The work of the Father
As I have already observed in other interventions, the Gospel of John appears as the result of the author’s great desire for sincerity in reporting not what he himself, that the community, wanted to understand about the life of Jesus but what he really had lived and He said.
We find an example in the passage of chapter 6 of the Gospel of John where Jesus says that he is the bread of life and whoever comes to him will not reject him because he did not come to do his own will but that of the Father and this is the will of the Father, may Christ lose nothing that the Father has given him. And he adds that no one comes to him unless the Father draws him. So Jesus sees the Father’s action in the other: if that one comes to him we must be very careful because it is, it could be, the Father who is sending him to him.
We see that the disciples also understood this, for example when Peter sees the pagans convert and asks how he can then not baptize them if the Father has given them the Spirit. In the same way we can ask ourselves when a person wishes to receive communion, to be absolved and we can interpose our blocks or when a person expresses, I don’t know, the desire to become a priest and perhaps, for example, because of his age, he is told that it’s not the case. We need to pay close attention because it can be the Father who sends it.
So here in this passage Jesus gives us a criterion to take into account. While an abstract discernment tends to remain closed in on itself, a more adequate discernment can try to understand the Spirit that moves the other, try to learn from the other.
So they said to him, “What must we do to do the works of God?” Jesus replied: “This is the work of God: to believe in him whom he has sent” (Jn 6:28-29).