The Life-Giving Bread Is For Those Drawn by the Father And He Will Give His Flesh For The Life Of The World (John 6:41-50).
At this point there would appear to be an important change in the narrative. Up to this point it had been ‘the people' who have been questioning Him. Now the scene moves on. “ The people” fade into the background and He finds Himself dealing with “the Judaisers”. This is John's term regularly used for the Jewish authoritarians, and especially for a hard core of them who followed Jesus about, and were so fanatically tied up with their religion that they were filled with antagonism and blinded to the truth about Jesus. (It does not signify all Jews). They probably consisted mainly of some of the harsher Scribes and Pharisees and their followers together with the representatives of the Chief Priests and some of the other priests (not all Pharisees or priests opposed Jesus and were at loggerheads with him as we have seen in the case of Nicodemus). The Scribes were the Jewish teachers who were trained in the Law. The Pharisees were men dedicated to obedience to the Law (in their terms) who on the whole saw themselves as religiously superior to the common people. They very strictly observed certain cleansing rituals which Jesus appears to have gone along with, and were fanatical about the Sabbath. They also believed in the coming resurrection and in angels. They would thus have been very interested in what Jesus was talking about here.
These Judaisers were clearly not among those who would be drawn by the Father, for they were too bigoted to listen, and Jesus was saddened by the fact. Instead they muttered among themselves about Him, and had in their hearts thoughts of putting Him to death. Here He was claiming to be bread that had come down from Heaven when they all knew that He was just a local boy, whose parents were well known to them. Who did He think he was? How could He have come down from Heaven? But in His compassion Jesus wanted them to have their opportunity and again repeated His offer of the bread of life. A slight problem arises as to where we are to include John 6:51. If we see it as the final verse in the section from John 6:41, it adds a slight edge to what has previously been said, the idea of Him giving His flesh for the life of the world (John 6:51). But in our view the probability is that it was said in the synagogue. Either way it was what caused the emphasis to change from His offering of Himself to them as the bread of life (through coming and believing) to the requirement that they eat His flesh and drink His blood (signifying that they would put Him to death). And it is clear from John 6:51 that this was Jesus' deliberate intent as He sought to faced the Judaisers up with what they were doing.