John6chapter 6

The season is given by the food. Barley ripens before wheat, and barley loaves were the cheap bread of poor households, so a boy carrying five of them fits a spring crowd near Passover walking out to a hillside with grass on it.

The crowd's reaction is a political fact, not a compliment. They intended to come and take him by force to make him king, and this is Galilee under Herod Antipas, in a generation that produced several would-be liberators who gathered crowds and were cut down. Withdrawing to the mountain alone was, among other things, refusing a coronation the Romans would have answered with cavalry.

The lake crossing works the way that lake works. It sits in a deep bowl, wind funnels down the ravines after dark, and the disciples had rowed three or four miles — which puts them in the middle of the widest part — before they saw him.

The synagogue discourse turns on a well-known expectation: as Moses gave manna, so it was said the Messiah would bring bread from heaven again. Jesus grants the frame and moves the bread — the manna fed people who died anyway. Then he uses language about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, which to Jewish ears was close to unbearable, since consuming blood in any form was forbidden outright in the Law. John reports that many disciples turned back that day, and he does not soften it.