John 6:36

Ver. 36. “ But I said unto you: you have seen me, and yet you do not believe. ”

They had asked to see in order to believe (John 6:30). But this condition was long since fulfilled: they have seen Him in all His greatness and goodness, as much as was necessary to believe, and yet the effect is not produced: you do not believe. Jesus has the right to draw this conclusion even from their request. No doubt they had faith enough to ask Him for the miraculous bread, but not to recognize Himself as the heavenly bread. This proves that they are still strangers to the spiritual needs which might lead them to Him, and to the work which He came to accomplish here on earth. This is what is signified to an ear as sensitive as that of Jesus by the prayer: “ Give us,” while they already possess Him Himself. In this way they end by revealing their moral stupidity. Comp. two equally rapid and decisive judgments, the one at Jerusalem (John 2:19), the other at Nazareth (Luke 4:23).

To what earlier saying does Jesus allude in the expression: “ I said unto you? ” The words in John 4:48 may be thought of, in which the relation between the two ideas of seeing and believing is altogether different. The declaration of John 5:37, of which de Wette, Lucke, and Reuss, think, has also a very different meaning, and besides it was uttered in Judea. There is nothing here which troubles Reuss. On the contrary, in his view this only proves more evidently this fact: “That in the mind of the redactor all these discourses are addressed to one and the same public, the readers of the book.” In order that this conclusion should be well founded, it would be necessary that no other more exact reference should present itself. Others suppose that Jesus cites a saying which John has not mentioned; but, in that case, to what purpose recall it expressly by the formula of quotation: I said to you? Meyer proposes to translate εἶπον ὑμῖν by: dictum velim, “regard it as said.” This sense is unexampled in the New Testament.Bruckner thinks that Jesus is calling to mind His whole teaching in general. But this expression indicates a positive citation.

Jesus quotes Himself here, as He often quotes the Old Testament, according to the spirit rather than according to the letter. On the arrival of the multitude, He had said to them: “ You have seen signs, and yet you seek Me only for the renewal of material satisfaction and not because of Myself.” It is this charge of John 6:26 which He repeats here in a little different form. “ You have seen Me,” corresponds with: “ you have seen signs; ” and “ you do not believe,” with “ you seek Me only for the sake of the flesh and not that your soul may be satisfied.” To say to Him: “ Give us,” when one has Him as present was not this to refuse to believe in Him as the true gift of God? The reading of the Sinaitic and Alexandrian MSS.: you have seen (without με, me), undoubtedly sets forth better the contrast between seeing and believing. The Alexandrian MS. itself, however, replaces the pronoun after πιστεύετε (μοι), and in the entire context it is the person of Jesus which plays the chief part. The two καί... καί (and...and), are untranslatable: they forcibly bring out the moral contrast between the two facts which they so closely bring together.

Between this word of condemnation and the calm and solemn declaration of the following verses (John 6:37-40), there is a significant asyndeton. This omission of any connecting particle indicates a moment of silence and profound meditation. Jesus had received a signal from His Father; in the joy of His heart, He had given a feast to all this people; He had made for them a miraculous Passover. And these dull hearts have not understood it at all. They ask again for bread, the earth still and nothing but the earth, while He had desired, by means of this figurative repast, to offer them life, to open to them heaven! In the presence of this failure, which for Him is the prelude of the grand national catastrophe, the rejection of the Messiah, Jesus communes with Himself; then He continues: “It is in vain that you do not believe! My work remains, nevertheless, the Father's work; it will be accomplished without you, since it must be; and in the fact of your exclusion nothing can be laid to my charge; for I limit myself to fulfilling in a docile way, at each moment, the instructions of my Father!” Thus the painful check which He has just experienced does not shake His faith, He rises to the contemplation of the assured success of His work in the hearts which His Father will give Him; and by protesting His perfect submissiveness to the plan of the Father, He lays upon the unbelievers themselves the blame of their rejection, and thus addresses to their consciences the last appeal.