Week 32 ———  Yom Teruah- the Day of Trumpets
John 6:25-65

Jesus had just fed the 5000, dismissed the crowds, and went up on a mountain to pray. He made the disciples get in a boat and go ahead of him, but he caught up to them by walking on the water. But they can’t escape the crowds. When they got to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, the crowds gathered again.

John 6:25-34   When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”  Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.   Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him, God the Father has set his seal.”  Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?”  Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”  So they said to him, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform?   Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”  Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.  For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

John 6:35-40   Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.   But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe.  All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.   For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.   And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of the all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.   For this is the will of my Father that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

Crowds surrounded Jesus.  And the miracle of the multiplication of the bread and fish ramped that up tremendously.  Jesus’ popularity with the crowd reaches its zenith after the feeding of the 5000.  Why is Jesus so popular?  Do you want to be popular?  Give away free food, free medical care, or free anything that usually works well.  It is election season, right?  All the candidates know if they promise to give you what you want, they will get your vote.  This is one of the problems with democracy.  The idea of democratic voting is that each person will decide what is best for them, and then the vote will represent what is best for the majority of people.  Unfortunately, that may not represent what is best for the country because most people don’t think past today.  Yes, lower my taxes and, at the same time, get the government to send me more free money and more benefits.  But that is why our country has a debt of over 35 trillion dollars.  Because people vote for what is best for them today, not what is best for the country in the coming days.   So we discussed Jesus handing out free food to thousands of people last week. How did they respond?

John 6:15   Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

Jesus is the king, but not that kind of king.  So he leaves them.   But the crowds found him the next day, and Jesus said to them:

John 6:26   Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.

Jesus tells the crowd, “Stop it!”  You are here for the wrong reason.  You are looking for the wrong thing.  Yes, I can give you bread, but you are thinking too shallow.  Sure, bread is good and necessary for life, but even when God rained bread out of heaven daily, what happened to all those people?

John 6:49   Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.

Well, of course, they are dead, Jesus; that was over a thousand years ago. But there is a different kind of bread from heaven they should be seeking:

John 6:50  This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.  I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. 

Jesus uses the metaphor of bread that sustains earthly life to show them that he is the bread that gives eternal life.  Do they understand?  Look at their response:

John 6:52  The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

 No, they didn’t get it at all.  Jesus uses the metaphor of bread to describe himself, just like he used the metaphor of “living water” when talking to the woman at the well.  Drink this water and never be thirsty again.  Eat this bread and live forever.  The woman at the well understood him.  The crowd is hopelessly lost.  Their level of understanding is zero.  Instead of understanding Jesus’ metaphor, they think he wants them to be cannibals and eat his flesh and drink his blood. You want to grab them by the face and say, “It is a metaphor!” Why can’t they understand?  It is not that difficult.  The problem is not that what Jesus is saying is hard.  The problem is their hearts are hard.

Thousands of people experienced the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, but there were two primary responses.  They all witnessed the same thing but got two very different messages.  One group saw the miracle and said, “Wow!  Isn’t God great!”  The other group saw the same thing and said, “Wow! Isn’t free bread great!”

There were those so focused on this world that they couldn’t see the hope of something else.  These weren’t starving people.  Remember the disciples discussing that they could have just broken up the meeting and let them go home to eat?  But Jesus filled this short-term need for food to teach a lesson.  So Jesus filled that need but wanted them to know there is more to God’s world than today.  There is more to life than what we see with our eyes.  Jesus is interested in how we are doing today, but he is more interested in the infinite number of days to come.   

If we look back at the passage we read earlier, we will notice Jesus is directing them toward a theme. You may not have noticed it as we read it before, so let me point it out.

6:27  Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. 
6:39  And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 
6:40 For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.
6:44  No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.
6:47  Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.
6:50  This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.
6:51  If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.
6:54   Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.
6:58  Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.

Do you think Jesus is trying to make a point? There is more to life than day after day trying to earn your daily bread. He is pushing the idea of eternal life and being raised up on the last day. Matthew and Luke only mention eternal life twice, and Mark only mentions eternal life once. John mentions it in Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in John 3, here in chapter 6, and in the upper room.  If I were to take a poll of people leaving a church service on Sunday morning and ask, “What is eternal life?”  What answers do you think I would get?  My very informal poll got these top four answers:  “To live forever,” “To go to heaven,” “To be with Jesus forever,” and “To never die.” All of the answers define eternal life as a length of time or a destination.  But what did Jesus say?

In the upper room, Jesus prays to the Father and says, “And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”  (John 17:3).

What is eternal life?  To know God, to know Jesus.  But again, to Jesus, who grew up with Hebrew scriptures, ‘to know’ does not mean to know about something.  Knowing about God is not enough.  The demons know about God.  This is the fourth or fifth time I have mentioned this, but it is so important here.  The verb “to know” in Hebrew is ‘yadah’ from the root word ‘yad’ which is the palm of your hand.  To know something in Hebrew is to hold it in your hand, experience it, and have a relationship with it.  To know God is to have an ongoing experience with Him and be in a relationship with him.

Let me give you an example:
Lots of people know who the Attorney General of their state is.  They may know a good bit about him.  But they don’t have a relationship with him.  But he is my friend.  I have a relationship with him.  We met every Tuesday at 6 am for seven years to discuss the scriptures and talk about things that mattered.  So, one day, I needed some help.  A woman was being abused by her husband, and we took her into our home because she was not safe with him.  Her husband ended up in the psychiatric ward in the hospital and threatened to kill me because we helped her.  So I needed some legal advice, and because we have a relationship, I could call the State Attorney General on his personal cell phone.  And, of course, he knew what I should do and helped me out. Now he would do that for anyone who needed help, but knowing his name and having a relationship with him are two very different things.

Similarly, many people know about God but don’t have a relationship with God.  They may have attended church all their lives and know a lot of Bible stories but still not have a relationship with the Father.  If so, they do not have eternal life.  Eternal life means an ongoing relationship with God and his Son, our Messiah, Jesus.  That is eternal life, which is forever, but it begins now.  It is a life that is so much more than just waking up, eating, working, and sleeping and then doing it again another day.  Eternal life is a different way of living, where you are focused on more than just your next meal or free bread.  It is the abundant life Jesus talked about. 

But the crowd in our passage doesn’t get it.  They are like voters in America, only thinking about what will improve my life today.   Free food is more important to them.  Jesus wants them to think beyond the daily grind and consider what is essential.

Jesus says those who have this relationship with him and the Father will be “raised him up on the last day.”   He uses that phrase four times in this passage, which is interesting because only one other time in the gospels does Jesus mention the “last day.”  There is a reason Jesus picked this time to discuss the “last day.”  Setting and context are so important.

Jesus is teaching on the Sabbath in the synagogue in Capernaum.   That Saturday at sundown, people in Jerusalem were scanning the horizon for the appearance of the new moon.  God told them in Exodus and Leviticus that the appearance of the New moon in Jerusalem would mark the beginning of their month.¹  In their calendar, the month began on the new moon.  But this is not just any month.  This is the month of the fall festivals, the month of the most holy day in their year.  

The tenth day of this month is the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, when the priest would once a year enter the holy of holies and make atonement for all of their sins.  And the ten days before Yom Kippur are a significant time.  They are called the “Days of Awe,” a time for everyone to search their hearts, confess their sins, and repent.  

But how would people throughout the country know what day it was?  They didn’t have calendars on their walls and no calendar app on their cell phones.  And the new moon must be sighted from Jerusalem and verified by two witnesses before the Sanhedrin.

So, as Jesus is teaching about being raised on the last day, the new moon would become visible in Jerusalem, and a trumpet would blow, and signal fires would be lit on the mountain. People on nearby mountains would see the fire and light theirs and blow the trumpet, and it would spread throughout the land. Because this is the first day of the month. This is Yom Teruah, the Day of Trumpets. 

We have previously discussed the spring Jewish festivals: Passover, Firstfruits, Unleavened Bread, and Pentecost. The Jews have celebrated them for thousands of years. The Old Testament calls them moedim, appointed times. We talked about how Jesus is the fulfillment of all the spring feasts. Let’s do a quick review.

Passover — You remember the 10th plague in Egypt.  The Israelites were commanded to slaughter a one-year-old lamb without blemish, paint the doorposts of their homes with the blood, and eat the lamb. And in every house that did not have the blood on the door, the firstborn would die.  Every year for over a thousand years, the Israelites would slaughter a lamb, put the blood on the altar, eat the meal, and remember the deliverance of the firstborn of Israel from death and the people from captivity in Egypt.  On the same day (at the same time), as the Passover lamb is being slaughtered, Jesus is slain on the cross.  A lamb without blemish; Jesus was without sin.   Jesus became our Passover lamb who delivered us from the curse of death and from captivity to sin.  (What a coincidence that happened the same day of the year at the same time.)²

The Feast of Unleavened Bread follows Passover as a memorial to the Jews who quickly escaped from Egypt with no time for their bread to rise.  Yeast became a metaphor for corruption and sin.  They were to remove the leaven (yeast) from their homes as a reminder of their ancestors’ journey and that God had called them to live differently and not follow other nations’ ways.  Jesus comes to Jerusalem just before Passover when everyone is cleaning out their homes and removing the leaven.  Jesus sees the sin and corruption in God’s house, the Temple, and cleanses the Temple, throwing out the moneychangers.  Jesus becomes the Bread of Life for us without leaven (sin).^3 4

Firstfruits is an appointed time to dedicate the barley harvest to God.  This is done at dawn of the first day of the week (Sunday) after Passover.  This offering to God is the first of the harvest, and it represents the whole harvest.  If that sacrifice is acceptable to God, the entire harvest is acceptable.  No one is allowed to touch the harvest until God receives his share first.  This is to remind them that everything they have is from God. Jesus is resurrected from the dead on the same day, at the same time as the firstfruits are harvested.  He tells Mary not to touch him as he has not yet gone to the Father.   Jesus is the firstfruits of the resurrection.  Because God accepts Jesus’ sacrifice, he can accept the whole harvest of people who follow Jesus. ⁵ 

“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”      1 Corinthians 15:20

Because Jesus is resurrected, the whole world, the fields white unto spiritual harvest, are accepted.

The Feast of Weeks – Pentecost
Daily, for seven full weeks, a sheaf of barley is presented to God for the harvest.  The next day, the fiftieth day, celebrates the current harvest and the incoming wheat harvest.  It is also the day that Moses received the gift of the Law on Sinai.  The law that one day God promised he would write on our hearts.  This feast was fulfilled 50 days after Jesus’ crucifixion on the day of Pentecost when God came in power as he did at Sinai, with a rushing wind and fire, with the gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples in Jerusalem.

It is no accident that God has these events happen on the exact same days.  He is painting a picture in history for those willing to look for it.  Now that Jesus has fulfilled all the spring feasts, we turn to the three fall feasts that have yet to be fulfilled.  They all happen in a month’s time.  The first is Yom Teruah, which our translations call the feast of trumpets.   

Again, the Day of Trumpets is a day that marks the beginning of a very holy time.  It is currently celebrated by Jews as Rosh Hashanah (literally, the head of the year) as a new year’s day, but the Biblical reason for the day was to announce the coming of the Day of Atonement in 10 days and the days between the Day of Trumpets and the Day of Atonement, the “Ten days of Awe,” a time to prepare for the coming day of Atonement by looking back on your life and seeking repentance.  The day had no formal ceremonies other than a day of rest, a special offering, and, most importantly, the blowing of the shofar.  (Now your translation probably says ‘trumpet.’  But the original trumpets were made from the horns of animals: rams or kudus or antelope. A band’s trumpet and brass instruments are still called the ‘horn section’ today.) More than anything else, it was an announcement of the coming Day of Atonement and the days of Awe.

The shofar is prominent in the story of the Battle of Jericho.  As they blew their shofars, they saw God fight the battle for them.  As they continued to use their shofars in battle and saw God continue to deliver them, they began to call God “the horn of our salvation.”  He is their deliverer.  David said it this way:

Psalm 18:1-3   I love you, Yehovah, my strength.  Yehovah is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.  I call upon Yehovah, who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies.

It was Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, who prophesied about Jesus:

Luke 1:68-69   “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David.

It was the loud blast of a shofar that heralded the presence of God on Mt Sinai.

Exodus 19:16   On the morning of the third day, there were thunders and lightning and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled.
Exodus 19:19 And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder. 

We reviewed how Jesus fulfilled the spring feasts.  I imagine you are already figuring out the coming fulfillment of the Day of Trumpets.  It will be the sound of the shofar that will herald the coming of Jesus again.

1 Corinthians 15:51-52   Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.
1 Thessalonians 4:16   For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 

Now you can see why Jesus is choosing this time to talk about being raised on the last day.  Put yourself in the story.  The people that Jesus is teaching are just thinking about today and how they can get free bread.  In his teaching, Jesus plants the idea of eternal life and being raised on the last day.   Even though he said it several times, they are just focused on the idea of the bread.  But on their way back to their homes, it is sunset, and they hear the shofar blow, and they know what it means.  They can’t miss the lesson here.  Jesus wants them to consider the day the last shofar blows.  Eternal life matters.

We can also be caught up in the business of this world. It is easy to be distracted by the cares of this life.  In Jesus parable of the soils it was the seed that fell among thorns.

Mark 4:18-19   Now these are the ones sown among thorns; they are the ones who hear the word, and the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things entering in choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.

What matters is eternal life, your daily relationship with God.  Let that be our focus.

One day, the final trumpet will sound, the last days will begin, and the day of the fulfillment of the Day or Trumpets will come, soon followed by the fulfillment of the other two fall feasts.  When?  Jesus said no man knows the day or the hour.   But I do know that God arranged for all of the fall feasts to be fulfilled on the very same day they had been observed for over a thousand years.  I can not help but think that God’s Trumpet will sound on the day he set aside for the blowing of trumpets. In 27 AD, that day was September 21, the day Jesus spoke of being raised on the last day.  This year, the Day of Trumpets (according to the Rabbinic calendar) will begin at sundown on October 2.  Listen for the shofar.  I’ll be blowing mine.

1. First, you must know that the Hebrew word for the month, chodesh, is also the Hebrew word for the new moon.  They used a lunar calendar with months being either 29 or 30 days, the length determined by whether the new moon could be sighted or not.  To avoid seasonal drift, they inserted a leap month into their calendar every 2-3 years.  The need for a leap month was determined by the stage of ripeness of the barley crop every year.  If it was time for the month of Aviv/Nisan (the month in the spring for Passover), but the barley had not entered the stage of ripeness, then an extra month was added to allow the barley to mature.  (Remember that the first day of the week after Passover is the Feast of Firstfruits where the barley is harvested.)   When the Jews had no access to sight the new moon from Israel, they had difficulty with setting the calendar, so a calendar that calculated the months was established in 359 AD. A calculated calendar is still used today (except by Karaite Jews that still sight the new moon and ripeness of the barley in the spring as in ancient days.)  Today’s technology allows us to back-calculate new moons astronomically, enabling people to determine dates for events in Jesus’ ministry and has made this chronological study possible. 
2. For more information on Passover, see https://swallownocamels.com/2024/03/31/march-29-27-a-d-behold-the-lamb-the-year-of-the-lords-favor-22/
3. For more information about cleansing the temple, see https://swallownocamels.com/2024/04/10/april-10-27-a-d-jesus-cleanses-the-temple-the-year-of-the-lords-favor-25/ 
4. For more information about the appointed times and the Feast of Unleavened Bread see https://swallownocamels.com/2024/04/17/april-11-18-27-a-d-jesus-celebrates-the-feast-of-unleavened-bread-the-year-of-the-lords-favor-27/
5. For more information on Firstfruits, see https://swallownocamels.com/2024/04/23/april-11-18-27-a-d-jesus-and-the-appointed-time-of-firstfruits-the-year-of-the-lords-favor-28/