John 6:19-21

“ When, therefore, they had gone about five and twenty or thirty furlongs, they see Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing near to the boat, and they were afraid. 20. But he says to them: It is I, be not afraid. 21. And as they were willing to receive him into the boat, immediately the boat reached the point of the shore where they were going. ”

There was no other means by which Jesus could rejoin His disciples, before their arrival at Capernaum, but the one which He employs, John 6:19. They were now in the middle of the sea. In its broadest part, the lake of Genesareth was, as Josephus, (Bell. Jud., iii., 10, 7) says, forty stadia, nearly two leagues in width. If the expression of Matthew: “in the midst of the sea,” is taken as an indication of distance (which appears to me doubtful), this detail accords with John's indication: twenty-five or thirty stadia. The present they see indicates the suddenness of the appearance of Jesus; the emotion of fear which the disciples experience, and which is more fully set forth in the Synoptics, does not allow the words ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης on the sea, to be explained here in the sense in which they are used in John 21:1: on the sea shore.

They think that they see a spectre approaching them. Jesus' words: It is I, be not afraid, must have made a very profound impression on the disciples, for it is reported in the same words identically in the four narratives. The imperfect ἤθελον (literally: they wished), John 6:21, appears to imply that Jesus did not enter into the boat: “They were willing to receive Him; but immediately they found themselves at the shore.” There would thus be a contradiction of Mark and Matthew, according to whom Jesus really entered the boat, in Matthew after the episode of St. Peter. Chrysostom thinks himself obliged to infer from this difference that John was here relating another event than that spoken of by Matthew and Mark. But the close relation between this miracle and the multiplication of the loaves in the three Gospels, as well as the general similarity of the three accounts, do not permit us to accept this solution. J. D. Michaelis supposed that, instead of ἥθελον, ἠλθον must be read, which would solve the difficulty: they came; they drew near Him with the boat to receive Him. And, a singular circumstance, the Sinaitic MS. presents precisely the reading which was conjectured by this scholar.

But it has too much the appearance of a correction to deserve confidence. Besides, Jesus moved so freely upon the waters that the boat had no need to come near to Him. Beza and many exegetes after him think that the verb were willing, here simply adds to the act of receiving, the notion of eagerness, comp. Luke 20:46; Colossians 2:18. And Tholuck has given greater probability to this meaning by contrasting the words were willing, as thus understood, with ἐφοβήθησαν, they were afraid: they were afraid at the first moment, but now they received him willingly. There is one thing opposed to this explanation: it is that John has written the imperfect, they were wishing, which denotes incomplete action, and not the aorist, they wished, which would indicate an action completed (John 1:44). On the other hand, there is little probability that John could have meant to say, in contradiction to the Synoptics, that Jesus did not really enter the boat, as Meyer thinks. In that case, must he not have said, instead of καὶ εὐθέως, and immediately, ἀλλ᾿ εὐθέως, but immediately? The meaning of John's narrative would be indeed that the sudden arrival at the shore prevented the execution of the disciples' purpose. As to ourselves, the relation between the two clauses of John 6:21, standing thus in juxtaposition, seems to us to be similar to that which we have already observed elsewhere in John (John 6:17). It is a logical relation, which we express by means of a conjunction: “ At the moment when they were eager to receive Him, the boat came to shore.” The moment of the entrance of Jesus into the boat was thus that of the arrival. The thing took place so rapidly that the disciples themselves did not understand precisely the way in which it occurred. John 6:33 of Matt. and John 6:51 of Mark must be placed at the moment of disembarking. One can scarcely imagine, indeed, that, after an act of power so magnificent and so kingly as Jesus' walking on the waters, He should have seated Himself in the boat, and the voyage should have been laboriously continued by the stroke of the oar? At the moment when Jesus set His foot on the boat, He communicated to it, as He had just done for Peter, the force victorious over gravity and space, which had just been so strikingly displayed in His own person. The words καὶ εὐθέως, and immediately, compared with the distance of ten or fifteen stadia (thirty to forty-five minutes) which yet separated them from the shore, allow no other explanation.

Such is the real sovereignty which Jesus opposes to the political royalty that fleshly-minded Israel designed to lay upon Him. He gives Himself to His own as the one who reigns over a vaster domain, over all the forces of nature, and who can, one day, free Himself and free them from the burden of this mortal body. If the multiplication of the loaves was the prelude of the offering which He would make of His flesh for the nourishment of the world, if, in this terrible night of darkness, tempest and separation, they have experienced as it were the foretaste of an approaching more sorrowful separation, in this unexpected and triumphant return across the heaving waves, Jesus, as it were, prefigured His resurrection by means of which He will be restored to them and that triumphant ascension in which He will one day give the Church itself a share, when, raising it with Himself, through the breath of His Spirit, He will bring it even to the heavenly places.

When we bear in mind that every voluntary movement which is effected by our body, every impulse which we communicate to a body which we throw into the air, is undoubtedly not an abolishing of the law of gravitation, but a victory which we gain momentarily over that law through the intervention of a force superior to it, namely, that of the will, we can understand that matter, being itself the work of the Divine will, remains always open to this essentially supernatural power. There is nothing therefore to prevent the Divine breath from being able, in a given condition, to free the human body for a time from the power of gravity. Reuss finds that this miracle “places Jesus outside of and above humanity,” and that, if it is real, it must no longer be said that the Lord divested Himself of His divine attributes. But to be raised above the law of gravity is less than to be wrested from death. Would the resurrection of Jesus, according to Reuss, prove that He was not a man? That of Lazarus, that he was not a man? The question of the κένωσις has absolutely nothing to do with this matter.