than one place about the flesh of Jesus being bread. Yet despite Jesus’ radical invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood (6:56), nowhere does John explicitly equate blood with wine. His readers fill in. Having experienced the magic of the marriage at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, they complete the implied equation. John, however, refuses to make the obvious move. While he lets the marriage at Cana revolve in our minds without interpretation, he quotes Jesus at length in two increasingly demanding interpretive discourses on the miracle of feeding 5000 people with “five barley loaves” and “two small fishes.”
By not allowing us the complement of bread-equals-flesh, refusing to complete the wine-equals equation, John carves out space for a redefinition of bread. And, as we would expect, his anxiety fills this space. Because he is obsessed with the body as a destined sacrifice to mortality, he desires nothing short of an “everlasting life,” immortality, as do we all in health and prosperity. Bread by being flesh brings life. John desires above all to possess a transformed body, one that will be a true sacrifice and “live forever” (6:58).
The Language of Bread
Bread redefined fulfills this promise. Simply stated, if you eat this new kind of bread, you will “not die,” possessing what Jesus calls “eternal life” (6:50, 54). This is the most difficult redefinition that any of Jesus’ hearers and John’s readers will be asked to accept. For it demands a radical reassessment of where we’ve come from, where we are now, and where we’re going. Our accustomed vocabulary crumbles. Patterned on Elisha the prophet’s feeding the multitude with 20 loaves of barley and some ears of corn (2 Kgs 42), John uses the simplest of stories. Jesus’ feeding the 5000 has very much the feel of a folktale in its attention to two of these and five of those, yet it is the fulcrum for his onslaught of redefinition on that simplest of commodities—bread.
“Now there was much grass in the place” (6:10), John tells us at the beginning of his story. A curious and charming detail, but we’re puzzled, not knowing why he would include such a seemingly irrelevant, even trivial fact. Not until the end of the story when Jesus is about to lay out his radical redefinition of bread, does John satisfy our curiosity. He sets “grass” in opposition to “desert.”
Grass, we discover, is the scene of Jesus’ new vocabulary of bread, while the “desert” is the scene of the conventional language of bread. The miraculous bread of the past, the manna that saved the wandering Israelites in the desert, is not the bread he’s interested in. The people themselves make the point that Jesus’ miracle of the loaves has precedent in the miracle of the manna in the wilderness. This gives Jesus an opportunity to interpret his own act. John frames Jesus’ double discourses with references to manna (6:31, 58), exploding within this space the people’s conventional understanding of bread.
First, bread is political. Second, bread is literal, always and insistently literal. The people satisfied their hunger with barley loaves, not figurative but fragrant bread with texture and color. Barley, moreover, is the bread of the poor who cannot afford wheat. Just as literally, and these two meanings of bread are in the end one, bread takes the political stage. For after eating, the multitude wants to make Jesus king (6:15).
But Jesus retreats to a mountain. The people understand fully that breaking bread can mean breaking the present political order. In our own century the Peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo, gives powerful expression to the people’s understanding in these lines from his poem “Our Daily Bread”:
You want to knock on all the doors
and ask for anyone; and then
see the poor, and crying quietly,
give bits of fresh bread to everyone
and to strip the rich of their vineyards
with the two blessed hands
that with a blow of light
flew from the nails on the cross!
Completing what John resists, Vallejo senses the necessity and follows up on the bread/flesh equation, subtly linking wine with blood. The new wine-blood gift of Jesus to the poor subversively replaces the old blood-wine extracted from the poor by the rich. John resolutely holds this bread/wine symmetry in abeyance, just as Jesus holds open the past theological understanding of bread (manna) to the present, and its present political meaning to the future. In doing this he opens up a field for planting new meanings. The new bread of Jesus is like manna from heaven. But unlike manna it is his flesh.
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Jesus makes two forays in creating this radical redefinition of bread. His first discourse (6:35–48) expands the meaning of “manna from heaven” in order to call the past into question and include Jesus himself. This monologue, in which Jesus promises action, leaves the Jews, who know his humble origins, murmuring, incredulous at his claims. Moving from belief to touch, from the eye to the tongue, his second discourse (6:51–58) ratchets up from the first. With this radical reassessment of eating bread, the future is called into question and his listeners both repelled and transfixed. This monologue, in which Jesus demands that his listeners take action, leaves even his disciples murmuring, confused by Jesus’ “hard saying.” It is a watershed.
“I am the bread of life” (6:35, 48), Jesus asserts at the beginning and the end of his first discourse. The same words, but they are by the end of this first monologue transformed into a different statement. John opens up the discourse for this possibility by having Jesus tease us with a hinted closure of symmetry, saying “he that comes to me shall never hunger; and he that believes on me shall never thirst.” Hunger and thirst, eating and drinking, naturally bread & wine, yet John withholds the second term as we’ve seen in order to create space in his discourse for expansion of the meaning of bread. The “bread” at the beginning of the discourse, then, is not the same “bread” at the end. It is transformed from the manna of God into the body of Jesus.
If manna in the desert is not the “true bread” (6:32), nor the bread collected from the grass in bits, what is the “true bread”? This bread is not in the past, as traditionally believed; and it is not in the present, as the people who would make Jesus king concluded. Instead, Jesus answers, it is belief in himself, a decision to share the immortality of Jesus, who came down from heaven and who will raise up believers. In this downward and upward movement, John echoes the angels on the ladder in Jacob’s vision, which he alludes to early on in his book (1:51), descending and ascending between heaven and earth.
This dynamic of coming “down” and raising “up” creates a fine tension. The Jews are very familiar with the coming “down” from God, as did the manna, but uneasy with Jesus’ claim to be such a person. The second term of the pair is also a familiar one, the Jews being accustomed to going “up” into God’s presence but uneasy with Jesus’ claim to be in such a place. Without his coming into the world and raising up in belief, Jesus asserts that his listeners cannot have what he calls “everlasting life” (6:40, 47). He is “the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die” (6:50).
Deftly, Jesus creates here a node of meaning where up and down are resolved. And he exploits this, saying that “No man can come to me, unless the Father which has sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day” (6:44). Jesus has come down to draw up. Belief, which is essential to identifying with Jesus as the bread of immortality, comes only by reciprocal motion. Isolating this critical node in his discourse, then, Jesus initiates the Jews into a new dynamic of meaning, “bread” now being a body accessible by belief. Moreover, meaning itself requires their participation. They must believe in order to accept Jesus’ new vocabulary which is the ground of belief. No wonder they “murmur.”
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