Living Water and Bread for the World

Week Eight - Day 1

Today's Reading

Gospel according to John 4:1 to 6:15

It is still very early in John's gospel account, and Jesus has already performed his first sign by changing water into wine at the Wedding in Cana of Galilee, attended the Passover celebration in Jerusalem where he threw the merchants and money changers out of the temple, and had a theological discussion with a leader of the Jews named Nicodemus about being born again.  Jesus is certainly off to a fast start.    While the other gospel writers begin with Jesus drawing the attention of the people out in the hinterlands with his teaching and works of healing, in John he is right in the thick of things, even in and around Jerusalem.  The Jesus that John portrays is not spending time in his hometown synagogue, he is clearly stating his divine connections with God the Father.  

Today Jesus is heading north to the region of Galilee which necessitates his passing through the region of Samaria.  The Samaritans had long been looked down on by the Jews as a descendants of foreigners and lower-class Jews who had settled in the land during an earlier period of exile.  The religious beliefs of the Samaritans was based on the Torah, but in a form that was considered polluted by the Jews who had resettled in the southern part of the former kingdom.  Jesus breaks both social custom and laws of religious purity by speaking with the Samaritan woman at the well.  The episode results in confusion and misunderstanding, first on the part of the woman and then on the part of the disciples.  This Jesus is anything but predictable.

It is not too long before Jesus is once again headed back to Jerusalem for a religious festival that is not identified (chapter 5).  Once there he performs healings and makes yet another extended claim that his Father is God.  We are then told that he then "went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee" (6:1), which is quite a ways north from Jerusalem.  We are told that the "Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near" (6:4).  This is now the second Passover that John has mentioned.  Jesus seems to have run into a large crowd heading towards Jerusalem (as many as 100,000 pilgrims would go to Jerusalem for the annual Passover celebration), and asks his disciples to help feed the people.  After a little scrounging around they take a little boy's lunch (6:9) and bring it to Jesus, who is always good at multiplication through faith.  'Five loaves and two fish for five thousand people?  No problem!  Wait, they want me to be their king?  Ok, everyone, it's time to move on.'  There is more to be done throughout the land.