Monday in the Third Week of Easter, April 24, 2023

John 6, 22-29

[After Jesus had fed the five thousand men, his disciples saw him walking on the sea.] The next day, the crowd that remained across the sea saw that there had been only one boat there, and that Jesus had not gone along with his disciples in the boat, but only his disciples had left. Other boats came from Tiberias near the place where they had eaten the bread when the Lord gave thanks. When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into boats and came to Capernaum looking for Jesus. And when they found him across the sea they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” Jesus answered them and said, “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him the Father, God, has set his seal.” So they said to him, “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.”

Many of the crowd that the Lord had fed with the bread and fish slept overnight in the field where he had fed them.  As this event had occurred in the Spring, which we know because St. John told us that this was done near Passover, the season would have cooperated with temperate weather.  But they did not retire until after they had seen the Apostles push off in their boat.  Their descent from the mountain would have been noticed, as would the Lord’s absence from the group.  Only after it had grown very late and dark did the Lord steal down the mountain to walk across the water.  When the sun rose, the people saw that no boat had come back for Jesus, but evidently Jesus had departed.  They waited some hours for him in case he had remained on the mountain, but after a time they gave up and themselves left, many of them on boats that were then arriving, but many others making their way around the sea on foot.  They all headed for Capernaum, where the Lord had taken up residence in the house of Peter and Andrew.

“Rabbi, when did you get here?”  They did not know that he had walked across the sea but they sensed that he had come there by miraculous means.  The Lord does not answer their question for this sign was meant exclusively for the Apostles while the sign of the feeding of the five thousand was meant for the Apostles as well as for the crowd.  The feeding shows his love of the people and also his limitless ability to care for them.  His walking on the water shows the Apostles his divinity, for while Elijah performed a miracle involving the multiplication of food, he did nothing like that.  The Apostles, though, seeing Jesus and hearing him call our to them would have recalled these words from the Book of Job: “Then the Lord answered Job out of a whirlwind” (Job 38, 1), and then the words of God, addressed to Job, who represents the human race: “Have you entered into the depths of the sea, and walked in the lowest parts of the deep?” (Job 38, 16).

“Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.”  The Lord makes no accusation but simply states the fact.  He does this in lieu of answering their question.  “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”  The Lord now takes up the subject on which he will spend some time speaking: that his Body was the Bread that they should eat and which would satisfy them forever.  The Lord is saying, You are hungry again and this is why you came back to me.  The bread you consumed last night is of the earth and only satisfies for a short time.  I can give you Bread that will satisfy you forever.  This is very much like his words to the Samaritan woman at the well: “Whosoever drinks of this water shall thirst again: but he that shall drink of the water that I will give him shall not thirst for ever” (John 4, 13).  In the case of the water the Lord generally, of grace.  Here he speaks particularly, of his Body.

“What can we do to accomplish the works of God?”  This is the great question each of us must ask God in prayer: What can I do to accomplish your work, O God?  Here, the people ask Jesus for direction.  We should keep in mind that they believed that he was the political Messiah and so they expected him to preach against the Romans and urge them to arm themselves for the coming rebellion which he would lead.  “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.”  They did not expect this answer, and their unhappiness with his answer underlies their reaction to everything the Lord says afterwards about his Body being real food and his Blood being real drink.  But this was the answer their Messiah gave them and if they truly believed in him, they would have taken hold of any answer he gave to their question.  But he had essentially told them that the work of the Messiah was nothing so little as the redemption of Israel.  They were to believe in him, the one God had sent.  This is where their salvation lay, not in feats of arms.

When we eat and drink our ordinary human food we ought to think of how the Lord continuously nourishes us with grace so that we can believe, we can hope, we can love.  We take such things as eating and drinking for granted in our society but let us not fall into taking God’s grace for granted.