NOTES for Joh 10:27-38
"If I am not doing the works of My Father, do not believe Me. But if I do them, even if you do not believe Me, believe the works..." The works that Jesus does become, as it were, a bridge, "bringing those on earth up to heaven", a bridge between unbelief and faith, because these are the works of God. The works of God and faith become mutually conditioning acts. It is very important to feel that our faith is not faith in some abstract principles, even if they are beautiful; our faith is inseparable from the very fabric of life.
It is important that the Greek word here is precisely ἔργοις, a work, a deed with a simple everyday meaning, without the loftiness we tend to give to everything connected with our Lord. "To work a miracle," says the New Jerusalem Bible about what Jesus does. This sense of real, daily action and effort, not fully conveyed by the elevated Russian "to create" or "to perform," is hard to render (recall "the arm of the Lord"). The word "work," "do," is one of the very important words for the whole Gospel of John. Recall the text: "The Son can do nothing of His own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing. For whatever He does, that the Son does likewise" (5:19). The word "do" sounds four times in such a small amount of text.
And now that we have understood that the Lord works so that we may believe, that the Lord enters the fabric of our life so that our faith will not be an abstract ideology, let us recall another text: Then they said to Him, "What must we do, to be doing the works of God?" Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent" (John 6:28, 29). That is, not only are the works the Lord does mutually connected with faith, but our works as well, if they are the works of God, are faith. It is difficult, and unnecessary, to separate faith and the works of God. Let us simply understand what the apostle James said: for as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead (James 2:26).