Over the years we have come to appreciate the unusual relationship between the synoptic gospels of Mathew, Mark, and Luke with John’s Gospels. While there are similarities between the four, the content in John's is somewhat unique, in that he presents a different side of Jesus that complements the other three Gospels and provides its readers insight and a clearer understanding of Jesus’ divine nature. As such, John’s relating the historical aspects of Jesus’ life are usually reserved for passages that reveal a unique aspect of Jesus’ divine nature. Marcus Borg writes that “the portrait of Jesus in John’s gospel was essentially one of the Christ of faith and not the Jesus of history…The picture of Jesus in John is quite different form the picture of Jesus in Matthew, Mark and Luke…In John, Jesus speaks as a divine person with his ‘I am’ statements: I am the bread of life, ‘the light of the world,’ and so on.” (Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time)
John does not waste any time and gets right to it in the very first chapter of his gospel: In the beginning was the Word, & the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning…and The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
How then does our gospel (John 6:1-21) in which Jesus feeds the multitude point to Jesus’ divine nature, after all this story and scene are similar to that found in the synoptic gospels? The answer resides in the distinction between Matthew, Mark and Luke’s account in which the apostles are charged with feeding the crowd. However, in John Jesus is clearly in charge when he writes with regard to the feeding: he himself knew what he was going to do.
John deliberately diverts our attention from the “miraculous” and reveals something vital about Jesus and, in turn, about God. Here, Jesus represents the One who can satisfy every human need. In this gospel Jesus fulfilled the multitude’s material needs and, while material needs are important, this is not what Jesus came to do. Rather, Jesus came to reveal that God's essential character is love and loving (John 3) and God's essential desire is to be accessible and available to the people of God (John 1 and 2). It may not be what we want -- so convinced are we that material possessions will make us happy -- but it is what we need ( Working Preacher July 23, 2012David Lose).
Last week the Lectionary deliberately skipped over Mark's account of the feeding of the 5,000 and walking on the water. This was probably because, in Mark, these things lead to a desire for more "magic" on the part of the people. In John, these and all miracles are called signs because they happen in order to point to the inauguration of the Kingdom of God in Jesus, and even, as was hinted last week, in the apostles (read, "church"). The response is faith (trust).
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