John 6:24-35 Commentary

Part of five Sundays in John 6, this is the beginning of a three week mini-series about Jesus as the Bread of Heaven so you may want to read through all of the passages before deciding on your preaching direction for this Sunday.

The people talking with Jesus this week are some of the same people who ate the miraculous meal we read about last week; the crowd has followed Jesus and his disciples back across the lake to Capernaum. They know something is different about Jesus because of that meal, but they also know it because they didn’t see Jesus leave with his disciples and yet he somehow disappeared overnight and ended up back on the other side (see verses 22-23). They ask Jesus about this, but God’s answer moves the conversation in a new direction.

Jesus’s answer shows that they are looking for him for a very simple reason: they liked having dinner, and, at best, are intrigued by their experience. At worst, they are eager to hitch themselves to Jesus as their literal gravy-train! For them, Jesus implies, the loaves and fishes meal wasn’t a sign of God’s presence or purpose but an experience to now be exploited.

Jesus warns that the gain will be short-lived compared to what they could have seen and realized. To use lingo we might better relate to, they went for the fast-and-easy-no-work-win rather than the work requiring contemplation and wonder. Jesus basically says, “Don’t do that!” when he says in verse 27, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life…”

By “work” Jesus doesn’t just mean what we do to pay for our daily bread—our jobs. The crowd uses the same word to ask both what they must do “to perform” the works of God as well as what works Jesus is “performing” so that they might believe in him (NRSV translation). I appreciate the NRSV’s translation choice because of the all-consuming, performative nature of works righteousness. Literally, the crowd is asking Jesus to prove his worth to them through his works/signs and they want to know what they must do to prove their worth to God through their own works.

But by “work,” Jesus doesn’t mean this sort of works righteousness either. Put simply, the repeated verb ergazomai refers to activities we put effort into—so not just our paid work but everything. That’s what makes the translation choice “perform” so apt. Because the crowd lacks belief, everything is performance. Like the food that will not last, the works they seek also lack spiritual substance.

If they want to be able to do the works of God, not just put on a performance that looks like the handiwork of God, then they’ve got to start with the person rather than the tasks. It just so happens that that person is the Son of Man standing right in front of them. Jesus says that the Son of Man gives the kind of food that will endure (see the textual point below on how this word connects the doing and the being of “working”). Then Jesus explains that the really important “food” is belief in the Son of Man. Next, Jesus says that both the food and the Son of Man are from heaven and give life. And finally, when the crowd tells him to give them this eternal, life-giving food, Jesus replies that he himself is that Bread of Heaven, the Son of Man, ready to quench their thirst and fulfill their hunger pangs.

It is a fitting promise because the crowd has already made the comparison to their ancestors in the wilderness. But like the misunderstanding they have made about work, they have a fundamental detail wrong, or rather, they stop short of the full truth of history. Instead of their gracious God getting credit for fulfilling their everyday needs, they remember manna as a sign of Moses. They have belief anchored in a person, just not the right one. Moses should be considered a gift from heaven, a leader for the people and an agent of God’s redemption, but he is not the true bread from heaven.

Jesus invites the people to instead look to him as the true bread. Unlike Moses there is full satisfaction for true hunger and thirst in Jesus Christ.

Textual Points

Jesus tells the crowd to pursue food that “endures,” which is the same word for “abide” or “remain” (menō). As you likely know, the gospel writer John loves this word, using it more than the other gospel writers. Here, Jesus describes the food that “remains” in three ways: given by the Son of Man, as the true bread from heaven given by the Father, and as his very self.

This is a trinitarian text! Jesus says that “God the Father has set his seal” on the Son of Man, and in Ephesians 1.13, the Holy Spirit is called the “seal” on those who are in Jesus Christ. Jesus is “sealed” to the Father through the Holy Spirit and we are “sealed” to Jesus through the Holy Spirit. Plus, both texts directly refer to our participation through belief.

Illustration Idea

Hopefully, we’re getting past some of the very unhealthy diet culture that dominated the late twentieth and early twenty-first century so that the next generation won’t be familiar with the phrase, “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.” Generations of people, particularly women, have been scarred and malformed by the constant reminder to look and be a certain way physically, and that “food that perishes” is, actually, more like the kind that remains to haunt your haunches forever.

The all-consuming nature of “diet culture” proves that what we seek through “food that perishes” can illuminate our idols and keep us from pursuing self-acceptance, God’s love—the deeper, richer, fare from God’s food which “endures.”