When Jesus’s Own Family Turned Against Him

As we follow the story about the life of Jesus Christ in John's gospel written in the New Testament portion of the Bible, we come to a very interesting passage in John chapter 7 which documents how the brothers of Jesus Christ turned against him, and mocked him. To understand the events of chapter 7, however, we need to first look at what happened in chapter 6, where Jesus was addressing a huge crowd of over 5000 people, and miraculously turned "five small barley loaves and two small fish" into enough food to feed everyone, with plenty left over. As John writes at the beginning of this chapter, the news about Jesus was now starting to spread fast, because he literally healed everyone who came to him. And now, with this miraculous way of multiplying food to feed the masses, they wanted to make him king over Israel. But Jesus's kingdom was not of this world. Satan offered it to him, but he refused. So Jesus had to literally hide from the masses who actually liked him, but for selfish reasons. But Jesus's problems with his new-found fame were only beginning. Eventually the crowd found him, which led to Jesus's next encounter with them later on in chapter 6. Jesus made it clear that he was not like Moses, who gave their forefathers "manna", bread from heaven, so that the nation could live in the desert for 40 years. Jesus tried to teach them the difference between physical food and spiritual food, while also prophesying about his own execution which would result in his body being killed, and his blood being spilled into the earth. Once the crowd understood that there were no more free lunches coming, most of them abandoned him, including, apparently, his own family members.