John 6:1-15

The Feeding of the Five Thousand (John 6:1).

Up to the end of chapter 4 information given in John's Gospel apparently precedes the Galilean ministry of Jesus. However, from that point on the connections are more vague. Chapter 5 begins with ‘some time later' and chapter 6 with ‘some time after this'.

It is clear, therefore, that John is presenting his material in a loosely connected form and skirting around much of the information given in the tradition. Whether John 5, which took place in Jerusalem, took place before the commencement of the Galilean ministry, as a final attempt to win the leaders over before Jesus moved into His Galilean ministry, we do not know, but certainly in John 6 we find ourselves plum in the middle of the Galilean ministry without any indication of how Jesus came to be in Galilee.

For at the end of chapter 5 Jesus appears still to be in Jerusalem, while in John 6:1 He is portrayed as crossing the sea of Galilee in the North, sailing from the well populated west side to its more deserted northern end. This confirms that John is giving a deliberately selective version of Jesus' ministry, and this is because his main interest is to stress the message that he wishes to get across, namely the uniqueness and purpose of Jesus, based on his own knowledge of events in the ministry of Jesus which have not previously been recorded. He thus presents us with totally new material as far as a comparison with the Synoptics is concerned, and while fully aware of the Galilean ministry, he mainly ignores it, only introducing it because a number of the ‘signs' were performed there (turning water into wine, the high official's son, and now the feeding of the five thousand and the walking on water). He is rather selecting his materials with a view to presenting dissertations of Jesus, which are usually connected with specific incidents which are illustrative of His words, many of which took place outside Galilee, but some of which occurred in Galilee. It is these which convey his message, and in the process he only connects them loosely.

John 6 is possibly one of the most misrepresented passages in the New Testament. It is often interpreted as being somehow an exposition of the Lord's Supper before the event. This is, however, to misunderstand its main intent, for while it is true that the Lord's Supper does wonderfully illustrate the truths proclaimed, and was almost certainly in John's mind, its teaching had more in mind Jesus' suffering and death. The incident that leads up to the exposition that follows is the feeding of the five thousand, an incident which is described in all four Gospels.