John 6:28-29 28Then they said to him, “What should we do, to be doing the works of God?” 29Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you might believe in that one whom he has sent.”
The crowd that had followed Jesus across the Sea of Galilee continued to ask him questions that reveal more and more their ignorance and lack of faith. They were so caught up in materialism, in the form of food in this story, that they missed the deeper message Jesus was saying. It would be nice to know what Jesus taught these people, but John was not interested in those details. He wrote with the specific purpose of helping his readings come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God, which this crowd was having a hard time doing. In the dialogue and Jesus’ earlier response, they caught the word works (erga) and repeat it in verb and noun forms: “working the works.”
As John recounts the scene, the people speak as one voice and as one entity representing the skeptic and doubter. They were thinking of works in the way of self-righteous deeds, like many people do even today. Religion can degenerate into the doing of human effort to please God, which always ends up short because of human sin and weakness. The people are clueless of biblical theology and have defined their own folk theology. They think they need to do something to have eternal life. For them, like for other Jews Jesus confronted, this “something” appears to be focused on their own efforts to somehow please God. Paul wrote about the same thing in Romans 3:28.
Jesus once again corrected their misunderstanding with a timeless truth. The type of work he meant is believing in that one, referring to himself. The keyword in John is repeated in the form of a purpose clause: in order that you might believe (pisteuēte), the same clause found in 20:31. This faith is not an abstract belief in a “god” of one’s imagination (many people say they believe in God), but faith in a specific person, Jesus the Messiah. The people needed to realize that eternal life is a gift of God that is received by faith in Jesus, not by doing something to make themselves look good before God. Faith itself is a gift of God who gives us the grace to overcome the fallenness and sin that seeks to deceive us and hold us captive. Grace comes in hearing the good news, which then gives us the choice to believe. Jesus brought that good news to this crowd in multiple ways including through his teaching and miracles. They were having a hard time submitting to the call of discipleship because they were stuck in their old worldviews, misunderstandings, and calloused consciences. The unstated imperative of this story warns readers not to follow the example of this crowd but to turn to Jesus in simple faith.
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