Ep. 46: Parting of the ways
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JOHN 6:22-71
Those who had wanted to take Jesus by force and make him their Messiah-King now caught up with him. Yet he was not actually the Messiah they expected. Nevertheless, enthusiasm was such that thousands were determined to give up their pilgrimage to the Passover and then and there proclaim the Galilean teacher Israel’s King.
Why then did he strenuously resist it? Their enthusiasm was fickle, it could go either way! From now on there were to be continuous misunderstandings, doubts and defections, growing into opposition and hatred to death. Jesus was even a mystery to many of those closest to him. Many returned to their homes, others went off to Jerusalem for the Passover. Only comparatively few came back to seek him. Jesus was a mystery. They could not disbelieve and yet they could not believe and they sought both ‘a sign’ to guide them and an explanation to give them its understanding.
It was that miraculous feeding that had raised the popular enthusiasm to the highest pitch, but this was tempered by the chilling disappointment of his denial of their ‘religious’ hopes and dreams for him. They now came seeking Jesus in every sense of the word. They came because they had eaten the bread without seeing in them ‘signs.’ They were now outwardly prepared for the very highest teaching, but they were not inwardly prepared for it and therefore they could not understand it.
In his own words, they sought him not because they saw signs but because they ‘ate of the loaves’ and, in their coarse love for the miraculous, ‘were filled.’ What brought them was not that they had discerned either the higher meaning of that miracle or the identity of the miracle maker, but that they physically ate bread that came from nowhere! Edersheim summarises it succinctly:
‘What they waited for was a Kingdom of God, not in righteousness, joy, and peace in the Holy Ghost, but in meat and drink, A kingdom with miraculous wilderness-banquets to Israel and coarse miraculous triumphs over the Gentiles’.
Such were the carnal thoughts about the Messiah and his Kingdom of those who sought Jesus because they ‘ate of the loaves and were filled.’ What a contrast between them and the Christ, as he pointed them away from the search for such food to ‘work for the meat which he would give them,’ not a merely Jewish Messiah, but as ‘the son of Man.’ And yet, in uttering this strange truth, Jesus could appeal to something they knew when he added, ‘for him, the Father has sealed, even God.’
The words, which seem almost inexplicable in this connection, become clear when we understand that this was a well-known Jewish expression. According to the Rabbis, ‘the seal of God was Truth’ (eMeTH). The three letters of which this word is composed in Hebrew are respectively the first, the middle, and the last letters of the alphabet. Thus the words of Christ would convey to his hearers that for the real meat, which would endure to eternal life, they must come to him because God had impressed upon him his own seal of truth and so authenticated his teaching and mission.
What now follows took place at a somewhat different time, perhaps on the way to the synagogue. The miraculous feeding of the multitude and the thoughts which clustered around it would naturally make them think of manna, the miraculous food. It spoke of Messiah and for all that the first deliverer Moses had done, the second Messiah would also do.
Their fathers had eaten manna in the wilderness. God had given them this bread out of heaven, given through the merits of Moses and ceased with his death. This the Jews had probably in view when they asked Jesus, ‘what about you?’ This was the meaning of Christ’s emphasis that it was not Moses who gave Israel that bread. The Saviour makes a quite different application of the manna.
Moses had not given it. His merits had not earned it for them but his Father gave them the true bread out of heaven. ‘For,’ as he explained, ‘the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’ Again, this very Rabbinic tradition, which described in such glowing language the wonders of that manna, also further explained its other and real meaning to be. If Wisdom said, ‘Eat of my bread and drink of my wine,’ it indicated that the manna and the miraculous water supply were the results of Israel’s receiving the Law and the Commandments. For the real bread from heaven was the Law.
As Jesus once more directed them to himself, from works of men to the Works of God and to faith, for some of them the passing gleam of spiritual hope had already died out. For they had seen him and ‘yet did not believe.’ With these words of mingled sadness and judgment, Jesus turned away from his questioners.
The solemn sayings which flowed from Jesus once he had identified himself as the Bread from heaven, could not have been spoken to the multitude. They had the experience of the raising of the young man at Nain and there, at Capernaum, of Jairus’ daughter. Besides, believing that Jesus was the Messiah, it might perhaps not be quite strange nor new to them as Jews that he would at the end of the world raise the pious dead. Indeed, one of the names given to the Messiah - that of Yinnon, according to Psalm 72.17 - has by some come from this very expectancy. Again. He had said that it was not any Law but his person that was the bread which came down from heaven and gave life, not to Jews only, but to the world and they had seen him and believed not.
When Jesus said, ‘and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself,’ he was well aware of his Jewish audience. The appeal to their own prophets was the more telling, that Jewish tradition also applied these two prophecies (Isaiah 54:13; Jeremiah 31:34) to the teaching by God in the Messianic Age. What was new though was when he made claims like, ‘everyone that has heard from the Father and learned come to Me.’ There was no application of this through Moses, but Jesus was very different. ‘He that believes has eternal life.’
This Jesus was the Bread of Life. The manna had not been bread of life, for those who ate it had died, their carcasses had fallen in the wilderness. Not so with this, the true Bread from heaven. To share in this Food was to have everlasting life, a life which the sin and death of unbelief and judgment would not cut short, as it had that of them who had eaten the manna and died in the wilderness.
Edersheim now addresses his concluding thoughts, which we know to have been delivered in the synagogue:
‘These were not a mere martyrdom for the life of the world, in which all who benefited by it would share, but personal fellowship with him. Eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man, such was the necessary condition of securing eternal life. It is impossible to mistake the primary reference of these words to our personal application of his death and passion to the deepest need and hunger of our souls. In this, also, has the hand of history drawn out the telescope and as we gaze through it, every sentence and word sheds light upon the Cross and light from the Cross.’
Truly, this was not the Messiah and Messianic Kingdom that they expected and wished for. Instead, this was the rock of offence over which they stumbled and fell. And Jesus read their thoughts. How unfit were they to receive all that was yet to happen in connection with the Christ, how unprepared for it! If they stumbled at this, what when they came to contemplate the far more mysterious facts of the Messiah’s Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension!
It was not just a case of external gestures. Only inward and spiritual understanding was acceptable. It was absolutely impossible to come to him except under the gracious influence from above. And so this was the great crisis in the history of the Christ. We have traced the gradual growth and development of the popular movement until the murder of John the Baptist stirred up deep popular feelings. With his death, it seemed as if the Messianic hope, awakened by his preaching and testimony to Jesus, were fading from view. It was a terrible disappointment, not easily borne.
Now it must be decided whether Jesus was really the Messiah. His works, despite what the Pharisees said, seemed to prove it. That miraculous feeding – that was just the beginning, or so they thought! All the greater was the disappointment. First, in the repression of the movement, then his voluntary drawing back, his breaking of their treasured traditions. This was not the Messiah many of them expected!
Here, then, we are at the parting of the two ways. Jesus clearly set forth the highest truths concerning himself, in opposition to the views which the multitude entertained about the Messiah. The result was not good. ‘Upon this many of his disciples went back and walked no more with him.’ This searching trial reached even to the hearts of the Twelve. Would they also go away? It was an anticipation of Gethsemane, its first experience. But one thing kept them true. It was the experience of the past. This was the basis of their present faith and allegiance. They could not go back to their old past, they must cleave to him. So, Peter spoke for them all, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the Words of Eternal Life!’ Then, ‘and we have believed and know that You are the Holy One of God.’
But of these Twelve Christ knew one to be a ‘devil’. The apostasy of Judas had already been birthed in his heart. And the greater the popular expectancy and disappointment had been, the greater the reaction and the hatred that followed. The hour of decision was past and the hand on the dial pointed to the hour of his Death.
This is an extract from the book, Jesus : Life and Times, available for £10 here (Finalist for Academic Book of the year at 2023 CRT awards)