View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 3
29/6/2025

Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Psalm 26
John 6:22-34

---

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Wesley Centre’s most recent “Conversations that matter” session. The theme was “the ethics of drug reform”, which included attention to questions of decriminalisation and the provision of safe injecting spaces for drug users. It was a comment on the latter which caught my attention and prompted a line of thought which led to today’s sermon.

In speaking of an attempt by the Sisters of Charity religious order to establish a safe injecting centre in Sydney, one of the speakers spoke of the nuns describing how they approached such proposals. First, they would ask themselves, What would Mary Aikenhead do? (Aikenhead was the founder of the order). Second, they would ask, What would Jesus do?

What struck me was the second question. The chances are that you’ve all seen “WWJD? ” logos somewhere – T-shirts or coffee cups (a friend even gave me a pack of Post-it notes, each with WWJD on them and a picture of Jesus looking as if he didn’t know! ). WWJD? – “What would Jesus do? ” – is a question often put by the more activist parts of the church as a dimension of moral reflection, but most of us have probably wondered something along those lines at one stage or another: “I don’t know what to do; What would Jesus do? ”

What struck me, however, was quite at odds with the intention of the nun and the session speaker telling her story. I realised that there is an important sense in which Jesus doesn’t ever “do” anything, or at least, Jesus does nothing along the lines of what anyone who asks, WWJD? , wants to do.

More simply and provocatively, Jesus never does anything “moral”, in the way we usually think about morality.

This needs a little unpacking, for which we’ll turn to a verse from this morning’s reading from John’s Gospel – a question to Jesus from the crowd: “What must we do to perform the works of God”? (6. 28). Notice how similar this is to WWJD. The crowds, ’ “What must we do? ”, asks, “What would you do, Jesus, to perform the work of God? ” What is the “right” thing to do?

There are a couple of reasons we might ask a question like this. Perhaps we simply want to do the “right” thing – to act justly or fairly, not to be prejudicial, or whatever. Yet it’s rarely that simple. To be able to demonstrate that I have acted rightly is very important to me. I want to know that I’ve acted rightly and I need to be able to prove it you, should you challenge me. A family spat or a long, drawn-out case in the law courts is a struggle to establish correctness of behaviour because establishing righteousness secures us against negative judgment and its consequences. To do the “right” thing is to be able to point to some common sense of what rightness is, and have others agree that we are right: “I did it because…” – and you nod your head with understanding.

“What must we do to perform the works of God? ”, the people ask Jesus. This is a question, particularly for that crowd, about how to be confident that I am living in accord with God. And this is, mostly, an enquiry into how to keep God at bay, how to keep ourselves safe from God.

But this is not simply a religious concern. If it’s not God we fear, it will be diminished reputation, or judgement or marginalisation by others. Think of all the virtue signalling that goes on today: greenwashing, or the often mindless repetition of the latest social and political memes. This is an attempt to satisfy whatever wrathful god-like power lurks in the secular social and cultural machine at any moment.

“What must we do to perform the works of God? ” asks the anxious people of Jesus, and we anxious people ask with them.

Helpfully, Jesus has an answer to this heartfelt question: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom God has sent” (6. 29; cf. 15. 8).

…Which is perhaps not so helpful. To a question about what to do, Jesus apparently proposes “having faith”, which seems to be rather a not-doing kind of thing. Consider the kinds of moral questions we ask: about safe injecting rooms, or going to war, or getting out of a marriage (or into one), or keeping money or giving it away, and so on. We ask here, “What would Jesus do? ”, in a serious search for moral guidance. But Jesus’ response, “Believe in the one whom God has sent”, doesn’t seem to take our questions seriously. Nicodemus’ exasperation from a little earlier in John’s Gospel is pertinent here, and indeed right through this Gospel: “How can such things be? ”

We must choose between two readings of all this. Either Jesus’ answer is unhelpful – by which we mean, wrong – or he is right, and the crowd has put the wrong question. Of these two options, the latter is the more interesting, because the question of that crowd way back then is still our own question. And given that, after all this time, we still ask, “Jesus, what must we do? ”, and never really know the answer, let’s wonder whether this might just be the wrong question, or asked in the wrong way, or for the wrong reason.

In what way could we be wrong here, as serious as our question might be? The answer is surprising, and it is what I proposed in passing earlier: that Jesus never acts morally. He seems moral because he often does what seem to be kind things. And because he acts with decisiveness, we get the impression that he, at least, knows what the good is. On this basis, the question “WWJD? ” looks to be a good one to ask.

But to be a miracle worker is not to be moral. It is not a moral act to turn water into wine, to walk on water or to raise the dead Lazarus. Perhaps the healing of the lame and blind looks to be a little more moral, but this would be so only if we think that we ourselves are commanded to do such things, in the same way we are commanded not to steal or tell lies or covet our neighbour’s donkey.

Jesus doesn’t act morally; rather, he creates. He fills what is empty and orders what is chaotic. He doesn’t balance up the dimensions of a problem as a self-defence against charges of being wrong or to develop a proof to God and others of righteousness. Jesus just does. He just does because of what he most fundamentally is: one with the God who sent him. This relationship exceeds any particular thing Jesus does. If we ask, how must we act to be righteous, Jesus simply acts because the question of righteousness is already answered.

To do as Jesus says, then, to “believe in the one whom God has sent” is not have “a” belief; it is to be as Jesus himself is: to live as one who fears no judgement because there is no judgement which could separate him from the God who sent him. Belief is here not “about” or “in” some assertion; it is a freedom in being, a freedom to act without the fear of judgement. What we do is not done in order to impress God; God is already sufficiently impressed by God’s own love for us.

“The truth shall set you free”, Jesus says elsewhere in John’s Gospel (8. 31-32). And what truth is this?

The truth that

God.

Loves.

The world (3. 16).

Not to “believe” in Jesus is not to be as Jesus is. Not to be in Jesus is to live in fear of God (or whomever), and so is to get God and ourselves wrong, and so is to be and to remain condemned (cf. 3. 17-21).

“What would Jesus do? ” is an anxious question, which has to do with the fear of being wrong before God or before others. “Believing in Jesus” frees us from this, if such believing is a becoming like Jesus: confident that God has us, whatever we do.

Morality still matters, of course. Doing what good we can matters, and any one of us could likely do more. But we no longer act out of fear of judgment, fear of getting it wrong. To believe in the one whom God has sent is to do as Jesus does, and what Jesus “does” – if we can call it that – is first of all to measure himself by the love God has for him. Everything else is just details.

So it is also for us: measure yourselves not by some calculated rightness of what you intend to do but by the love God has for you, and act in light of that love. What then comes from the details of our actions is God’s problem and not ours.

This is what Jesus would do, and he set us free that we can do it too.