When addressing the issue of social justice, one of the most emphasized aspects is that of the poor and the hungry.  Hunger is one of the most basic of human needs, and only the extremely calloused can be unmoved by seeing the abject poverty of someone who legitimately cannot feed their family.  As Christians, we are exhorted to care for the poor like Jesus did—which begs the question, “How did Jesus care for the poor?”  The answer is to see how Jesus Himself responded when presented with a multitude of poor and hungry people.

The people who approached Jesus in John 6 were people in need.  They were following Him because they had seen His healings of the sick, and knew they needed that kind of mercy.  These were not the wealthy and self-sufficient; these were ones who did not apparently even have bread for their journey.  Jesus saw the great multitude coming towards Him, and He was moved with compassion for them, purposing in His heart to feed them.  But as He did so, He had a very important point to communicate to His disciples, as well as to the crowds.

Jesus asked Philip where they should buy bread for the people.  Philip’s startled reply betrayed both the magnitude of the situation and the limitation of human resources to meet the need.  Even if the disciples had two hundred denarii to spend, it would not be enough to satisfy the need.  The best they could come up with was a little boy’s lunch—five loaves and two fishes, with over five thousand people to feed.  Their question was a valid one: what was this meager offering among so many hungry, hurting people?

Jesus actually did not directly answer their question.  He simply instructed the disciples to have the people sit down, and with very little ceremony, He provided for the hungry in an amazing, supernatural way.  In the well-known miracle of the loaves and fishes, Jesus demonstrated the complete inability of man and the necessity of the power of God to bring justice about to the poor.  The solution was not found in man’s resources, but rather, God’s.

The multitude perceived the supernatural power in their midst and thought they had found the way out of their economic pains.  When they said of Jesus, “This is truly the Prophet who is to come into the world,” they were referring to Deuteronomy 18:15, where Moses prophesied that God would raise up a prophet like himself from among the people.  This multitude was looking to Jesus as more than a good teacher.  They were so convinced that He was the One who would free them from their oppression that they planned to make Him king by force.  They would have undoubtedly been familiar with passages like Isaiah 60-66, and would have been eager to usher in the Messianic kingdom.

Whereas other would-be messiah figures would have seized this as the perfect opportunity to gain the favor of the masses, Jesus quietly slipped away from them.  He knew that it was not yet time to take the physical throne of David—if He had set up His kingdom at that time, few, if any, of His people would have actually been in it.  The multitude was ready to cast off the oppression of Rome, but in their hearts they were not right with God and therefore not ready for His kingdom.  Jesus knew this, and crossed the sea (on foot) to get away from them, leaving them wondering where He had gone and hungry for more of the same miraculous provision they had just encountered the day before.

When they finally caught up to Jesus on the other side of the sea, they asked Him how He got there ahead of them.  Jesus, however, dismissed the small talk entirely and cut right to the heart of the matter.  They weren’t seeking Him because they saw the signs that pointed to Him as the Son of God.  They came to Him as a benefactor, a provider, and a food source.  While it’s true that Jesus is a great provider, the people’s motives were entirely misdirected, and Jesus exhorted them to labor for a different kind of sustenance.

Their response was to ask how they could enter into the kind of power Jesus had—the kind of power that could multiply bread.  Jesus redirected their priorities again.  More pressing than the issue of food was the issue of their belief in the Son of God.

However, the crowd was not easily deterred.  They asked for a sign that they might believe in Jesus—a sign, say, like Moses providing bread for the Israelites in the wilderness.  Their focus was still on their next meal.  Jesus again confronted them with their true need: they could only truly be satisfied by the bread from heaven.  When the people again did not seem to get the point, Jesus hit them with a statement that could not be avoided or misconstrued: “I AM the bread which came down from heaven.”

His following exhortation laid out His mission—the gospel.  He was sent from Heaven by the Father to redeem human beings and raise them up at the last day.  Believing in Jesus as the bread of heaven was the prerequisite to eternal life.

Upon hearing this, the people began to murmur among themselves.  Just a day earlier, they had considered Jesus to be a prophet like Moses who should be immediately named king.  Now they were complaining about His bold words and asking who He thought He was.  Didn’t they know His mother and father?  What was this Nazarene carpenter talking about, anyway?

Nevertheless, Jesus didn’t let up for a moment.  He reiterated and emphasized what He had just told them.  The most important problem at hand was not physical food.  Physical food had not been the problem for ancient Israel in the wilderness—they were given plenty of it, and yet they were all dead.  Jesus wanted more for these people than to live comfortably for seventy years; He wanted them to live in glory forever.  Even with His shocking command to eat His flesh and drink His blood, He was redirecting them from their temporal hunger to the more important issue at hand.  Ravi Zacharias commented on this subject,

…[Jesus] was not speaking in a cultural vacuum to consign His followers to cannibalism.  Rather, His words were intended to lift the listeners from their barren, food-dominated existence to the recognition of the supreme hunger of life that could only be filled by different bread.  It was in that very journey under Moses that He had first told them that physical bread had limited sustenance.  He wanted to meet a greater hunger.[1]

By this point, every sensibility of the people had been thoroughly offended.  Even Jesus’ followers were wrestling over this hard saying, unable to reconcile their ideals of an utopian, just society with the counter-cultural message that Jesus was hitting them with.  But Jesus did not let up on His language at all; in fact, He turned the discourse in a much more personal direction.  “Does this offend you?” He asked (John 6:61).  These people may have been eager to appoint Jesus as a king; but what if they had seen Him where He was before, glorified with the Father, true God of true God?  What would their reaction be to Him then?  If they could not handle His message of eternal life, how could they receive Him as the very Son of God?

He confronted them blatantly with the point He had been making all along.  “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing.”  The hungry were not saved by consistent daily rations.  Deliverance for the oppressed would not be found in a violent overthrow of Rome.  The arm of the flesh was far too short to rescue the ones in need.  True life could only be found through the Spirit of God, and if the poor and destitute were unwilling to receive it, they would always know oppression—no matter how full their stomachs were.

So we are again brought to our initial question: How does Jesus care for the poor?   It must be noted that He does care for their physical needs.  He demonstrated the generous abundance of God to a crowd of hungry people in need.  But it is also crucial to see that He did not only care for the physical needs.  When push came to shove, He actually withheld the physical provision that He could have easily given them in order to avoid compromising the message that they needed for their souls to live.  The biggest issue weighing on His heart was their spiritual status, not their social standing.  In His mind, life and justice was only complete when they were laboring for the food that endures to everlasting life.  So as we seek to seek to serve the poor as Jesus did, we must follow the pattern He set: We serve the poor and minister to their needs, but we must earnestly contend for the salvation of their souls.  The flesh profits nothing—and only the Spirit is that which gives true life.