WHY can we follow Jesus? Because he told us to (John 13.36; 21.19, 22). But what inspired us to obey that command? Jesus highlights two possibilities: “You are searching for me, not since you saw signs, but since you ate your fill of the loaves.”
Signs? Or loaves? I used to listen to him as reproaching the gang’s greed. It is a simple assumption to make, not least since the appetite for food is such a primal one. But he can be difficult them for considering that the hassle that they had put into looking for him out was meritorious, and likewise the religion that had prompted their search in the primary place. The crowds tried to impress him with their dogged pursuit, besides being wanting to be fed within the literal sense of the word. But Jesus was offering them a distinct form of food: the Bread of Life — himself: nothing to do with filling the stomach.
These verses help us to grasp the meaning in last Sunday’s miraculous feeding and walk across the ocean, though not by explaining how the miracles were effected. At that level, they’re as mysterious now as they should have been back then. Neither made any form of lasting change to the world or the Kingdom. At least a part of their meaning must lie elsewhere.
I was once puzzled that so many commentators read the Gospel feeding miracles as symbols of the eucharist. Thousands of individuals sharing bread and fish together, and filling their stomachs with enough and to spare, didn’t sound similar enough to the overtly sacrificial language of a broken body and spilled blood. But I assumed in a different way after noticing that Matthew and Mark each introduce the Last Supper in language virtually similar to that used of the feeding: “Giving thanks, he broke and gave to them.” John, too, earlier on this chapter (6.12), uses similar language for his account of the feeding of the five thousand.
What the 2 miracles have done is to substantiate Jesus’s power to transcend the boundaries of nature. This point — easy to state, staggeringly difficult to know — isn’t an end in itself, however the means to an end. It is a preparation, in other words, for what follows as this week’s section of chapter 6. For here is where John the Evangelist begins to elaborate his understanding of the eucharist.
This Gospel lection deals only with the primary a part of John’s elaboration (one other 24 verses are still to follow). “Eucharist” is an early name for the meal that we also know as holy communion. I prefer it due to its great antiquity. I prefer it to other names (equivalent to “the Lord’s Supper”, “mass”, etc.) since it puts the virtue of thanksgiving front and centre of the sacrament. Even in spite of everything these centuries, “eucharisto” remains to be the usual Greek word for “thanks”.
Ever since Adam was forged out of Eden, human beings have needed to work for a living: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Genesis 3.19). The necessity of labor still holds true, even for the Bread of Life: “Do not work for the food that perishes”, says Jesus, “but for the food that endures for everlasting life” (John 6.27).
The Bread of Life to which he refers transcends natural reality. The crowd are able to just accept that; for they’ve encountered miraculous bread before: each personally, through the feeding of the five thousand, and thru the historic present of their nation, of their identity as God’s chosen recipients of manna within the wilderness.
In each those cases, the meaning of the bread remains to be literal: it satisfies the appetite, and sates hunger. The Bread of Life, though, is a world away from this, in the identical way that Christ’s resurrection is a world away from the raising of Lazarus. The Bread of Life is once-for-all bread, because the sacrifice of Christ is a once-for-all sacrifice (Romans 6.10; Hebrews 9.12).
It — or, relatively, he — takes us to the guts of the incarnation, providing an exegesis of this Bread of Life which recalls John 1.14: “The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and provides life to the world.” We have the approaching week to reflect on this connection before next week’s Gospel takes us “further up and further in”.
