This coming Sunday is the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time. 32 So Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34 So they said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” 35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.

At vv.12 and 27 (gathering the fragments after feeding the crowd and referencing perishable food), Jesus implicitly linked the feeding miracle with the manna story of Exodus 16. In v.32, he does so explicitly. For the second time in this chapter Jesus prefaces his remarks with the solemn, Amen, amen, I say to you. Jesus reworks four essential elements of v. 31:

1. the donor of the bread is God (“my Father”), not Moses;
2. the gift of bread occurs in the present (“gives”), not the past;
3. the bread of which Jesus speaks is the “true bread from heaven”; and
4. Jesus tells the crowd that they, not their ancestors, are the recipients of God’s gift of the true bread from heaven (“gives you”).

Jesus answers the crowd’s demand for a sign (v.30) by showing them that they have already received one. The contrasting gifts of v. 32, the exodus gift of manna and the present gift of the “true bread from heaven,” recall the contrasting gifts of John 1:17: “because while the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”

Jesus describes the “bread of God” with two predicates: “comes down from heaven” and “gives life to the world.” These two predicates repeat what has already been said about Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. In 3:13, for example, the language of descent from heaven describes the activity of the Son of Man (cf. 3:31). In 5:21, Jesus is spoken of as the one who gives life (cf. 5:25–26). The description of the bread of God thus enables the Gospel reader (but not the crowd) to recognize that Jesus is the real subject of the conversation, not the feeding miracle alone. The conversation of 6:25–34, like that with Nicodemus (John 3) and the Samaritan women at the well (John 4), operates on two levels of meaning simultaneously and contains two understandings of the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life.

The crowd’s request for bread in this verse reveals that they understand only one level of the conversation. The similarity between the crowd’s request for bread (Sir, give us this bread always) and the Samaritan woman’s request for water in 4:15 is unmistakable (The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water”). She wanted the water in order to be relieved of the task of drawing from the well. They had been fed from the loaves and they probably wanted some permanent gift of this kind.

Like the Samaritan woman, the crowd of John 6 has understood one part of Jesus’ words—that the bread of which he speaks is better than the bread given to their ancestors—but does not grasp why it is better. The bread of which Jesus speaks is not given “always,” but is given once and for all in the very person of Jesus. And in receiving the gift, the recipient will never again hunger or thirst.

The Feeding of the Five Thousand by William Hole (1846-1917) | Edinburgh University Library | PD-US