From the Daily Lectionary for Wednesday in the Fourth Week of Lent
John 6:27-40
“Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform 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, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; 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 all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”
I think this is so very important, not just to understand John’s theology, but to understand the entirety of the faith. It all comes down to the word, in this translation, “believe.” “What must we do to perform the works of God?” the disciples ask. Jesus answers, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” For centuries the church has interpreted this passage to mean that faith is all about believing in Jesus… in his miracles, his resurrection, and perhaps more importantly, the church’s Christology, that is to say, the church’s theology surrounding the person of Jesus. The implication is that our job as Christians is to simply believe, that the life of faith is an ongoing assent to dogma.
But the word for believe in the Greek… pisteo… is more accurately translated trust in. Trust in Jesus, and trust in the way of life Jesus teaches. You see the difference? Belief only implies that our faith is passive, personal, unrelated to anyone but ourselves. Trusting is about a way of life: in particular, a way of life of sacrifice. We know from the canon of the Gospels and the Epistles in the New Testament what this life is about. In short, it is about loving our neighbor. Jesus’s entire ministry was to mobilize the faithful into a way of life that raised up those oppressed and shamed in his world. He preached shared abundance among the rigid social and economic hierarchy, and that granting dignity and justice to the ostracized and left-out would be the very means of God loving the world. He offered a vision rooted in Torah that would engender a just and sustainable society. His metaphor was “The Kingdom of Heaven.”
Belief is speculative and debatable. Trusting a way of life is a vocation. Trust the way of Jesus, good people. In it there are signs and wonders, a richness beyond all reckoning. “The yoke is easy,” as Jesus puts it, because our work is founded on the wings of praise.
A Prayer for the Church (BCP p. 291)
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
