Great Expectations

Read: John 6.1-71

John 6 is a critical pivot point in the Gospel. The crowds…and His disciples…have great expectations of Jesus; He is at the height of His popularity. What will His response be to these expectations?

Consider what Jesus does in this passage:

1) While by the Sea of Galilee, He feeds a following crowd of 5,000 with a boy’s lunch of five bread loaves and two small fish. The leftovers of bread were sufficient to fill twelve baskets after “all had enough to eat.”

2) After withdrawing from the crowd, His disciples watch (in fear!) as Jesus walks on storm-tossed water in order to join them on their subsequent journey by boat across the lake.

3) Jesus makes the declaration, “I am the bread of life,” leading to confusion among the crowds (who were looking for more miraculous signs…and probably more bread!) and confrontation with the Jewish religious leaders.

4) Jesus’ popularity begins to decline precipitously.

In “The Gospel of John: When Love Comes to Town,” Dr. Paul Lewis Metzger helps us understand what is going on in this text:

“Most of us probably don’t look to Jesus to give us our next meal, but we might look to Him to add to our wardrobe or to help us advance our careers and increase our benefit packages. Moreover, we live in a culture driven by consumer demand and untrained desire. So we may be asking Jesus, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ in a very different way…What if He doesn’t meet our great expectations for what we would make Him out to be? Consumer demand means that we will likely try to take Jesus by force and make Him king…We don’t realize what life in Jesus is all about – freedom from ourselves and freedom for God and others as we live abundantly by faith in Him and His word rather than out of the fear of scarcity. When will we truly realize that Jesus Himself – and not the bread or the new jeans or the raise or the career move – is our daily sustenance and significance for life? When will we realize that Jesus is greater than Moses and Elijah and Elisha, and that our expectations for life are often so trivial and that Jesus is so far greater than our greatest expectations?”