Monday in the Third .week of Easter, April 27, 2020

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.”

The answer Jesus gave to the crowd here is not what they could have anticipated.  “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” is an ancient question.  People had crossed vast distances to ask this of the ancient oracles which spoke on behalf of the gods.  Among the ancient Jews, the Hebrews had gone to their Judges and Prophets, appointed by God, to know how to serve him in the particular circumstances of their lives.  With the coming of Moses and the Law, anyone could learn what it was that God required.  But when Jesus says to the crowd which he has taken possession of by feeding it, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life,” he is telling them that the law of Moses does not suffice or anything more than for living on “the earth”.  That is to say, it can only be a preparation for eternal life — important in this way, but still nothing more than that.  Jesus announces that the food “that endures for eternal life” is given by himself alone.  He is making a staggering statement.  He is declaring that he is greater than Moses, and the law he teaches surpasses the holy Mosaic law.  He has already done this in sign for them: Jesus took the woefully insufficient food available from the unnamed young man, and from this provided a superabundance of food, such that when the remnants were collected, even they greatly exceeded the original amount.  Jesus, in effect, took the old law which took care of the earthly needs of the Jewish people and transformed it, by his blessing and power, into a “quantity” so great that it could be shared with all others (the meaning of the collected remnants) and of a quality which filled not just the Hewish belly but indeed the human soul.  This is accomplished by Jesus alone, and distributed to the members of the crowd only by his Apostles.  When Jesus commands them now not to work for the food “that perishes”

“but for the food that endures for eternal life”, he instructs the people that he will provide the work that leads to the food, and the work that he gives them is no more or less than this, “That you believe in the one he sent”, namely, in him.  In showing himself as the perfection, the fulfillment, of the old law he makes a staggering claim: that he is greater than Moses and the old law at least to the extent that the food he provided for five thousand men (and more besides) exceeded the original amount pointed out by Andrew his Apostle.  Jesus goes further than any pronouncement of Moses, for Moses had said of the law, “Do this and you will live,” but never said, Believe in me.  Jesus explicitly tells the people, Believe in me.  Believe in whom, though?  In the carpenter from Nazareth (not even from Judah, the home of the “real” Jews)?  Throughout the course of chapter six of St. John’s Gospel, Jesus insists on this and reveals that he is the Manna that came down out of heaven from the Father.  

The Lord puts his commandment in very simple terms and very few words, almost as though he is presenting a plain and simple meal of a few fish and loaves of bread.  But what he demands is momentous and would yield more than any of the folks assembled that day were able to imagine.  Jesus offers tremendous proofs of his claims, from raising a dead man to life, to raising himself to life after a most destructive death.  For many, no proof could ever be enough.  For others, leaving all behind — the Jewish law, their families, their livelihoods — it was and is the beginning of life without end.