50 pages • 1 hour read
Gospel of John
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Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Jesus returns to Jerusalem for another religious festival, during which time he performs a miraculous healing and offers a long discourse on his identity and spiritual authority. While walking in Jerusalem near the pool of Bethesda, Jesus and the disciples encounter a man who had been unable to walk for 35 years. Together with other people in a similar condition, he sits and waits by the pool every day for the waters to be stirred up, because local legend has it that this is a sign of angelic visitation, and that the first person in the water will be healed. He had never succeeded in getting in the water, though, so his condition remained the same. Jesus confronts him with a direct question—“Do you want to be healed?” (5:6)—and follows this up with a command: “Get up, take up your bed, and walk” (5:8). The man is healed immediately and walks away.
This dramatic healing soon attracts the attention of the religious authorities in Jerusalem, who criticize Jesus because the healing occurred on the Sabbath, and Jesus’s command to the man to pick up his bed and walk was in direct violation of the Sabbath observances. Jesus responds to the controversy by saying that God the Father is always working, and therefore so is he. He goes on to make a direct connection between God and himself, noting that he is sent by God the Father, who granted him authority, and that he does only what he sees the Father doing. This further incites some of the religious leaders, who regard his words as blasphemous: “This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because […] he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (5:18).
Chapter 6 Summary
This chapter contains a series of tightly interconnected pericopes, detailing two of Jesus’s most famous miracles—the multiplication of loaves and fish, and walking on the water—followed by a long narration on his identity as the bread of life. Jesus and the disciples travel to a spot by the Sea of Galilee, where a large crowd gathers around Jesus to hear his teaching. Rather than send them away, he prompts the disciples to feed the massive crowd of 5,000 men (not counting women and children). All they can produce is a boy’s lunch of five barley loaves and two fish, so Jesus has the people sit down, takes the food, and distributes it among them. Despite the crowd’s immense size, the food never runs out, and after everyone has eaten, the disciples pick up 12 basketfuls of uneaten fragments. The crowd is so struck by the miracle that they want to proclaim Jesus king on the spot, but Jesus slips away up the mountain, and the disciples leave by boat. Later that night, when the disciples are far out in the Sea of Galilee, Jesus rejoins them by walking on the water, another miracle that shows his supernatural authority over the physical world.
Once the ship lands on the shore at another spot, the crowd finds Jesus again and presses him about the things they have seen. Jesus responds using terms borrowed from the miracle of the manna, the bread God provided for the Israelites when they were walking in the desert during the days of Moses: “For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (6:33). In contrast to the miraculous manna of ancient Israel, however, which fed the body but did not save it from death, Jesus proclaims that he is the bread of life, and whoever eats him will have true and unending life: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever” (6:51). This message is so challenging that many of Jesus’s own followers abandon him, but the 12 disciples remain faithful.
Chapter 7 Summary
Chapter 7 opens with a story in which Jesus’s brothers encourage him to go to Jerusalem and do his ministry there, as Galilee is not, in their view, the appropriate venue for a messianic ministry. Jesus resists this idea at first, much as he resisted the attempts of the crowd to press him into their own conception of what his identity and mission should be. Later, however, he does go up to Jerusalem for the Feast of Booths, albeit in a more secretive way. Once the feast is at its height, however, Jesus begins teaching publicly in the temple courts, speaking about the way his identity is tied to God the Father. He also picks up a refrain from his earlier conversation with the Samaritan woman and proclaims himself to be the source of life-giving water: “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink’” (7:37).
The crowds in Jerusalem are unsure what to do with Jesus and his message—some speculate that he might be the Messiah, but others find him confusing. The Pharisees and religious authorities send out officers to arrest Jesus while he is in the temple, but they are so struck by Jesus’s teachings that they return emptyhanded: “The officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, ‘Why did you not bring him?’ The officers answered, ‘No one ever spoke like this man!’” (7:45-46).
Chapter 8 Summary
This chapter begins with one of the most famous pericopes in the gospels, the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. (Modern scholarship is agreed that this story was not part of the original composition of the Gospel of John, but its consistent addition to the early manuscripts has rendered it an accepted part of the biblical canon.) Jesus, coming again to the temple courts, is confronted by a group of Pharisees who bring a woman who has been caught in the act of adultery. For her crime, she is subject to one of the harshest penalties of the Old Testament law, being stoned to death. The Pharisees demand to know what Jesus would say about the case, presumably either to trap him into arguing against the law of Moses, or to get him in trouble with the Romans for encouraging an act of stoning. In response, Jesus simply stoops and writes in the dust, then tells them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (8:7). Faced with this interpretation, the Pharisees drop their stones and leave the scene. Jesus then addresses the woman with compassion and an encouragement to pursue a life unbound to sin: “And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more’” (8:11).
After this pericope, the scene returns to Jesus’s proclamations amid the crowd of pilgrims at the religious festival. Here, he uses the imagery of light and darkness to describe his identity: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (8:12). Jesus also references his approaching death, which he hints at throughout the gospel, but the crowd does not understand him. They continue to debate Jesus’s identity, with some calling him the true Messiah and others proclaiming him a false teacher of some kind, and although many remain confused, many others come to believe in him. As the crowd continues to question him and respond to his teachings, Jesus pushes his rhetoric even further, claiming a unique status of divine pre-existence by using the “I Am” language of God’s personal name and claiming that he predates Abraham: “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (8:58). Some in the crowd try to stone him in response, but he evades them and leaves the temple courts.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
Chapters 5-8 continue John’s pattern of interweaving miracle stories and discourses. However, new elements begin to emerge in this section. Whereas his conversations in Chapters 1-4 tended to engage hearers who were (or became) sympathetic to his message, as the story continues, his interlocutors become more bewildered and, in some cases, more antagonistic. This contributes to a sense of rising tension that will build throughout the gospel, culminating in Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion. This dynamic is most clearly seen in the pericopes that take place in Jerusalem, where Jesus is accused of encouraging the breaking of Sabbath laws and where the crowds struggle to comprehend the way he describes himself, leaving split opinions as to whether he is the Messiah or a false teacher. The reaction of the Jerusalem crowds turns hostile as he co-opts the biblical terminology exclusively reserved for God and applies it to himself.
The Gospel of John uses several structural patterns to make the case for The Identity of Jesus Christ as being both divine and the long-awaited Messiah. As can be seen in this set of chapters, John regularly intersperses his narrative with a carefully selected set of miraculous signs and a repetition of Jesus’s “I Am” statements, which allude to the personal name of God (see Exodus 3:14). Scholars of biblical literature have long noticed that John appears to use seven of these signs and seven “I Am” statements in building his case about Jesus’s identity. Seven was a number associated with the idea of perfection, completeness, and divinity in ancient Jewish thought.
These chapters give prominent place to miraculous signs like Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 and walking on water, and relating several of Jesus’s “I Am” statements—the bread of life, the light of the world, and his inflammatory claim to divine pre-existence before Abraham. Many of these statements, taken in context, are claims to fulfill the patterns and expectations of Old Testament revelation. This can be seen in Jesus’s claim to be the bread of life, an allusion to the manna of the wilderness wanderings in Moses’s day, as well as in his description of himself as the light of the world, an allusion to high Jewish festivals, where the symbolic imagery of light played a prominent role.
In addition to the central theme of Jesus’s identity, these chapters also touch on Jesus’s Relation to God the Father and the Holy Spirit. As in the earlier set of chapters, his relation to the Father is given more attention than his relation to the Spirit, although the latter is mentioned several times, including in a note about the coming of the Spirit: “[F]or as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (7:39). Jesus makes direct claims to a unity of identity with God the Father, particularly in Chapter 8 during his address to the crowds in the temple courts. Love as the Foundational Christian Ethic is not a main topic of Jesus’s discourses here, but it clearly emerges from his practices, particularly in his healing of the man by the pool of Bethesda and his compassionate interaction with the woman who was caught in adultery.
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