The day after the feeding of five thousand, the crowd has followed Jesus across the Sea of Galilee. They are, Jesus observes, not seeking him because of signs but because they ate bread and were satisfied (v. 26). He offers them the bread of God — which descends from heaven and gives life to the world. They ask for this bread. And then he identifies himself: I am the bread. The feeding of the five thousand was a sign. This is the reality the sign pointed to.

From the writers we read together

Saint Augustine

Bishop of Hippo (354-430 AD)

Augustine understood hunger from the inside. Before his conversion he had tried to feed himself with Manichaean philosophy, with Neoplatonism, with sexual pleasure, with rhetorical ambition. Each of these satisfied briefly and left a greater hunger behind it. His conversion was, in his account, the discovery that only one thing satisfied the soul's particular hunger — not because it numbed the hunger but because it matched it. “Bread of life” is, for Augustine, the name of the only food that does not leave you hungry after eating. Every other bread is a sign; this is the thing the signs were signifying.

The double promise of verse 35 — “shall not hunger” and “shall never thirst” — addresses the double nature of the human appetite. We hunger for something to fill the void; we thirst for something to refresh the spirit. Augustine would say the restlessness he described in the Confessions is the hunger-and-thirst condition of the human soul before it has found the bread that satisfies it. Coming to Jesus and believing in Jesus are the two verbs attached to the two promises. They are not the same act, but they are inseparable. You come once; you keep believing.