John 6:56-69 Commentary

It’s the last of John 6 and the last of the gospel of John for a while—next week we jump back into Mark. As it comes to reactions to Christ, the end of John 6 is a mixed bag. Even while excluding the verses about Judas’s impending betrayal and including Peter’s declaration of faith and trust, Jesus’s discipleship enrolment numbers go way down.

Did you pick up on that setting change? For most of this discourse Jesus has been teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum, but instead of the crowd murmuring, the gospel writer specifically says that “many of his disciples” are now questioning things. There’s a distinction even made for the first time between the Twelve and the larger group of disciples. And even among the Twelve, Jesus says that there are those who do not believe!

It’s pretty clear then, that Jesus’s words are not magical; they do not create belief and trust all on their own. As the disciples rightfully ask, who can accept Jesus’s words as truth?

Jesus’s answer: those whom the Father has led to the Christ are the same people who know the Spirit’s life in Jesus’s words and have come to trust in him. They have come to trust in a reality described but not yet fully concrete. Except, that is, in the person of Jesus Christ standing in front of them—which is its own kind of mystery that takes the Spirit’s help to trust and believe.

Throughout this Bread of Heaven discourse Jesus has been playing with this idea of the physical/flesh and the eternal intertwined and yet distinct. It is the Spirit, Jesus says, that is the interplay between them; it is the Spirit that gives life where the flesh is useless.

In pastorally difficult situations, we often fall back on the good spiritual discipline of looking for the goodness of God in the land of the living—in real, physical things and experiences—so that we can trust and remember that God is real and good and at work in the world. We do so because, from the very beginning, God has been mixing the spiritual power of life into the physical existence of creation.

If you recall, part of John 6 is Jesus slipping away from the crowd after the feeding miracle because they wanted to make him their king, and that they pursued him because they had had their bellies filled. But now, after a long lecture on the true Bread from Heaven and this talk of doing something quite unseemly—eating his flesh and drinking his blood?!?—the multitude surrounding Jesus has thinned out considerably.

I think what Jesus and the gospel writer John are trying to communicate to us here is that we want to believe in things/people that will make a difference in our physical existence. We can get trapped in only thinking about this physically—like our ancestors did about the manna and the crowd did about their stomachs. Instead of giving God credit for providing for their physical needs through his spiritual working of making manna fall from the heavens, our ancestors gave Moses—another physical being just like them—credit. Looking to only the physical, their vision became short-sighted and they lost the connection to the full spiritual truth of God-as-provider. As a people, it became part of a pattern of over-reliance on human leaders (e.g., Israel’s desire for a king). Pursuit of immediate gratification does not always build resilient or strong faith, does it?

It is in this way that “the flesh is useless.” When it fools us into thinking that we’ve found true life in a way that is disconnected from the reality of God—or God’s very self—then yes, it’s useless. When anything here on earth allures us towards hope or the promise of feeling or being satisfied all on its own, then we are far from the path the Father has laid towards Christ. In the grand scheme of eternity, such things are useless when they are devoid of the Spirit’s life-giving power because the evil one tries to use them to convince us that they are all we need.

Belief otherwise is what turns us to God. Belief that this life and what the physical can offer in terms of happiness and prosperity are not the full story is what turns us to seek the spiritual truths that run deep and wide and make this life make better, truer, sense.

Dale Bruner translates Peter’s declarative question “Lord, to whom can we go?” this way: “Lord, the alternatives are not good.” The alternatives and all of their trappings are not good for us. When we know that, we just might be able to find the Spirit’s life in the words we hear Jesus speak to us. It’s the grand arc of repentance: what we are doing is not good for us, let us turn to Jesus and find the Spirit’s power to live a better, holy way.

Textual Point

Exegetes have lots of thoughts as to whether Jesus is referring to actual events in verse 62 when he asks, “Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?” Some believe Jesus is speaking of the cross, but most wonder if Jesus is referring to the fact that the disciples will be bolstered in faith by witnessing Jesus’s literal ascension to heaven in Acts 1. Lest we forget what Jesus is saying in this context and in other passages of the gospels: such physical seeing and witnessing for one’s self is not necessary for true faith and belief.

Illustration Idea

Mrs. Davis was a 2023 mini-series about a nun, Sister Simone, trying to destroy an Artificial Intelligence, Mrs. Davis. The AI has led the world to be a seemingly better place—there’s no war and people seem to be making choices for their own happiness and well-being, but Sister Simone knows it’s not real and that people aren’t truly free if they are living according to an algorithm. Throughout the series, Simone looks to her boyfriend, Jay, who is eventually revealed to be Jesus, whom she goes to spend time with through prayer (FYI in a very unconventional sense that will probably make you very uncomfortable). Mrs. Davis is a show that constantly puts the question of who one’s faith is in, why, and how it is connected to your actions. Speaking of creating the show, Damon Lindelof said, “…if you give yourself over to the algorithm, the algorithm’s just going to give you what it thinks you want. And then that becomes all you want, pretty much, and you’re never outside of your lane. And I don’t think that’s a particularly good thing.” In other words, there’s a better path to give your life to after all.