Tuesday, 4/16/13
Today’s Gospel tells
a story from the next day after Jesus had fed the five thousand with the five
loaves. In St. John’s account of that previous day he wrote that the crowd, in becoming aware of the great miracle happening
before them, had begun saying, “This is truly the Prophet, the one who is to
come into the world.”
They were referring
to Deuteronomy, 18:15 where Moses had promised that at some future date God
would raise up a Prophet like himself to whom they would need listen. When the
people made a move to make Jesus their king, he slipped away from them. On
the following day when they caught up with him across the lake in Capernaum,
they wanted to know if he really were the Prophet whom Moses had promised centuries
before.
Now, it had become a
belief among the people that when the promised Prophet came, he too would bring
down manna from heaven. To check if Jesus were that Prophet, they asked him
what sign he could give that would be like Moses bringing down bread from
heaven; and Jesus told them that what Moses gave them was not true bread from
heaven.
It is possible that Jesus
based that answer on the historical fact that what their ancestors took to be
bread from heaven was actually a bread-like substance that can still be found
in the Sinai Desert. There are aphids feeding on desert shrubs, exuding a
white, honey-like, substance that the Bedouins still call “manna.” Like the
Bible’s manna, it must be gathered in the morning, because at 80 degrees it
melts into the sand.
Later in this
discourse from Chapter Six of John’s Gospel, Jesus would turn most of his
followers away by insisting that the Bread he would give them to eat was his
flesh. But here at the beginning of the long discourse, he seemed to be saying that
his teaching was bread for their souls that they would need to believe to have
life in them.
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