Generosity, Part 5: Giving Overflow (John 6:1-15)
Generosity, Part 5: Giving Overflow
November 23, 2025
John 6:1-15
By: Pastor Mike Conner
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On this Christ the King Sunday, John’s Gospel confronts us with a Jesus who does not want to be king: “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (6:15). I find it a bit perplexing. If you had come into the world to save it, and a great crowd of 5,000 menplus women and children had experienced your power and were ready to crown you as their king, wouldn’t you think that things were finally starting to cook, that you had the beginnings of movement? Instead, Jesus draws back from the very people who want to vault him into a position of worldly power. I want to explore why.
The ancient Israelites had a troubled experience of kingship. Their desire to be like other nations and have a king in the first place was flagged as a grave danger. Centuries before the days of Jesus, the prophet Samuel, who reluctantly anointed Saul to be the first king of Israel, raised this warning:
This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign…to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day. (1 Sam 8:11-18 NIV)
What words do we hear over and over again in that passage? He will take. He will take. He will take. The king will take sons and daughters, fields and vineyards—eventually the peoples’ own personal agency. That’s what a king does: a king takes; a king centralizes and consolidates power and resources around himself. And though Israel, and later the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, had some good kings in their history—the best, of course, being David, and even his record is mixed—what we hear most often in the pages of the Old Testament is pain: endless war, oppressive taxation, the nationalistic coopting of religion, and apathy toward the plight of the poor. He will take.
Jesus did not come to be a king who takes. He came to be a king who gives. He did not come to be king who gathers all power to himself. He came to be a king who gives his power away. So he had to reshape the imagination of the people. He had to subvert their expectations, based on generations of trauma, of what a king does and what a king is like. To reach in and change what they desired, to resurrect their imagination, were as important to his saving work as his feeding and healing. So he had to avoid being taken by them. He would not be forced to play a role in a failed fantasy, this world of kings. So he withdrew.
Notice how many people participate in this great feeding. The disciple Andrew brings the unnamed boy forward. The boy shares his five loaves and two fish. The disciples organize the crowd into seated groups. Jesus blesses and distributes the food. The disciples then collect, to their shock and delight, twelve baskets of leftovers, each getting to hold the proof of what he did not think was possible.
John is careful not to label this moment a miracle. Instead, he calls it a sign (1:14). This isn’t an event that transcends the laws of nature but that points beyond itself to some fundamental truths about Jesus. And one of those truths is that Jesus empowers the people around him to transcend, to overcome, their fears—fears of vulnerability, fears of whether or not they will still have enough if they open themselves to others and share who they are and what they have.
It’s very significant that Jesus had the people sit down together. These were folks from many different villages and towns who may or may not have known each other. If they were drawn to Jesus because of his ministry of healing, they likely had some fundamental fears about being taken care of, about being seen and having enough. Jesus invited them into community with each other, gathered around tables spread in the wilderness.
Jesus wants us to feel in our bones that everything we need is already available to us when we gather in openness and generosity. If each of us opens our bag to bring out and pass around what we have brought with us, there will be more than enough. We will eat until we are satisfied. We will even have leftovers to share. Poor Philip, tested by Jesus, tries to solve the problem from the top down, like a king, running the economic calculation: it would cost an exorbitant amount just to get each of these people a few bites of bread. Jesus—led by the boy—inspires a bottom-up solution, rooted in sharing. If the crowd had seized Jesus to make him king, they would have been, in a strange way, disempowering themselves.
Even after it was over, even after they had eaten to the point of satisfaction, the people still struggled to really see the truth about Jesus, themselves, and their tablemates, to which this sign pointed: the truth of the gift economy. They just see Jesus, and I know this is going to sound strange, but in only seeing Jesus the people kind of miss Jesus’ point.
They think if they can crown him king all their problems will go away. But Jesus came that we “may have life and have it in abundance” (John 10:10 CSB) He came to draw us to himself, to sit us down with one another and bless us into our best, most trusting and most generous selves. The flip side is that when we, personally or as a Church, try to claim Jesus without also claiming the crowd—that is, one another, as well as the needs and gifts of our neighbors—he slips away from us.
The poem that begins John’s Gospel includes this verse: “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (1:16). Jesus is a fullness that is always overflowing to us, gift after gift after gift. This is the life of perfect, eternal communion enjoyed by the Trinity, by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each overflowing in self-gift to the others, each being filled by the self-gift of the others.
This is the that the Son of God brought near to us in the body of Jesus, and it’s the pattern of life Jesus sought to establish everywhere he went.
Think about the abundance that Jesus makes possible in John’s Gospel alone:
When he turns the water into wine at the wedding of Cana, it’s the servants of the chief steward who fill the great stone jars with water, who take a cupful to the chief steward (John 2:1-11). After he talks with the Samaritan woman at the well, “many Samaritans from that city [believe] in him because of the woman’s testimony” (4:39 NRSV, emphasis added). When Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, and Lazarus comes out of his tomb still bound with strips of cloth, Jesus tells the people around him to “unbind him, and let him go” (John 11:44 NRSV). When Jesus seeks out his scattered disciples after his resurrection, he tells an exhausted Peter to cast the net on the other side of the boat, and the net fills with so many fish that it threatens to break.
Do you see it? This is not a king who takes but a king who gives.
You, he says, you fill the jars, you share your testimony, you unbind the man. There is something kingly about that, I suppose—the giving of an order, the delegation of a task. But these aren’t really orders or delegations, they are invitations to participate, they are a summons into our true power and humans made in God’s image: the power to overflow in love.
Who is he calling you to be?
What is he calling you to do?
Who are the people he is calling you to sit down and get to know, learning their names, learning to trust?
Sometimes Jesus just needs one person, like the boy, to bring their lunchbox forward and say, “I know this isn’t enough on its own, but I’m willing to share it,” to set the gift economy in motion. Maybe you are called, somewhere in your life, to be like that boy. Maybe you are called to be Andrew, who can identify and bring forward people whose gifts are so easily overlooked.
On this Stewardship Sunday, as we prepare to give our 2026 commitment cards, my prayer is that each of us will give what we can in response to a Jesus and a Church that gives, not to a Jesus and a Church that takes. For if it is the latter, the joy of the Lord has withdrawn, and we need to confront that sense of taking or being taken from in the Church or in our heart. I make my pledge today because I believe that there is always already enough, and I am grateful that you are the ones that Jesus has asked me to sit down and share life with. May it be so for you, too.
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.