Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the signs he had performed by healing the sick. Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with his disciples. The Jewish Passover Festival was near.
- John 6:1-4

In today's passage, John hints at the motives the crowds have for following Jesus: they were drawn to him by his miraculous works.

But John also does something else, something he does throughout his Gospel. John links Jesus' ministry to Moses, the great hero of the Hebrew faith. In John 1, we read "For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." In John 3, we read "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” In John 5 it happens again "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me."

In John 6, we're about to get a lot more of this with a miraculous water-crossing and a mass-feeding. And in today's passage, we see a crowd with great expectations, a religious leader on a mountain and a reminder of the Passover Festival. We're being cued to remember the Moses-story.

Jesus met his Jewish crowd through a familiar narrative, a key moment in the calendar and a set of powerful expectations. Jesus riffed off of these things, leveraged them, fulfilled them ... but not in the ways people expected. There's a nimbleness and a complexity about how he brings all of these threads together in order to meet these people where they were and push them toward a deeper relationship with him.

Jesus met the crowds in the midst of their narratives, calendars and expectations. How has Jesus used your narratives, calendar and expectations to meet you? How has Jesus transformed your narratives, reshaped your calendar and challenged your expectations?