurrection “at the last day” (see 5:28–29), and this Jesus has supplied, not once but four times.
55 Jesus now gives a reason for his two startling pronouncements. “For my flesh is real food,” he claims, “and my blood is real drink.” He repeats the phrases “my flesh” and “my blood” from the preceding verse, but in a different word order, accenting not the pronoun “my” but the two nouns “flesh” and “blood” (see n.
“Real,” or “true,”* does not mean “literal,” as if Jesus were proposing cannibalism. He has already told his disciples of “food to eat that you do not know about” (4:32), defined as doing “the will of the One who sent me” (4:34). In the present discourse he has distinguished “the food that remains to eternal life” from the literal “food that is being lost” (v. 27), and promised “the true bread from heaven” in contrast to literal manna in the desert (v. 32). Yet neither does “real” quite mean “metaphorical” or “spiritual” as opposed to literal—as if literal food and drink were somehow unreal.* Rather, Jesus’ flesh qualifies as “real” food and his blood as “real” drink because they do what food and drink are supposed to do, and do it better.* They nourish and give life, not for a day or even a lifetime, but forever (see vv. 50–51, 54). In declaring them “real,” Jesus is bearing testimony (although the word is not used), just as he “testified” earlier that God was “real” or “true” (3:33), and claimed that his own “testimony” about himself and John’s testimony about him were also “true” (5:31, 32; see also 7:18; 8:14, 17, 26; 10:41; 19:35; 21:24). Similarly, the solemn assurance here that his flesh and blood are “real” food and drink serves to reinforce the “Amen, amen” with which the present speech began (v. 52).*
56 Having given this assurance, Jesus repeats word for word what he said a moment before (v. 54), “The person who eats my flesh and drinks my blood,” but with a different ending. Instead of “has eternal life,” he now claims that such a person “dwells in me, and I in him”—a decisive pronouncement, defining “eternal life” on the one hand, and “eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood” on the other. Both involve being united to Jesus.* “Eternal life” is life united to him and dependent on him, while to “eat his flesh and drink his blood” is to be united to him in his death. Neither is possible without the other. But how is either one possible? What does it mean to “dwell”* in Jesus and have Jesus “dwelling” in oneself? Nothing in the Gospel so far has quite prepared the reader (much less “the Jews” at Capernaum!) for such language. It is as much an enigma at this point in the story as “eating my flesh and drinking my blood.” Jesus’ first disciples “stayed with him” for part of a day (1:39), but staying or dwelling “with” Jesus and dwelling “in” him are by no means the same thing. He told “the Jews” in Jerusalem, “you do not have [God’s] word dwelling in you” (5:38), implying that God’s word ought to be “in” them. But the mutual indwelling of which he speaks here is something altogether new. Jesus will not even try to spell it out until much later in the Gospel when he is alone with his disciples.* It is in fact a characteristic—the defining characteristic—of true discipleship, or of what it means to “believe” (v. 47).
Mutual indwelling expresses an intimate relationship between Jesus and his disciples, mirroring the relationship between God and Jesus. The reader knows by now something of the relationship between the Father and the Son (see 3:35; 5:17, 19–23), but not in the language of mutual indwelling. Only later will Jesus explain to “the Jews” that “the Father is in me, and I in the Father” (10:38), and they will not understand. Still later he will invite his disciples to believe the same thing (see 14:11), and will promise them that “In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (14:20). Codex D, as we have seen (above, n.
57 Jesus accomplishes much the same result by introducing “the living Father” in the next verse, thereby appealing to his own dependence on the Father as the model for a disciple’s dependence on him.* The question is whether verses 56 and 57 should be separated by a comma or a period. Does verse 57 simply complete the thought of the preceding verse, or is it a new and distinct pronouncement? Virtually all translations and commentators opt for the latter, placing a period at the end of verse 56 and beginning a new sentence with “Just as” (v. 57).* Our translation has followed that precedent, and yet verse 57 does at the same time complete the thought of verse 56 by grounding the mutual indwelling of Jesus and the believer in Jesus’ mission from and dependence on the Father. “Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father,” he explains, “so the person who eats me, even that person will live because of me.”
Except for the jarring reference to “the person who eats me,” these words begin to strike a more familiar chord. The reader knows that Jesus is “sent” from the Father (3:17, 34; 5:36, 38; 6:29), and even though the phrase “the living Father”* has not been used, the reader also knows that “the Father has life in himself” and “gave to the Son to have life in himself” (5:26). Finally, Jesus has said that the “food” by which he appropriates that “life” from God is “that I might do the will of the One who sent me and complete his work” (4:34). Therefore he can say, “I live because of the Father,” but what is crucial here is the conclusion he draws from it: “so* the person who eats me, even that person will live because of me.”* While Jesus never speaks of “eating” the Father, he depends on the Father for his “food,” that is, his very life, and by the same token those who “eat” Jesus are those depend on him for their life.* At this point he does not specify whether the words “I live because of the Father” and “that person will live because of me” are referring only to life in this world or to resurrection life,* nor does he repeat the promise, “I will raise him up at the last day” (v. 54). But the effect of the analogy is to define “eating” Jesus as “doing his will and completing his work,” in the same way that he does the Father’s will and completes the Father’s work—even to the point of death, and the prospect of death cries out for the hope of resurrection. To Jesus in this Gospel, life is life, whether in this world or the world to come. “Believing” in Jesus (v. 47) has now been defined as “eating” his flesh and “drinking” his blood (vv. 53–55), “eating” him as union with him (v. 56), and union with him as doing his will and completing his work (v. 57), in short, as discipleship with all that that entails, up to and including the prospect of martyrdom and the hope of resurrection.
58 Jesus concludes his response to “the Jews” (v. 52) by gathering into a few well-chosen words the whole exchange with them, and before them with “the crowd,” all the way back to the crowd’s demand for “bread from heaven” (v. 31). First he repeats verse 33 almost verbatim: “This is the bread that came down from heaven,” changing only the present participle “comes down” (v. 33) to the aorist “came down,” to accent his personal claim that “I came down from heaven” (v. 38). Next, with the words, “not as the fathers ate and died, the person who eats this bread will live forever,” he revisits verse 49, “Your* fathers ate the manna in the desert, and they died,” and verse 51, “If anyone eat of this bread he will live forever.” By now it is clear that “this bread” is the flesh of Jesus “for the life of the world” (v. 51), and that eternal life is possible only through his death. The two questions, “How does he say now that ‘I came down from heaven’?” (v. 42), and “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (v. 52), have now been answered, but as we will see (v. 60), not to everyone’s satisfaction.
59 Jesus’ speech is over, and the Gospel writer adds a belated “narrative aside”: “These things he said teaching in synagogue in Capernaum.”* The reader knows already that the setting is Capernaum (vv. 17, 24), but this is the first and only mention of the synagogue. There has been no explicit change of venue from the place where the crowd first “found” Jesus after crossing the lake (v. 25), and we are left to wonder: Did they find him in the synagogue, or did they find him at the lakeshore and then adjourn to the synagogue? Did he first debate “the crowd” by the lake (vv. 26–40) and then “the Jews” in the synagogue (vv. 41–58)? None of these questions is answered explicitly, but the very broad summary in verse 58 suggests that the entire discourse at least as far back as the introduction of the biblical text about “bread from heaven” (v. 31) took place in the Capernaum synagogue.* John’s Gospel has implied that Capernaum is Jesus’ home (see 2:12; 6:42), and other Gospel traditions present him teaching and performing an exorcism in the synagogue there (Mk 1:21–28; Lk 4:31–37).* Later, when the High Priest in Jerusalem asks him “about his disciples and his teaching” (18:19), he will reply, “I have spoken openly to the world. I always taught in synagogue and in the temple, where all the Jews come together, and I spoke nothing in secret” (18:20, italics added). Jesus has been in the temple twice (2:14–22; 5:14), and will teach there at length in later chapters (see 7:14, 28; 8:20; see also 8:59; 10:23), but only this once at Capernaum is he said to have taught “in synagogue.”* From the standpoint of Jesus’ statement to the high priest, the present notice, “These things he said teaching in synagogue in Capernaum,” forms a matched pair with the notice a chapter and a half later, “These words he spoke in the treasury, teaching in the temple” (8:20).* Perhaps the Gospel writer included the two notices to accent the point Jesus will eventually make to the high priest—that his teaching was for “all the Jews” (18:20)—not secret or esoteric instruction to a small, subversive group of disciples, but a matter of public record. “Ask those who heard what I told them,” he will say; “Look, they know what I said” (18:21). Here in chapter 6, “the Jews” in Galilee have indeed heard what he said. Their final response, like that of “the Jews” in Jerusalem at the end of chapter 5, is undisclosed, but there is little reason or precedent for thinking it favorable (see vv. 41, 52). Instead, certain of his “disciples” react (see v. 60).
60–61 Like “the Jews,” many so-called “disciples” are troubled by Jesus’ words about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. “This word is hard,”* they complain; “Who can hear it?” (v. 60). Like “the Jews” too, they speak to each other, not to Jesus, for he does not actually hear their words but knows “within himself” what they are saying* and calls it by its right name, “murmuring” (v. 61), just as “the Jews” had “murmured” earlier about his claims (vv. 41, 43). What is it that “makes them stumble” (v. 61)?* Is it Jesus’ claim to have “come down from heaven” (v. 38), or is it the notion of “eating” his flesh (vv. 51–58), or is it both? Such things were incomprehensible to “the Jews” (see vv. 41–42, 52), but in the case of these would-be “disciples” the difficulty may not have been that his words were obscure or difficult to understand, but that they were all too clear. If, as we have seen, he has been saying that life for the world comes about only through violent death, his own and by extension theirs, it is not surprising that they would find such a prospect “hard” to listen to, much less accept and embrace. Their reaction is like Peter’s in Mark, when Jesus predicted his own death, Peter “rebuked” him, and Jesus in turn “rebuked” Peter, calling him “Satan” (Mk 8:32–33), and in Matthew, where Peter added, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you” (Mt 16:22, NRSV), and Jesus called Peter both “Satan” and a “stumbling block” (16:23).* Ironically, as we will see, Peter’s reaction in John’s Gospel is exactly the opposite (vv. 68–69). The onus that falls on Peter in Matthew and Mark falls here on the undefined “many” who stumbled at Jesus’ words.
H. Jesus and His Disciples at Capernaum (6:60–71)
Then many of his disciples, when they heard, said, “This word is hard. Who can hear it?” And Jesus, knowing within himself that his disciples were murmuring about this, said to them, “Does this make you stumble? So then, [what] if you see the Son of man going up where he was at first? The Spirit is that which makes alive; the flesh accomplishes nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit, and they are life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the beginning who they are who do not believe, and who it is who will hand him over. And he went on to say, “This is why I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is given him from the Father.” From this, many of his disciples turned back and would no longer walk with him. So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away too?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we turn? You have words of life eternal, and we believe and we know that you are the Holy One of God.” Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you as the Twelve? And one of you is ‘the devil.’ ” He meant Judas of Simon Iscariot. For this man, one of the Twelve, was going to hand him over.
Once again, the audience seems to change abruptly. First they were “the crowd” (vv. 22, 24), then “the Jews” (vv. 41, 52), now Jesus’ “disciples” (v. 60). These “disciples” react in much the same way as “the Jews” had done, “murmuring” at what Jesus has said (v. 61), and sounding more like enemies than like disciples, more like the so-called “believers” at the first Passover in Jerusalem, to whom Jesus “would not entrust himself” (2:24) than like “his disciples” who first “believed in him” at the Cana wedding (2:12). The latter seem to have become a fixed group within the narrative, accompanying Jesus to Samaria (4:8, 27, 31, 33), assisting at the feeding of the crowd (6:3, 8, 12), and meeting Jesus on the lake (vv. 16, 22, 24). Since then, they seem to have been silent observers of Jesus’ discourse to “the crowd” and to “the Jews.” It is unclear whether these “disciples” who are now complaining are part of that group, or whether they are merely those who “heard”* (v. 60), potential rather than actual disciples?* If Jesus was dealing first with an undifferentiated “crowd” (vv. 22–40), then with the crowd as “Jews,” or unbelievers (vv. 41–59), perhaps he is now finally dealing with the same crowd as potential disciples. From the start, “following him because they could see the signs he was doing” (v. 2),* they were clearly differentiated from the actual disciples, who sat with him on the mountain (v. 3) and watched them “coming to him,” and gave them food. And yet both expressions, “following him” and “coming to him,” imply, as we have seen, at least a first step toward discipleship. The term “disciples” (v. 60) implies that they have heard and want to believe, yet they find Jesus’ hard words unacceptable. As a result, we are told, they “turned back and would no longer walk with him” (v. 66). Twelve remain, evidently those who have been known as “the disciples” all along. With Simon Peter as their spokesman they declare their allegiance to Jesus (vv. 68–69), and he tells them that he has chosen them as “the Twelve,” but that one of them—he does not say which one—is “the devil.”
62 “So then,” Jesus continues, “if you see the Son of man going up* where he was at first.…” The implication of the unfinished question is “What then?”* But does he mean to say that if they saw “the Son of man going up,” they would no longer be troubled?* Or that they would be even more troubled than they are?* Or is he being intentionally ambiguous?* There is no ambiguity here. The pronouncement is linked to Jesus’ claim that he has “come down from heaven” (vv. 38, 41, 42; also implicitly, vv. 33, 58). If they were to see Jesus “going up where he was at first,” it would demonstrate that his claim was true. The reader knows what they do not: that Jesus (and he alone) has “gone up to heaven” (3:13), that only he “has seen the Father” (6:46), and consequently that his claim is indeed true (see also 20:17). The phrase “where he was at first” reaches all the way back to the Gospel’s opening glimpse of “the Word” who was “with God in the beginning” (1:2). A glimpse of him “with God” again at the end would reassure these “disciples” at Capernaum that death, whether his or theirs, was not something to fear. No such visible demonstration is promised, however. All they have to go on is Jesus’ spoken “word” (v. 60), “hard” though it may be, and what he requires of them is faith in him, and in that “word.”*
63 “The Spirit is that which makes alive;* the flesh accomplishes nothing,” Jesus continues. “The words I have spoken to you are spirit, and they are life.” He has already assigned the work of “bringing to life” or “making alive” to the Father, and consequently to the Son, associating it closely with “raising the dead” (5:21). Here too it suggests resurrection, echoing Jesus’ repeated promise, “I will raise it [or him] up at the last day” (vv. 39, 40, 44, 54). But what is different is the role of “the Spirit” in “making alive,” or raising the dead. Nowhere else in John’s Gospel is this connection explicitly made,* yet anyone familiar with the Old Testament (for example, Gen 2:7; Ezek 37:5) or with Paul’s letters* will find it unsurprising.
Here “the Spirit” is contrasted to “the flesh” (a term carried over from vv. 51–56), recalling Jesus’ comment to Nicodemus that “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (3:6). In much the same vein, Jesus now insists that “the flesh accomplishes nothing.”* This poses a serious problem for many interpreters because it seems to undercut Jesus’ insistence just expressed that “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves” (v. 53), and that “The person who eats my flesh and drinks my blood dwells in me, and I in him” (v. 56).* Especially those committed to a sacramental interpretation of verses 53–58 complain that Jesus seems to be giving them something with one hand only to take it back with the other. Raymond Brown, for example, unable to explain “how the absolute statement, ‘The flesh is useless,’ could ever have been said of the eucharistic flesh of Jesus,” admits to having “interpreted 60–71 as if these verses had no reference to 51–58.”* But a solution presents itself if we go back to Jesus’ first use of the word “flesh” (v. 51): “and the bread I will give him is my flesh for the life of the world.” There, as we saw, “my flesh” was a metaphor for Jesus’ death “for the life of the world.” Here, the point is that “flesh” is no good without “Spirit,” that is, death even for a noble cause “accomplishes nothing”—unless it is followed by resurrection. Martyrdom for martyrdom’s sake, without hope of vindication, is sheer futility, but Jesus has promised vindication, not once but over and over again: “never go hungry,” and “never ever thirst” (v. 35), “never cast out” (v. 37), “raise it up at the last day” (v. 39), “have life eternal,” and “raise him up at the last day” (v. 40), “raise him up at the last day” (v. 44), “has life eternal” (v. 47), “will live forever” (v. 51), “has life eternal,” and “raise him up at the last day” (v. 54), “dwells in me, and I in him” (v. 56), “will live because of me” (v. 57), and “will live forever” (v. 58).
Jesus’ “word” (v. 60) sounded “hard” to these would-be disciples because it seemed to be all about “flesh,” and consequently all about death. On the contrary, he now claims, “The words* I have spoken to you are spirit, and they are life.” Not “flesh,” but “spirit”*—not “death,” but “life.” It is true that life comes only through death, whether his or theirs (see 12:24), and this they find disturbing, but the other side of the truth is that death is not the last word. In resurrection, “life” trumps “death,” and “the Spirit that makes alive” trumps “the flesh.” Jesus invites these “disciples” to hear his words in faith as “spirit” and as “life,” but he knows already that some of them will not.
64 Jesus now unmasks the unbelief of these so-called “disciples,” just as he unmasked the unbelief of “the crowd” here at Capernaum (v. 36) of “the Jews” earlier at Jerusalem (5:38), and of Nicodemus and his friends even before that (3:11–12). His words are gentler this time, and less sweeping, for there are only “some of you,” he says, “who do not believe,” fewer perhaps than the “many” who “stumbled” at his message (v. 60). The Gospel writer takes the opportunity to add a narrative aside, calling attention once again (as, for example, in v. 6) to Jesus’ foreknowledge: “For Jesus knew from the beginning who they are who do not believe, and who it is who will hand him over.”* Possibly the writer has in mind already the charge that Jesus was unable to retain the loyalty of his own disciples because they all deserted him at his arrest and one of them handed him over to his enemies.* The narrative aside makes it clear that none of this took Jesus by surprise, but that all of it was within his knowledge and part of God the Father’s plan. The definite “who they are” echoes the indefinite “some of you” from the preceding clause, implying that Jesus knew more specifically than he was telling just who the unbelievers were. The phrase “from the beginning” looks back from the standpoint of the Gospel writer and his readers at Jesus’ ministry in its entirety, not at some specific starting point within his ministry.* Consequently, it includes even those who “do not believe” in the writer’s own time (that is, who they are* who do not believe). It is virtually equivalent to “beforehand” or “ahead of time,” and makes no claim about what Jesus might have known from his baptism or his birth, much less from all eternity.*
If Jesus’ knowledge of who did not or does not believe looks very generally at the past and the present (see 3:11–12; 5:38; 6:36), his knowledge of “who it is who will hand him over”* looks at a specific event in Jesus’ future. It has become customary to translate this verb as “betray,” but in itself the verb does not connote treachery. Jesus will be “handed over” more than once in this Gospel, and in different ways (see, for example, 18:30, 35, 36; 19:16).* Here it is a matter of one person handing Jesus over, and readers familiar with the story from this Gospel or any other will know that he is referring to Judas Iscariot. It is the first hint of Jesus being “handed over” by Judas, but many others will follow (see v. 71; also 12:4; 13:2, 11, 21; 18:2, 5; 21:20). Readers unfamiliar with that story might recall an earlier notice that the Jerusalem authorities were “pursuing Jesus” and “trying to kill him” (5:16, 18), and perhaps conjecture that someone among his disciples was planning to “hand him over,” but who, and how, and to what end would still remain a mystery to them.
65 The writer returns to Jesus’ direct speech, which builds of course on what he has just said (v. 64a, “But there are some of you who do not believe”), not on the writer’s narrative aside. Jesus “went on to say,* ‘This is why I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is given him from the Father.’ ” When had he told them that? Never in exactly those words, but the quotation is indirect, not direct, and verse 44 is close enough: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him.” Only the “unless” clause is different in the two pronouncements. Instead of “unless the Father who sent me draw him,” Jesus now says, “unless it is given him from the Father,” recalling the principle first laid down by John to his disciples three chapters earlier, “A person cannot receive anything unless it is given him from heaven” (3:27). The two pronouncements (all three, in fact) can fairly be regarded as amounting to the same thing. Having interpreted the harsh metaphor of people being “drawn” or “dragged” to God as being “taught by God” or “learning from the Father” (v. 45), Jesus now dissolves the metaphor altogether in favor of John’s broader appeal to that which is “given” from heaven (3:27), or, in Jesus’ own words, “from the Father.”
More striking is the pronoun “you.” “I have told you,” Jesus says (my italics), even though in verse 44 he was addressing “the Jews” (see v. 41), not “his disciples” as here. This confirms what the reader has long suspected: that Jesus’ audience throughout the chapter (and through much of the public ministry) is always the same, whether they are called “the crowd” (vv. 22, 24), or “the Jews” (vv. 41, 42), or “the disciples” (vv. 60, 66). What he says to one group he says to all. They are all potential disciples or believers, yet they do not believe, at least not as a group, and sooner or later their unbelief is unmasked (see 12:37).
66 Like “the crowd” and like “the Jews,” these “disciples” do not reply when their unbelief is exposed. Instead, the narrative resumes. “From this”* could mean “from then on,” but it more likely echoes Jesus’ phrase “this is why” or “for this reason” (v. 65), and carries much the same meaning: “as a result of this,” or “consequently.”* What results is that instead of answering Jesus, “many of his disciples turned back and would no longer walk with him.” We are not told explicitly whether this was an immediate or a long-range result, but Jesus’ words to “the Twelve” in the next verse, “Do you also want to go away?” argue strongly that it happened immediately, right at the scene.* Without claiming that the “many” coincide exactly with the “many” who first “murmured” and “stumbled” at what they had heard (vv. 60–61), the writer leaves the impression, first, that Jesus has failed to calm their fears, but, second, that he has been proven right on two counts. One is that there are indeed “some … who do not believe” (v. 64), and the other is that “no one can come … unless it is given him from the Father” (v. 65). They are themselves living proof of it, as they turn and walk away. They have “followed” Jesus (v. 2), “come to him” (v. 5), hailed him as “the prophet” (v. 14), tried to make him king (v. 15), “looked for” him and “found” him (vv. 24–25), but now they “turned back,”* an expression with an almost military sound (see 18:6!). The verb is aorist, marking in this instance not a momentary setback but a decisive turning away. The accompanying verb is imperfect: they “would no longer walk with him,”* making their defection permanent.
While this is the first (and only) explicit reference in the Gospel to “walking with Jesus” as a metaphor for discipleship, the metaphor itself is natural and inevitable. When the first disciples first laid eyes on Jesus, he was “walking” (1:36), and they immediately “followed” him (1:37). They then accompanied him to Cana and Capernaum (2:1–12), to Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria (2:13–4:42), possibly* back to Cana (4:43–54) and Jerusalem again (5:1–47), and now to the lake of Galilee and to Capernaum. All this can fairly be described as “walking with Jesus,” even though the only time he was said to be literally “walking” was on the lake (6:19), where they either met him in a boat (v. 21) or followed later in other boats (vv. 22–24). Later, Jesus will be seen “walking” in Galilee (7:1), in the temple at Jerusalem (10:23), and generally “among the Jews” (see 11:54), inviting all who hear him not to “walk in the darkness” (8:12) but to “walk while you have the light, so darkness will not overtake you” (12:35; see also 11:9–10; 1 Jn 1:6–7; 2:6, 11; 2 Jn 3–4). “Walking” becomes a metaphor for living one’s life,* “walking with Jesus” or “walking in the light” a metaphor for being his disciple,* and “walking in darkness” a metaphor for unbelief. When these disciples “turned back and would no longer walk with him,” the writer implies, they stopped “walking in the light,” and began to “walk in darkness.”*
67 Jesus now addresses a group he calls “the Twelve,” introducing the term as if he expects the reader to understand who “the Twelve” are. Any reader familiar with even one of the other Gospels will understand, but no other Gospel introduces them so abruptly as this. Matthew mentions them first as “his twelve disciples” (10:1), after having spoken more generally of “his disciples” (5:1; 8:21, 23; 9:10, 11, 14, 19, 37), and then names each of “the twelve apostles” one by one (10:2–4). Mark records that Jesus “appointed twelve” (3:14),* and like Matthew he lists their names (3:16–19). Luke has Jesus summoning “his disciples,” and then choosing “twelve of them, whom he also named as apostles” (6:13), again listing their names (6:14–16). John’s Gospel has no list, and no explanation of who “the Twelve” might be. John’s Gospel knows nothing, for example, of any analogy between “the Twelve” and the twelve tribes of Israel (as in Mt 19:28; Lk 22:30). The only disciples named so far have been Andrew (1:40), Simon Peter (1:40, 42), Philip (1:44), and Nathanael (1:45). Judas Iscariot (v. 71), Thomas Didymus (11:16), and another Judas (14:22) will be named later. All these are names familiar from the lists in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but only Simon Peter (v. 68), Judas (v. 71), and Thomas (20:24) are explicitly said to belong to the Twelve. “The sons of Zebedee” (21:2) and one or two others will be singled out but not named. Consequently the reader cannot with any confidence construct a list from John’s Gospel alone.* Those who are unfamiliar with other Gospels have nothing to go on except the fact that “his disciples” had gathered up “twelve baskets” after Jesus fed the crowd (vv. 12–13), so that possibly “the Twelve” could be the same disciples who had assisted at the feeding, each now carrying a basket of leftover crumbs.* In any event, Jesus asks the Twelve as a group, “Do you want to go away too?” giving them the freedom to leave with the unbelieving disciples if they so choose.*
68–69 They do not so choose. “The Twelve” now come to represent an inner circle of Jesus’ disciples who remained faithful (without necessarily implying that they were the only faithful disciples).* Simon Peter, speaking for the Twelve, replies, “Lord, to whom shall we turn? You have words of life eternal, and we have believed and we know that you are the Holy One of God.” Here for the first time in the Gospel a named disciple addresses Jesus as “Lord,”* a term just as easily translated “Sir,” and used so far only by strangers or those seeking Jesus’ help.* But from here on only disciples or believers will address him in this way, and (all but twice) with the more confessional meaning, “Lord.”* Simon Peter asks rhetorically, “To whom shall we turn?” picking up the verb from the preceding reference to those who “turned back” from following Jesus (v. 66). “To whom” leads us to expect an emphatic “you” in the next sentence, but instead the pronouncement puts the phrase “words of life eternal”* front and center, echoing Jesus’ own claim that “The words I have spoken to you are spirit, and they are life” (v. 63).*
The Twelve recognize the life-giving quality of Jesus’ words, even if the other disciples do not. Unlike the others, they do not “stumble” at his words (v. 61), but recognize that “life eternal” comes through death and in no other way. Simon Peter articulates for them their faith in Jesus, and this is where we finally encounter the emphatic pronouns that we expect: “and we believe and we know that you are the Holy One of God” (v. 69, italics added). Not “I” but “we.”* Not “Peter’s confession” but that of the Twelve.* In contrast to those who did “not believe” (v. 64) but “turned back” (v. 66), they “believe” and consequently “know” who Jesus is.* The emphatic “You are the Holy One of God”* recalls Nathanael’s confession in the opening chapter (“You are the Son of God. You are the King of Israel,” 1:49), and anticipates Martha’s five chapters later (“You are the Christ, the Son of God,” 11:27, my italics throughout). These passages, plus the parallel synoptic accounts, led some later scribes to modify or elaborate “the Holy One of God” in the direction of more familiar titles such as “the Christ, the Holy One of God,” or “the Christ, the Son of God” (as in 11:27 and 20:31), or “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (as in Mt 16:16), but the manuscript evidence for the simpler expression, “the Holy One of God,” is overwhelming.*
If we can assume that Jesus and the Twelve are still at the synagogue in Capernaum (v. 59), we have an additional irony: “the Holy One of God” is the same title given him by a demoniac, “a man with an unclean spirit,” in that same Capernaum synagogue according to Mark (1:24) and Luke (4:34). If so, the confession by the Twelve confirms that “the Holy One of God” exactly describes who Jesus is. In the synoptics, “Holy One” implied ritual and moral purity, making Jesus a terror and a threat to the world of the demonic, and all that was impure or unclean. Here the accent is on his having been set apart by God to complete a task. Later, he will identify himself as one “whom the Father consecrated* and sent into the world” as “Son of God” (10:36; see also 17:17–19).* “The Holy One of God” is virtually synonymous with “the Son of God,”* acknowledging and confirming what Jesus himself had said again and again, that the Father “sent” him (vv. 29, 57; also 3:17; 4:34; 5:23, 24, 30, 36, 37, 38; 6:38, 39, 44) to bring “words of life eternal” to those who would listen. Here, at last, are the listeners.
70 Recognizing that Simon Peter was speaking for the Twelve and not just himself, Jesus answered “them” (not just Peter) with a rhetorical question of his own, “Did I not choose you as the Twelve?”* and a startling revelation: “And one of you is ‘the devil.’ ” When and where did Jesus “choose”* these disciples and designate them as “the Twelve”? Nowhere in this Gospel. Just as the text requires some familiarity with who the Twelve are, so it seems to require familiarity with a story in which Jesus chose or appointed twelve disciples to travel with him and share in his ministry (that is, a story resembling Mk 3:13–19, Mt 10:1–4, and Lk 6:12–16). Only Luke’s account uses the verb “choose”: “And when day came, he called his disciples, and having chosen twelve of them, he named them also as apostles” (Lk 6:13, my italics). John’s Gospel repeats three more times the notion that Jesus “chose” his disciples, each time presumably referring to the same group (13:18; 15:16, 19), yet in contrast to Matthew, Mark, and Luke it never refers to them (even in 13:16) as “apostles,” or as “the twelve apostles,” and never records an incident in which Jesus “chose” them.
The reader is free either to fill in the gap from prior knowledge of a synoptic-like account, or simply to take the writer’s word for it that Jesus “chose” the Twelve, without wondering why or how or under what circumstances. The latter option is not so strange, given that the reader was also left to wonder when and how Jesus had previously “sent” his disciples “to harvest that on which you have not labored” (4:38), and by what process the Father “gives” or “draws” disciples to Jesus (vv. 37, 39, 44). It appears, in fact, that when Jesus claims that “I have chosen” the Twelve, he is merely claiming to have “received” what the Father has “given” him (see 3:27), for, as he has insisted repeatedly, “the Son can do nothing by himself, except what he sees the Father doing” (5:19), and “I can do nothing by myself” (5:30). Those whom he has “chosen out of the world” (see 15:19) are none other than those whom, he says, the Father “gave me out of the world,” adding, “Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word” (17:6). This applies both to his choice of individuals (of which we have seen glimpses, 1:35–51), and to his designation of them as a special group known as “the Twelve” (of which we knew nothing until now). They are Jesus’ sovereign choice because—not although—they were first of all chosen by the Father.
Why are “the Twelve” mentioned in these few verses but virtually nowhere else in the Gospel?* Apparently to heighten the irony and shock of what comes next: “And one of you is the ‘devil.’ ”* Not “a devil,” as in virtually all English translations, but “the devil,” because of the same grammatical rule that dictated “the Word was God” (rather than “a god,” 1:1), and “the King [rather than “a king”] of Israel” (1:49), the rule that “definite predicate nouns which precede the verb usually lack the article.”* Moreover, “a devil” would imply a plurality of devils, something of which the New Testament knows nothing. Demons or unclean spirits are not quite the same thing, and there is no evidence in the Gospels (unless this is it) that any of the Twelve were ever demon possessed. If “devil” (or diabolos) is indefinite, the meaning would have to be “One of you is slanderous” or “an accuser,”* not “One of you is a devil.” Even when it is read as definite, the etymological meaning, “the accuser,” lies very close to the surface, for Judas indeed became Jesus’ “accuser” to the religious authorities. For this reason I have put “the devil” in quotation marks in the translation. Judas is “the devil” because he does the devil’s work.* For Jesus to call him “the devil” here is not so different from calling Simon Peter “Satan” in Matthew (16:23) and in Mark (8:33). There too the etymology of “Satan” as “the Adversary”* is clearly at work. On the traditional Jewish principle that “an agent is like the one who sent him,” or “the agent of the ruler is like the ruler himself,”* someone who does the devil’s work is in that sense himself “the devil” or “Satan.”* The supreme irony of the pronouncement, of course, is that one of “the Twelve,” one of those “chosen”—not just by Jesus but by the Father—turns out to be “the devil”! Has Jesus made a mistake? Or has God? For the moment, the issue is left unresolved, but in time Jesus will return to it, with the firm assurance to his disciples that it was no mistake, or as he will put it, “I know whom I have chosen” (13:18).
71 Jesus’ pronouncement leads us to expect some reaction from the Twelve, but instead the Gospel writer inserts another of his “narrative asides” (as, for example, in v. 64), explaining that Jesus “meant* Judas of Simon Iscariot. For this man, one of the Twelve, was going to hand him over.” Here for the first time Judas* is named, as “Judas of Simon Iscariot,” revealing both his father’s name* and his place of origin,* and at the same time explicitly identified as “one of the Twelve,” and yet as the one who, Jesus knew, would “hand him over” (v. 64), presumably to those who were seeking his life (see 5:18; 7:1). The writer’s interest in Judas, particularly in these narrative asides, continues through subsequent chapters as a kind of private conversation with the reader, accenting Jesus’ foreknowledge, Judas’s motives and his possession by the devil, and the other disciples’ ignorance of what he was up to (see 12:4, 6; 13:2, 11, 28–29; 18:5).
Here, of course, the Twelve are not privy to the writer’s parenthetical aside, nor can Judas know that he has been singled out. Yet the pronouncement, “And one of you is ‘the devil’ ” (v. 70) should have caused an uproar, and does not. This is where the Twelve should have “kept looking at each other, perplexed as to which one he meant” (13:22), or asked him each in turn, “Is it I, Lord?” (Mt 26:22; also Mk 14:19). Instead, the Gospel writer postpones that moment until much later, when Jesus puts it another way: “Amen, amen, I say to you that one of you will hand me over” (13:21). What triggers the confusion finally is not Jesus’ mention of “the devil” (which seems to have gone right over their heads), but the prospect of Jesus being “handed over,” something the reader knows about already because of the two narrative asides (vv. 64, 71), but something about which the Twelve are still totally in the dark. Evidently the pronouncement, “And one of you is ‘the devil,’ ” is more for the readers’ benefit than theirs, underscoring (as we have seen) the irony that even being “chosen” does not guarantee either faithfulness or salvation.* The reader can grasp the irony, but cannot tell whether or not the Twelve did so, for they held their peace.
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