NOTES for Joh 6:14-27

By refusing the possibility of leading a political movement, Christ rejects a temptation that recalls how Satan tempted Him in the wilderness with the illusion of earthly power. To save the people—the very reason He came to them—it proved necessary to reject their hopes and ideas. But love can be expressed not only through approval, but also through opposition. If the Lord does not answer some of our requests, His love may be revealed in this more strongly than if He granted them...

Christ walks on the surface of the sea without sinking into the water, just as He walked among people without becoming mired in earthly passions. The words He speaks to the bewildered disciples—“Do not be afraid!”—sound entirely natural in such a situation. Yet these words mean more than a simple desire to reassure them. The Bible repeatedly presents them as spoken by God or by angels speaking in His Name. Thus, in the midst of the Sea of Galilee, Christ once again bore witness to Himself as God.

Surely every believer would like to do something for God. Something good, something that would please Him... Some people consider this simply impossible; others work hard, trying to do something for Him.

The mistake lies in the very way the question is posed. When we do something for God, it is OUR work; we are doing it ourselves.

Today's Gospel reading raises the central question: what should we do to do the works of God? Not works for God, but the works of God. And Jesus explains that everything is very simple: the work of God is to believe in the Son of God. Not merely to believe that He existed, that He exists, that He is truly the Son of God, but to believe in Him: to open your heart to Him and receive Him as your only Savior. Not in theory, but in practice. And when we truly open our hearts to Him, we will be able to do the works of God.

In the final verses of today’s passage from the Gospel of John, Jesus addresses each one of us. He answers a question that resounds in many hearts: “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” (John 6:28) And indeed, when you encounter Christ and want to follow Him, it is so important to understand what you should do. You see Light and Love, you feel His loving gaze upon you, and you do not know how to respond to all of this. In the Gospel Jesus gives an answer, and this allows us to be certain that when this question resounds in any person’s heart, He will answer them too. Whether through the words of these lines or in some other way, He will answer! And what will He say? No, it will not be some terrible and heavy burden; it will not be an order to abandon all friends and family and go to church twenty times a week. He will call the person to follow Him farther and to continue asking for His presence, believing in Him. These words will be addressed to the one who cries out: “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in Me” (John 14:1).

People rushed to find Christ because they had eaten bread and wanted more of it rather than miracles. Yet many of them also regard miracles less as signs that bear witness to a higher truth than as spectacular displays. That is why the words about the bread of life that comes down from heaven and, unlike manna, satisfies more than bodily hunger remain misunderstood.

It is difficult for His listeners to understand Christ, but He continues speaking to them. If so, why does He preach? Is He not sowing His seed to the wind?

No, not to the wind. He is sowing for the future, and days will come when what has been sown begins to sprout in those very hearts that still seem unreceptive. To the age-old question, “What should we do?” Christ gives an unexpected answer, one that many people still find hard to grasp: believe. Not because He rejects deeds, but because, amid our bustle and our attempts to put contrived plans of our own devising into practice, it is all too easy to lose sight of whether what we have planned should be built at all.

Faith, however, gives us a point of reference that helps us act.

The Lord very often has to raise our gaze higher than we are used to looking. Even when we hear his words, we still understand them somehow wrongly, in a more earthbound way, less ‘uncompromisingly’ than he does. In today's passage from the Gospel of John, his listeners again ask Christ for some proof that he is the Messiah. In reply, the Lord explains that signs are not the point. Elsewhere we encounter an even sharper response from him in a similar situation (see Matt. 12:38–42). But in both passages, the essence of his words is that he is greater than signs. That God as a Person matters more. That the way to salvation is in him himself, not in what he has the power to do. The Jews speak to him about bread, while he speaks to them about the One who can truly satisfy, the One who ‘comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’ (John 6:33)—about the Holy Spirit. Above all, as St Seraphim said, we must acquire the Spirit. We must seek the Kingdom. Then ‘all these things will be added to you’, because ‘your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things’ (see Matt. 6:32–33). He knows that, to come to faith, we sometimes need miracles, signs and manifestations of God's power. And he gives them—for example, through the deacon Philip, who came to Samaria (see Acts 8:27–40). But from what happens next, we see that coming to faith through signs is not enough for God. We must receive the Holy Spirit within us not for the sake of his gifts, but receive God's principal gift: himself.

Jesus' listeners do not always understand Him rightly: into familiar words, long grown customary, He often puts an entirely new meaning. And often the new meaning He puts into them is entirely unexpected, changing what today we would call the paradigm of thought.

For example, they ask Him about the works of God, meaning approximately what today we would call religious obligations. They ask Him about the works of God in the sense in which teachers of the Torah and learned rabbis often spoke about them: in order to keep the Torah fully, one must fulfill the commandments and, in addition, do this and that. But Jesus speaks about trust, about relationship with Himself, as the main work of God. And no wonder: many of Israel's teachers also saw all religious obligations as a means to establish and strengthen relationship with God, considering precisely this to be the main and only work of God.

And now into the world has come the One on relationship with whom depends the possibility not simply of establishing relationship with God, which was possible before, but of sharing in the life of the Kingdom in all its fullness. Yet they ask Him what additional religious obligations one must take on so that, when the Messiah comes, one will be sure to be among the remnant that meets Him.

The same is true of the bread Jesus speaks about. He speaks to them of that breath of life with which the Kingdom is permeated, and they reply: well, once there were times when God gave our fathers manna in the wilderness; what will You give us? Can You show us something that would become convincing proof of Your words for us?

As one can see, the main problem here is that those asking the questions cannot see the main thing for which Jesus came into the world: the Kingdom. Therefore they ask Him about many things that have no direct relation to the Kingdom. He again and again tries to bring them back to the main thing, for the meaning of His mission is precisely to bring as many people as possible into the life of the Kingdom, so that the history of the Kingdom in the world would not end together with His earthly ministry.

The multiplication of the loaves is a great miracle in itself. But for Christians the most important thing, of course, is that this miracle becomes a prototype of a much greater miracle: the sacrament of the Eucharist. Through the centuries and until the end of the world, the Lord gives us Himself as food under the form of Bread, and, as with the multiplication of the loaves, this food is enough for everyone.

Because the Son of God Himself becomes food for people, life not only does not diminish, but increases in the world. This is exactly why the Cross, on which the Lord gives us His life, has become for Christians a synonym of that Tree of Life which the Lord planted in the midst of paradise.

And we also see in this miracle that it is not performed without the participation of the disciples: one way or another, each according to his calling, we all become participants and celebrants of the sacrament. Clergy participate in the Eucharist in one way, the laity in another, but the place of each of us in the Church of Christ depends in a most essential way on this participation. After all, the multiplication of the loaves also required the boy who gave his bread to Christ, and the apostles, and those who ate that blessed bread.

Orthodox theologians of the 20th century, mostly in emigration, created an entire theological movement, new and rather unusual, which received the name Eucharistic ecclesiology. Among these thinkers were Fathers Nikolai Afanasiev and Alexander Schmemann, John Meyendorff and Cyprian Kern, and many others. As a result of their work, arguments and positions appeared in theological discussions among Christians, perhaps for the first time among us, that we had needed for centuries. What matters most for us in their legacy is the thought that the Church is not simply a hierarchical institution in the Latin style and not simply a community of believers in the spirit of Protestantism. The Church is more an event than a structure, more an action than a state. And this event is the Eucharist.

The text about the multiplication of the loaves is incomparably important for us: important liturgically, important theologically, important ecclesiologically. We never tire of repeating this. It is simply important, because it is a living connection with the Lord, a connection that takes place during every liturgy. This event is mentioned six times in the Gospel, more than any other. We understand that it is a kind of bridge between the Last Supper and every liturgy.

But now we would like to look at this text from another side. Christ says: I am the bread of life (John 6:48). But He is also the incarnate Word, for in Him "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Word and bread... Guigo II the Carthusian ended his prayerful reading with this prayer: "You break for me the bread of Holy Scripture, and by breaking this bread You grant me to know Yourself..." (from the book Prayerful Reading of Holy Scripture by E. Bianchi).

The Gospel is such a small book in volume, just as five loaves are few; but it satisfies everyone who partakes of it, and everyone finds his own meaning, especially dear and understandable to him alone, as everyone receives his own piece of bread. Yet at the same time this will be a meaning related to the universal meaning, just as each piece is taken from one loaf.

And not only one meaning, but meanings that are constantly multiplied, like the loaves. They are multiplied so that we may not grow weak and in the end die. This does not happen with any human book. Between a human book and the Gospel there is the same difference as between ordinary bread that we eat and that prosphora which alone feeds the whole parish.

Jesus clearly uses every opportunity to show the people listening to Him what the Kingdom is. And often these opportunities are connected with a meal, with food, with being fed. To some of us today, such manifestations of the Kingdom may appear "low" and "unspiritual." But it is important to remember that in those days a meal was never simply the consumption of food. It always began with the blessing of bread, and if there was wine on the table, of the wine as well. No one sat down at the table without such a blessing. And with this approach every meal became sacred, because God Himself was always invited to take part in it. And the breaking of bread, if there was bread on the table, was also an essential part of it, since bread, like wine, was in any case blessed separately. With this attitude toward the meal, it became a form of communion with God in which all who had gathered at the table took part.

And Jesus, as we see, uses this in order to bring His listeners into communion with the Kingdom, to show them what new life in the renewed world can be. Of course, the people sitting on the ground in expectation of the meal knew perfectly well how bread and wine were blessed. But they hardly expected the blessing to have such an effect. And the effect was plain: the food, which had seemed to be very little, was enough for everyone.

Such is the nature of the Kingdom, where matter is completely subject to spirit. Jesus' listeners began their meal in our world, not yet transformed, according to its laws, and finished it in the Kingdom, according to the laws of the Kingdom. There could have been no better testimony: after all, it is always better to see once than to hear a hundred times, and this applies to the Kingdom more than to anything else. Of course, the people listening to Jesus did not fully understand what had happened. But they received the experience of being in the Kingdom, and such an experience is not forgotten.

Is it not strange that the One who comes from heaven takes care to feed crowds of His listeners and followers with bread? Is that what He came for? And yet the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves for five thousand people is the only miracle described by all the evangelists, and that means it is especially important. It is this miracle that serves as the starting point for the conversation about the true bread by which a person truly lives, the bread of life.

We have heard since childhood that a person does not live by bread alone. But if we try to understand what makes up our spiritual diet, will we find in it what can truly satisfy the heart, rather than a substitute that leaves only a hangover and nausea?

The Lord offers us this kind of bread. It is not teaching, not commandments, not faith in God - the Jews already had all this, and it exists in many spiritual schools and religions. Jesus speaks of the bread that truly comes down from heaven and gives real, eternal life. It is He Himself.

Today's reading helps us better understand what is usually called Jesus' "messianic secret." In speaking of it, people mean the fact that Jesus Himself, until the last days of His earthly ministry, almost never spoke directly about His messiahship, at least not openly. The evangelist's account takes us back to the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves (vv. 1-14). And the reaction to it, as we can see, was an attempt to proclaim Jesus "king," to make Him the leader of a new messianic movement (v. 15). This is no surprise: according to the commonly accepted ideas of that time, the Messiah was to become king, restore an independent Jewish state, and introduce in it laws corresponding to the Torah. But Jesus, of course, was not going to become the leader of any religious-political movement.

But Jesus had another, more important reason to conceal His messiahship. He Himself speaks of it directly to those who went looking for Him in Galilee: most of the people seeking a meeting with Him did so not because they thirsted for the Kingdom, but because they wanted, in time of need, always to be able to receive free bread (v. 26). Jesus, however, speaks with them about eternal life and about the main thing without which one cannot partake of it: trust in the One whom God sent into the world to give people the Kingdom (vv. 27-29).

But they do not understand Him. They ask Him: where are the proofs that Your words are true (v. 30)? And at once they give an example of what proofs would convince them: manna from heaven, as in the days of Moses in the wilderness (v. 31). Jesus again tells them that the Kingdom is greater than any miracle, and that the bread of the Kingdom is more important than manna (vv. 32-33). And again they do not understand Him.

His listeners cannot grasp that with the Savior's coming into the world a new era has begun, and that what happened to them on the shore of Lake Gennesaret was not a miracle in the sense in which manna was a miracle. Simply by being with Jesus, they found themselves in the Kingdom and lived for a while according to its laws, but, as we can see, they did not understand fully what had happened to them. That is why they ask Jesus for bread and expect to receive it just as their fathers once received manna from God (v. 34). And Jesus again and again tries to explain to them that the point is not bread, but the Kingdom and that fullness of God's life which is given there to everyone, so that no manna will be needed there anymore.

A miracle is the Kingdom's invasion of our world, the manifestation of its laws where completely different rules usually operate. But now the Kingdom is entering the world, transforming it, and the times of miracles are passing. The time of the Kingdom is beginning - open to everyone who seeks it and wants to enter.

What an interesting situation: Jesus crosses to the other side of the lake, and a crowd of people follows Him. To put it in ordinary human terms, these people tagged along after Him to see something interesting. One might say: they chose to tag along; Jesus did not invite them, so why on earth should He worry about feeding them? Let them go to the nearest villages or, in the end, sort things out for themselves however they wish. They should have thought ahead before setting out to who knows where; they could have taken care of their own food. But Jesus apparently does not frame the question this way at all. He sees people who have followed Him and, for some reason, considers it necessary to provide them with food. Why? Did He invite them? Did they ask Him to give them food? No. But they followed Him, and for Him this is the main reason to care for them... On the one hand, this is a lesson for us—a lesson about responsibility for those “whom we have tamed.” On the other hand, it is a great consolation: if He is so merciful, then He is just as open to our needs when we turn to Him for help.

People follow Christ because they have seen the miracles He performed for the sick. Christ does not reject such people, not only because of His mercy but also, it would seem, because for many of them practical interest may become the first stage on a spiritual path. Miracles are not an end in themselves for Christ, nor even a means of attracting the people to His preaching. But one who has acknowledged Jesus’ power to heal may also receive from Him words about eternal life.

Yet that person may also refuse to receive them and continue demanding that He satisfy exclusively his “ever-growing” earthly needs.

To feed those who had gathered, Christ does not create food out of nothing, but gives the disciples an opportunity to participate in multiplying it. He takes bread and fish from their provisions and, after blessing them, distributes them to the disciples; the amount of food multiplies as it is handed out. That evening Christ made the disciples not only His fellow workers, but also participants in the miracle He was performing.

The people understood that a miracle had occurred not while they were eating, but after the meal, when they saw the baskets of leftovers. Then they called Jesus the Prophet who was to come into the world. Alas, they did not do so when He taught them.

Change comes hard to human nature...