EPISODE 6 John Chapter 6 ”Miracle on the Mountain”

Hi, and welcome to Share the Word, the best way to learn your way through the New Testament one chapter at a time. We know there are a lot of devotionals and encouraging thoughts for the day from the Bible available online, but our goal is a little more to honestly and systematically present the whole story of the New Testament. So let's listen in to today's lesson and go a little deeper. The Miracle on the Mountain, John 6. You've no doubt heard the saying, There's no such thing as a free lunch. Well, we're going to see a big exception to that for a whole lot of people, something that was an unforgettable experience for John and his fellow disciples.

John chapter 6 of his Gospel opens with these words: Sometime after this, Jesus crossed over to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee, where a great crowd of people followed him. Did you realize the miracle that John describes in chapter 6 is the only one Jesus performed which is recorded in all four Gospels? That tells us it made quite an impression on Jesus' earliest followers. Although John gives us this indefinite time note, sometime after this, we can figure out from the other Gospels not only approximately how much time has elapsed, but also some of the important things that occurred during that period. For one, the prophet John the Baptist had recently been arrested and killed by the puppet king Herod Antipas, the Roman-appointed ruler of Galilee. Jesus himself has spent the last approximately six months in Galilee, experiencing the most popular time in his public ministry.

But now Herod is looking for Jesus too. So at the height of his popularity, when great crowds of people were following him, Jesus essentially leaves the country. He crosses the Sea of Galilee to what is today called the Golan Heights, the extreme northeast of Israel. In John, in Jesus' time, this was a province not under Herod or the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem's influence. The other gospel writers add that he headed out to the remote area of the hills. Jesus was clearly trying to get away from things, out of the reach of his enemies, but also probably hoping to get away from the demands of the large crowds that had been recently following him everywhere he went in Galilee.

They climbed up a mountainside, John remembers, and finding a good spot, sat down to rest. Peace and quiet. All of us need it from time to time when things get too crazy in our lives. But shortly, they heard voices. At a distance at first, but soon coming nearer. Then they saw them.

Here they come. A whole lot of people had been trailing them and now were coming toward them. These people had followed Jesus and the disciples on foot around the Sea of Galilee from the towns and villages on the other side. It was early evening, John remembers, and Jesus asked Philip, one of the disciples, if he had any idea where they could get food to feed these people who were arriving. He asked Philip because he was actually from this district, and if anyone would, he would know where to get food. But seeing the swelling crowds with more and more people arriving every few minutes, Philip's reply was, It would cost a half year's wages to buy enough food to feed so many people.

And of course, they didn't have that kind of cash on hand, and even if they did, there was no place to buy that quantity of food. John notes that Jesus asked Philip that question to see what he would say, not because he was really expecting they could buy enough food for the multitude that was gathering. Now, when I say multitude, that is what I mean, because all the records in all the Gospels say that by the time all the people got there, there was a crowd of about 5,000 people gathered. In the meantime, Andrew, another one of the twelve, apparently on his own initiative, had been scouting through the crowd. He confirmed these people had been following them all day from the other side of the lake and had no food, except, he adds, for one little boy I came across, probably a local who tagged along with this crowd out of curiosity. He had some barley loaves and a couple small fish.

In the villages around the Sea of Galilee, this was a staple. They ate a lot of small pickled or salted fish on coarse bread. What the boy had in his lunch basket sounds like about enough for two sandwiches. You know what happens next if you've listened to or read this chapter, don't you? Many years ago, when my kids were small, our family was up in western Pennsylvania at an amusement park called Idlewild. It's in the beautiful Laurel Highlands near Ligonier.

While we were having fun at that park, I learned this later, that very day, right down the road at Quecreek Mine, nine coal miners were trapped 240 feet underground when the tunnel they were in suddenly flooded with millions of gallons of water. It wasn't until we got home a couple days later that I realized this even had happened, because there was round-the-clock updates going on on national television. The miners were all safely rescued eventually, thank God. CNN dubbed it The Miracle at the Mine. It wasn't really a miracle, but it was a very incredible story and emotional if you stayed up like me that Saturday night to see them lift the first blackened, soaking wet miner named Randy Fogle out of that flooded mine after more than three days buried in the earth.

The part I liked the best was the next day when a few of them were being interviewed outside that hospital, or they were taken for evaluations. They were laughing now as they told about having only one measly ham sandwich to share between 900 miners over three days' time. So they would pass it around, and each one of them would take tiny nibbles. They made me think of this story in John chapter 6. You know, some people say, critics of the Bible, that what must have happened that day that John is writing about was that after a moving speech by Jesus about sharing, everyone passed around the little boy's lunch and everybody took a small bite. Or after a convicting exhortation by Jesus, paired with a little boy's example, a lot of other people who had been hiding food decided they would share theirs too.

But nothing like that John is telling us about. That couldn't possibly be what happened. That was not a miracle. John's and the other accounts of what happened that evening are very specific. They say that Jesus had the people all sit down in the grass in companies of fifty and one hundred. That's how they knew the size of the crowd.

Then Jesus took the little boy's lunch and gave thanks to God for it, and he began distributing it from the boy's basket to the disciples' baskets. Now in turn, they were taking the food out to the people. Twice John makes the point of saying this was done from only five small loaves and two fish. And he says they kept distributing food until all five thousand people who were there had eaten their fill. Then after everyone was full, Jesus asked John and the others to go gather up leftovers, and there were twelve baskets of food left over. You know why there were twelve, right?

I'm thinking one for each of those disciples. That's their lunch for the next week. Now this was a miracle. Five thousand people somehow fed from a boy's lunch. Something that amazing Jesus did, witnessed by so many people, was an absolutely unforgettable experience. John remembers that in the wake of that incredible event, this multitude of people was so euphoric they decided that Jesus should be their king.

I think they made a connection with Moses based on the comment in verse 14. Remember, Moses, centuries before, after the Exodus, had fed the people in the wilderness with supernatural manna from heaven. Moses had prophesied that one day God would send to Israel a prophet and deliverer greater than himself. These people saw, I think, in this event on the mountain, on top of other miraculous things Jesus was known to have done, a fulfillment of Moses' prophecy. This must be the leader Moses said God would send. Understand that in the first century, under the oppression of the Romans and their puppets like the Herods, the Jewish people were very much dreaming of a deliverer.

So this is the role they wanted Jesus to fill. Realizing what they were imagining and discussing, John says Jesus withdrew from them even further up into the hills, all by himself. Jesus knew that their plan for him was not at all what God's plan for him was. This is a long chapter. We need to skip ahead a little bit. A couple of days later, Jesus reemerged in Capernaum, back on the other side of the lake, the populated side of the lake in Galilee, where many of the people who had witnessed this miracle were from.

Starting in verse 26, there's extensive dialogue between them about what had happened that day on the mountain and its significance. Remember, John includes miracles which to him were signs. Jesus didn't just do these things to wow people. They had deeper significance. They meant something. John realized something spiritually important.

What was a sign about this feeding miracle that happened on the mountain that night? Well, in the ensuing discussion, Jesus suggests to these people that they have been following him for the wrong reasons. You do it, he said, because I meet your physical needs, when the reason you should be following me is because I can meet much more important spiritual needs. They didn't follow that. That didn't compute for them. So he made an analogy.

Notice verse 33. Jesus said, There's a bread from God which comes down out of heaven to give life to the world. So give us this bread, they cried. They were imagining something like the manna that had once fed the people of Israel in the wilderness. But that's not what Jesus was talking about at all. He told them in verse 35, I am the bread.

He who comes to me will not hunger. He who believes in me will not thirst. Now some of his listeners were beginning to understand he was making something of a crazy claim here, and they recoiled from it in disbelief by saying, Isn't this Mary and Joseph, the carpenter's son? How could he be saying he came down out of heaven? Jesus, however, didn't back away. He reiterated his claim in very clear terms.

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But this is the bread which comes down out of heaven so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down out of heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.

And the bread which I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Wow, this was not what most of these people wanted or expected to hear. They were imagining in Jesus some kind of political savior, and the fact that he could provide free food without anyone having to work for it, well, that would be a big bonus. But he rebuffed their attempts to draft him as a king. In fact, he told them that their preoccupation with physical things was actually causing them to completely miss more important things right in front of their face. He told them they needed a spiritual savior, and that that's why he had come.

He insisted that he had come out of heaven from God to be their savior. When he said, The bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh, that's clearly a reference to his coming death on the cross. One of the fundamental things to understand from the Bible is how Jesus' death on the cross can produce life for us. It's because when he died on Calvary, an incredible exchange took place. He took our sins on himself and suffered the penalty of death in his own flesh they require. When he did that, he actually paid the price for our sins they deserve so that a holy God's justice could be satisfied, so that he could now offer us forgiveness and eternal life.

This is an incredible deal Jesus is describing for them. Jesus took our sin and the penalty of death it deserves and offers in return forgiveness and eternal life. How do we take advantage of it? That's the question these people should have been asking. Well, we must first admit we need the Savior God sent. We must personally claim by faith what he did for us at the cross, and we do that by believing into Jesus and receiving him into our lives for who he claimed to be.

That's what John keeps underscoring and underscoring for us in chapter after chapter. John records now how this exchange was a turning point among Jesus' general followers. He'd been growing increasingly popular over the past year, but in the aftermath of the miracle on the mountain, when he refused the multitudes' offer to be their king, things changed. It became clear that his agenda would not fit their agenda. Their idea of what the Messiah should do didn't at all sound like what Jesus planned to do. So for most of them, their response was to Jesus, I am the bread of life message was to grumble and to say, This is too much.

This is too hard to believe. Who could accept this? They'd hoped he'd become a political king on their terms, but he wanted to be a king in their hearts. They'd hoped for a perpetual free lunch from a miracle worker, but he insisted he had come to satisfy deeper spiritual needs. They were looking for temporal solutions from this life's problems, but he was telling them he was here on a mission that affected their eternity. It's hard to interest someone in the bread of life if they are not spiritually hungry.

Jesus chides them several times throughout this section about their priorities, what they were concerned about versus what they should be concerned about. They were fixated on the physical, on the temporal. For most, apparently, their real relationship with God, eternity, those kinds of things, they weren't thinking about them. They didn't even care about them at this point. Times and circumstances change, but why people do not feel a need for Jesus or a hunger for God which will lead them to Jesus is often because they are preoccupied with other lesser things. They have different priorities, which are really unsatisfactory substitutes, sort of like how junk food takes away our appetite for healthy food.

If our minds and hearts are so full of earthly concerns and interests that little or no room is left for thoughts about our relationship with God or for what happens after this life, then we are right where many of these people were. And I hope if you're listening to me today, that doesn't describe you. I think it probably doesn't, or you wouldn't be giving us your time. But if you're here and you're hungry for God, let me conclude by saying there is definitely a reason for that. C. S.

Lewis, again, once insightfully wrote, Preachers are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger, well, that's because there's such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim, well, that's because there's such a thing as water. If I find within myself, he said, a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation for that is I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that doesn't prove the universe is a fraud. Rather, it proves that earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it.

He's right. If there's a hunger inside you, a deeper soul hunger that nothing here seems to fill, it's because only a real relationship with our Creator will fill it. We need, in Jesus' terms, the bread of life that has come down out of heaven. We need Him in our lives. We need our spiritual dimension satisfied. And he adds something in this passage that should be very heartening.

Jesus said that if you are feeling hungry inside spiritually, that you are actually experiencing the wooing and the drawing of God's Holy Spirit. Jesus did not come for people 2,000 years ago. The Holy Spirit is still coming for people today, wooing and drawing them toward a relationship with their Creator. The whole episode I'm calling the Miracle on the Mountain and its aftermath produced a real division, John remembers. The multitudes of people who had been following Jesus for the miracles and what they hoped he would do for them in temporal terms had to rethink everything in light of the spiritual challenge he put to them. The unpopular truth he was pressing on them was, You need a Savior from sin because you're estranged from God.

But sadly, we read here that when confronted with that, many of those who had been following him to this point turned away. So many, in fact, that Jesus turned to the twelve who had been with him the longest and said, Are you going to leave me too? Peter, speaking up for the rest of them, responded, Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we believe and know that you are the Holy One of God. This sign, the miracle on the mountain, really happened. John witnessed it.

Philip was there. Matthew wrote about it in his gospel, as did Luke, who interviewed a lot of people, telling us that Jesus fed more than 5,000 people one evening from a little boy's lunch. That's incredible, literally impossible to believe, unless we also come to believe what these men came to believe, and that is that Jesus was the unique Son of God, the Logos, the Savior come down out of heaven for the life of the world. If that's who he really was, then all bets are off, aren't they? Then the impossible suddenly becomes possible. And so John keeps challenging us in one way and another with the questions, What do you really believe about Jesus?

Do you believe he is really who he claimed to be? Do you believe he can really do what he claimed he could do? John is always pressing us to consider and answer these critical questions. Thanks for listening, and if you will, help us share the Word. If you're enjoying these commentaries on the Gospel of John, please help us share the Word by passing along the podcast to your friends and family. There's no better way to learn the content of the New Testament than chapter by chapter.

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