Bible Study 101: Why Does John Mention the Passover in John 6? Hearing Jesus, Devotional
This episode is part of Bible Study 101, a series teaching a method
Rachael calls the color method. You take one passage and read it several times, marking something different in each color, and by the end you see things on the page you'd never catch reading at normal speed. This week the passage is John 6:1-15, the feeding of the five thousand.
Today's color is purple, and purple marks timing. Words like then, after,
already, when, near. That sounds like the least interesting color of the week
until you get to verse 4, which is six words about a festival. It has no people
in it, nothing supernatural, and nobody doing anything, so it sat blank on the
page for four straight days while everything around it filled in. It's also the
sentence that tells you what kind of story you're actually reading.
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Chapters
0:00 What we're doing this week
0:28 The difference between reading and studying
0:55 What purple marks
1:24 Why timing is so easy to miss in Scripture
2:30 The two things timing words do for you
3:53 Reading John 6:1-15
5:41 Marking the timing words
8:29 Back to verse 4
9:23 What Passover actually is
10:26 A crowd in a wild place with no food, during Passover season
11:33 This is not a story about a picnic
12:03 Why the crowd calls Him the Prophet
12:46 Why this is the argument for the whole method
14:19 Writers don't waste sentences
16:06 The grass, and the green pastures
17:03 The mountain, twice
17:32 Prayer
18:20 Homework
What is the color method?
It's a way of studying Scripture that Rachael developed while teaching
sixth and seventh graders who had never been shown how to read the Bible for themselves. She later published it in her first book, She Hears.
You take a short passage, ten to fifteen verses, and mark it with colored
pencils or highlighters. Each color answers one question. Green marks the who. Blue marks the supernatural, the things only God could do. Red marks the action words. Purple marks timing.
The colors aren't the point. The point is that you can't put a color on a
word without making a decision about that word, and you can't make a decision without slowing down enough to actually read. Most of us skim familiar passages without noticing. This makes it impossible.
What does purple mark?
Timing. Think of purple as the clock.
You're looking for when something happened, how long it took, what came
before, and what came after. Words like then, immediately, during, already,
when, after, again, the next day.
Why does timing matter so much in the Bible?
Because Scripture handles time in a way that reading a normal book
doesn't prepare you for.
There are 400 years between the end of the Old Testament and the
beginning of the New. You turn one page and four centuries have passed, and nothing on the page tells you that. Inside a single passage you can cover
generations in three sentences.
Timing words do two things. They tell you the order events happened in,
which matters because our memories compress stories and lose the sequence. And they locate the passage inside the larger story of Scripture, so you know whether you're before the rescue or after it, before the kings or after the kingdom fell apart, before Jesus or after.
What are the timing words in John 6:1-15?
Verse 1: Sometime after this. Right at the start. And notice what
that assumes. After what? Something happened before this, which means John is connecting this scene to chapter 5. Most of us open to a chapter and read like the story begins there. It doesn't.
Verse 3: Then Jesus went up on a mountainside.
Verse 4: The Jewish Passover Festival was near. Mark this one even
though it may not look like timing yet.
Verse 5: When Jesus looked up.
Verse 6: He already had in mind what He was going to do. That's
timing telling you something happened before the conversation even started.
Verse 10: There was plenty of grass in that place. Mark this too,
at least with your pen.
Verse 11: Jesus then took the loaves.
Verse 12: When they had all had enough to eat.
Verse 14: After the people saw the sign.
Verse 15: He withdrew again to a mountain. And notice what
"again" tells you. He'd already done this once, back in verse 3. He
went up, He came down into all of this, and now He's going back up.
Why does John mention the Passover in John 6?
Because it tells you what kind of story you're in.
Passover is the meal Israel ate the night before God brought them out of
Egypt. It's the festival where every Jewish family remembers the rescue. Lamb, bread, deliverance.
And remember what happened right after that rescue. They went out into
the wilderness with no food, and God fed them bread from heaven every morning for forty years.
Now look at this scene. A huge crowd in a remote place with no food. It's
Passover season, so these people are already thinking about the exodus, because that's the entire point of the festival. And in the middle of that remembering, a man goes up on a mountain, comes back down, and hands them bread that should not exist.
This is not a story about a picnic. John put one sentence in verse 4 that gives you the frame for the whole passage.
Why does the crowd call Jesus the Prophet?
Because of everything above. In verse 14 they say, Surely this is the
Prophet who is to come into the world.
That's not a random title. In Deuteronomy 18, God said He would raise up
a prophet like Moses. These people had Moses on the brain because it was Moses season, and they had just watched a man do something Moses-shaped. They connected it immediately.
And they weren't wrong. Which is what makes verse 15 land the way it
does, when they try to make Him king by force and He walks away. They had the right person and the wrong idea of what He came to do.
Why is this the argument for the whole method?
Because of how it was found.
For four days that verse sat white on the page. No people, so no green.
Nothing supernatural, so no blue. Nobody doing anything, so no red. Everything around it filled in and it stayed blank.
The only reason it got looked at is that purple forced a stop on it and
made a decision necessary.
There's nothing special about the colors. If this method doesn't work for
you, that's fine. But what it does is force your brain to slow down on the
things it would otherwise glide past, especially the things a modern reader
isn't wired to catch. We aren't ancient Israelites with Moses on our minds. We
don't feel Passover season coming.
Two small details worth noticing
Verse 10 says there was plenty of grass in that place. That seems
like a strange thing to mention. But in that part of the world, grass means
spring, which lines up with Passover. It also means this crowd sat down in
green pasture, which may bring something else to mind. A shepherd who makes people lie down in green pastures and prepares a table for them.
And the mountain shows up twice. Verse 3, He goes up. Verse 15, He goes
back up. Mountains matter in Scripture. It's where Moses met God and where the law was given, and John has put Jesus on one twice in fifteen verses.
Writers don't waste sentences
John says at the end of his gospel that he saw many things Jesus did that
he chose not to write down. Scripture is God breathed, and God worked through a person who made real decisions about what to include.
Rachael works as a ghostwriter, and she'll tell you that when someone is
paying you to write, you don't waste sentences. You choose what goes in and what stays out.
So out of everything that could have been included in this scene, one
line is about the calendar. If it's in there, it's because God wanted you to
know it.
FAQ
Do I need to have heard the earlier episodes? No. This one explains what it needs to as it goes.
What do I need to follow along? A Bible or a printed copy of John 6:1-15 that you're comfortable marking, and something purple. You can print the passage free at Bible Gateway.
Do I need special supplies? No. Colored pencils from a kid's school supply drawer work. Wax Bible highlighters are nice because they don't bleed through, but a pencil will do.
Is it okay to write in my Bible? Yes. If that makes you uneasy, there's an episode earlier in this series that deals with it directly, or use a printout instead.
What if I mark different words than Rachael does? That's fine. Some words go either way, and God shows different things to different people from the same text.
What's the homework? Pray. Then read Exodus 16, or just verses 1 through 15, which is the account of God feeding His people with manna in the wilderness. Then come back and look at your page again.
What's next? Orange. It's the shortest color of the week and it matters more than it looks like it will.
Where can I go deeper on the color method? She Hears, on Amazon, teaches it over six weeks through the stories of six women in the Gospels. All the Scripture is printed in the workbook, so you don't have to write in your Bible if you'd rather not.
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