The entire architecture of the Fourth Gospel is organised around a single verb. St. John never uses the noun “faith” (pistis); he uses instead the dynamic verb “to believe” (pisteuein) — and he does so more than ninety times. This is not a stylistic preference; it is a theological programme. John himself makes the programme explicit in the first conclusion of his Gospel: “These [signs] have been written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you might have Life through his Name.” (John 20:30–31)
Everything in John — the seven signs, the great discourses, the Passion narrative and the Easter appearances — is ordered toward this one end: forming in the reader a capacity to believe. The question, then, is precise: what does John mean by this verb?
1. A Dangerous Familiarity
The first obstacle to reading John well is the very familiarity of the word. “To believe” is a term every reader already inhabits, coloured by personal experience, by catechesis, by cultural assumption. The Johannine text passes through this pre-existing meaning almost without resistance, and the reader unconsciously projects it onto the evangelist’s words. This is a classic form of “psychological projection” — finding in the sacred text what one has already brought to it.
The wiser posture is one of deliberate poverty: to lay aside what “believing” means for us and ask, freshly, what it means for John. The discipline is modest but demanding. Its reward is considerable.
2. The Object of Believing: “That Jesus Is the Christ, the Son of God”
For John, “to believe” is never vague. It has a precise and irreducible object: “that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (20:31). This formulation is crucial. It holds together two realities that seem, at first, impossible to unify.
On one side: Jesus, the son of Mary and Joseph, the Galilean whose family is known — “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” (John 6:42). A human being, at most a great prophet. On the other side: the Christ, the Messiah, the one anointed with the Holy Spirit in its fullness — and beyond even that, the Son of God, God himself. Thomas’s cry at the end of the Gospel — “My Lord and my God!” (20:28) — is not an emotional exclamation; it is the culmination of the entire Johannine journey of believing.
To believe, for John, is thus to cross a threshold: to pass from seeing a man to touching, within that man, the Divine Nature. It is an act of perception made possible only by transformation.
3. Believing as Movement: An Approach, Not an Assent
The most important structural feature of John’s use of the verb is that “to believe” is consistently paired with motion toward Jesus. “Come to me” and “believe in me” are virtually interchangeable in his Gospel (see 6:35, 7:37–38, 10:41–42). To believe is to draw near. It is not primarily an intellectual assent — not the mind pronouncing a proposition correct — but a movement of the whole person toward the Person of Christ.
This movement has a goal: to reach, through the humanity of Jesus, the depths of His divinity. John expresses this goal with spatial precision. In 19:34, a soldier pierces the side of Jesus and immediately blood and water flow out — for John this wound is the open door of heaven (see 1:51), the access-point to the Holy Spirit. The Beloved Disciple stands there as witness: “he who has seen has borne witness” (19:35) — so that we too “may believe.” This is where the journey of believing leads: to the opened side, to the drawing of Blood, Water, and Holy Spirit from the depths of the crucified and glorified Christ.
Thomas makes the same gesture with his finger. He is invited to put his hand into the side of the Risen Lord (20:27). This physical act is the act of believing at its most concentrated: entering into the humanity of Jesus so deeply that one arrives at His divinity and exclaims, undone: “My Lord and my God.” Believing is this movement — an entry, a touching, a being-touched.
4. The Fruit of Believing: Eternal Life and the Holy Spirit
Throughout the Gospel, John associates the act of believing with the gift of Eternal Life and the gift of the Holy Spirit — and these two, for him, are ultimately one gift. “The person who believes in the Son has Eternal Life” (3:36). “He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from his belly” — and John immediately glosses: “Now this he said in reference to the Spirit” (7:38–39).
The logic is consistent: believing — as movement toward Christ, as entry into His depths — brings the believer into contact with the source of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the Christ, the one anointed with the Spirit in fullness, the one who breathes the Spirit upon his disciples (20:22). To reach Him truly is to be reached by Him — touched by His divinity, filled with His Spirit, introduced into the divine life He shares with the Father.
“His Name” — Yeshua, “God saves” — is the name into which believers are received. To believe in His Name (1:12) is to be introduced into the Son, and through the Son to become children of God: sharers in the divine nature.
5. The Six Signs: A Journey of Purification
If believing requires reaching the divinity of Jesus through and within His humanity, it follows that the capacity to believe must be cultivated — that there are obstacles within us which prevent that touch. John’s Gospel is structured as a progressive pedagogy for this purification. He selects not all the signs Jesus performed (20:30) but precisely six, each functioning as a halt on the journey, a healing of one layer of opacity within the believer.
The six signs are:
1. The Wedding at Cana (John 2)
2. The Healing of the Official’s Son (John 4)
3. The Healing of the Paralytic (John 5)
4. The Feeding of the Five Thousand (John 6)
5. The Healing of the Man Born Blind (John 9)
6. The Resurrection of Lazarus (John 11)
These are symbolised from the outset by the six stone water jars at Cana, designated explicitly for “purification” (2:6). Each sign purifies an impurity in our capacity to believe; each sign brings us one step closer to the point where no obstacle remains between us and the divine nature of Christ. The journey culminates at the Cross — where the side of Jesus is opened, where heaven is accessed, and where the Beloved Disciple stands as the model of the fully formed believer.
6. Believing as Transformation: “We Shall Be Like Him”
The First Letter of John provides the anthropological key to this entire journey: “We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). In John’s theology, sight and likeness are inseparable. One can only see what one has become capable of seeing; one becomes capable of seeing only through being transformed into the likeness of what is seen. This is why the deepest act of believing — seeing the divinity of Jesus — requires the deepest transformation in Him.
This transformation is the work of the Holy Spirit, received precisely through believing. The circle is not vicious but generative: believing opens the believer to the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit deepens the capacity to believe; deeper believing reaches further into the divine nature and draws more fully from it. “The work of God,” Jesus says, is precisely this: “that you believe in the one whom he has sent” (6:29). It is both the task and the gift.
When John, at the empty tomb, sees the burial cloths — the head-cloth folded separately from the linen — he “saw and believed” (20:8). What did he see and believe? The mystery of the Total Christ: Head and Body, the Risen Head already ascended, the Body (the Church) still on earth, distinct yet inseparably united in one mystical Person. To believe, at this depth, is to know oneself as the Body drawing Life from the Head, hooked to the Risen Christ, receiving from Him the river of divine Life.
Conclusion: The Golden Thread
“To believe,” for St. John, is not the intellectual performance of pronouncing a creed, nor the moral performance of living by a code. It is a movement of the whole person — purified through the journey of the six signs — into the depths of Jesus Christ, until the believer touches His divine nature and is touched by it, until the Holy Spirit flows, until the believer cries with Thomas “My Lord and my God,” and discovers, in that cry, Eternal Life.
Every element of the Fourth Gospel serves this single end. The signs are pedagogical stages of purification. The discourses are invitations to draw near. The Passion is the opening of the door to heaven. The Easter appearances are the final handing-over of that Life. And the entire Gospel — selected, shaped, arranged as it is — exists so that we, who read it, “might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, we might have Life through his Name” (20:31).
“Believing” in St. John
When we read St. John’s Gospel we are struck by the fact that for him “to believe” is so essential, and that the whole structure of his Gospel relies on that issue. All the architecture of his Gospel is meant to lead the reader, through a spiritual journey, to a clear goal: becoming capable of “believing”.
In his Gospel, St. John doesn’t use the word “faith”; instead, he seems to privilege the verb: “to believe”. The way he understands that spiritual, inner reality is very different from the common understanding.
Let us remember a very common pitfall: when we read the Bible we often operate a “psychological projection” on the words we find, applying a modern or personal meaning to words that seem the same, but are in reality different for this or that author of the Bible (St. John, St. Paul, …). Our reading of the Word of God becomes biased.
One of these cases of a biased reading is the verb “to believe” in St. John. It is more advisable to have the humility and purity to say that maybe St. John put a different meaning to it and that we should explore it, instead of unconsciously projecting our own idea of what is “to believe”. It is more challenging, maybe a tiny more demanding, but certainly wiser.
Below is how St. John presents the structure of his Gospel to us:
“While therefore Jesus did also do many other signs
in the sight of his disciples
which are not written in this book,
these [6 signs I gave you] have been written
so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and that believing, you might have Life through his Name.” (John 20:30-31)
For John, “to believe” is not vague or imprecise, as if saying saying: “I am a believer” without making it more precise (believer in what? in whom?). For him, it is “to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God”. “That Jesus”, the human Jesus we know, the son of Mary and Joseph, is THE Christ, the Son of God. Jesus, who appears to be just a human being (“Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” (John 6:42) ), at the most a Prophet (a great prophet, or “the” Prophet), is not only a human being, but He is infinitely much more: He is the Christ, the Messiah, the One who is full of the “Chrisma”, the “Unction”, i.e. the Holy Spirit, and He is the One who gives the Holy Spirit (“And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit'” (Jn 20:22)). John wants us to reach an important point of spiritual Growth that allows us to experiment that Jesus-the-man is the Son of God, God Himself (“my God” says Thomas in John 20:28). John wants us to get that close to Jesus, through a journey of purification and transformation, that there are no obstacles between Him and us, so we can touch Him with our “to believe” and be touched by Him, by His divinity to the point that we say with Thomas: “My God” (John 20:28).
“My Lord and my God”
We can only see Him as He is (i.e. God) if we are transformed in Him, made like Him: “we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2).
What is “to believe”? Intellectually, with our will, we can say that Jesus IS God, but this is not the goal of St. John, this is not “to believe” for him. He wants us to be that much transformed in Jesus that we are made similar to Him, capable of being touched by His Divinity, capable of being united to His Divinity, with no obstacles between Him and us.
St. John offers us in his Gospel 6 Signs. They are like 6 stops, each one purifying our faith from an impurity. These stops prepare us to “enter in the side of Jesus” (see John 19:34), as the “heaven opened” (John 1:51), from where we draw Water, Blood, and the Holy Spirit (see John 19:30.34).
_________
Here below, you can find important quotations from St. John’s Gospel (in red) that help us to better understand what it is “to believe” and what it brings us. Each quote is followed by a short comment (in black), helping us understand the initial verses of St. John: 20:30-31 we mentioned earlier.
1:12: “But to all who did receive him, to those believing in His Name, he gave the right to become children of God.”
“His Name”, Jesus, means: “God saves”, God introduces us in Him, in the Fire of His Love. Introducing us in the Son, we become adoptive sons in Him: “children of God”.
2:23: “And while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover during the Festival, many believed in His Name – seeing the signs he was doing.”
As you see, John uses again the same expression “believing in His Name”. It comes as a result of “seeing the Signs”. Now, about the signs: remember that John gives us 6 signs that are 6 halts for our purification. They are symbolised by the 6 “water jars” in Cana’s wedding meant for the “purification” (see John 2:6):
1- Cana of Galilee (John 2) 2- Healing the Official’s son (John 4) 3- Healing the Paralytic (John 5) 4- Feeding the five thousands (John 6) 5- Healing the man born blind (John 9) 6- The Resurrection of Lazarus (John 11)
3:14: “And as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, in like manner the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 so that everyone who believes in him may have Eternal Life. 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him would not perish, but have Everlasting Life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. 18 The person who believes in him is not condemned. The person who does not believe, is condemned already, because he has not believed in the Name of God’s only begotten Son.”
3:36: “The person who believes in the Son, has Eternal Life, but the one who disobeys the Son will not see life, but rather, the wrath of God remains upon him.”
“Everlasting Life”: Believing makes us get closer to Jesus, who is the Giver of “Life”. “Life” is the Holy Spirit, “Life” is: the divine life we are called to share. “saved through Him”: Jesus saves (this is His Name).
4:42: “And to the woman they said, “No longer because of your talk do we believe; for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man truly is the Saviour of the world.””
To believe that Jesus is the “Saviour of the world” = believing in His Name.
5:24: “Truly, truly I say to you, the person who hears my word and believes the One who sent me, has Eternal Life, and is not going into judgment, but has crossed over out of death into Life. 25 Truly, truly I say to you, a time is coming, and is now come, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, 38 and the ones who hear will Live. 26 For just as the Father has Life in Himself, so He has granted to the Son to have Life in himself. 5:27 And to him he has given authority to do the judging, because he is the son of a human.”
6:29: “Jesus answered, and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in that one whom he has sent.””
All John’s Gospel is here: accomplish the “work of God”: to reach the point, after purification, of being able to believe fully that Jesus is God. Reaching the God in Him.
6:30: “So they said to him, “What Sign then are you performing, so that we may see, and believe you? […]”
6:35: “Jesus said to them, “I am the Bread of Life. The person who comes to me, would by no means hunger, and the one believing in me would by no means thirst, ever.”
Believing in Jesus = getting closer to Him, in order to draw from Him the Holy Spirit. But as well to “eat Him” directly. He “eats” us as well and introduces us in Him. To believe is to come to Him, to get closer, and to draw from Him Eternal Life: the Holy Spirit.
6:40: “For this is the will of my Father: that anyone looking to the Son and believing in him would have Eternal Life, and I would raise him up at the last day.”
John, repeating himself: looking at Jesus, His human side, and believing that He is God… makes us reach His Divinity, and receive the Holy Spirit: Divine Life.
6:47: “Truly, truly I say to you, the person who does believe in Me has Eternal Life. 48 I am the Bread of Life.”
Same mechanism of the act of faith.
7:37: “And in the great and final day of the festival, there stood Jesus. And he cried out, saying, “If anyone is thirsty, he should come to Me and drink: 38 he who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from His belly.” 39 Now this He said in reference to the Spirit, whom those believing in Him were about to receive. For the Spirit was not yet present, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.”
“Come to Me” = to believe. “streams of Living Water” = the Holy Spirit. He is the giver of the Holy Spirit. Believing is going to Him and drawing from Him the Holy Spirit.
8:23: And he said to them, “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world. 24I said to you that you will die in your sins. For if you do not believe that I am who I am, 72 you will die in your sins.”
“who I am” = I am God. Which is what He says in John 20:30-31: we are invited to believe (get closer) that He is God. If we don’t reach the bottom of His Being (His divinity), we won’t get the Holy Spirit.
10:24: “If you are the Christ, tell us clearly.” 25 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I am doing in the Name of my Father, these testify for me. 26 Yet, you are not believing, because you are not of my sheep. 27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 And I give to them Eternal Life, and they will by no means perish, into all time, and no one will snatch them out my hand.”
John is repeating in a dramatic way the central point of his Gospel.
10:41: And many came to Him. And they were saying, “Though John performed no miraculous sign, everything John said about this man was true.” 42 And many there believed in Him.
“came to Him” = “believed in Him”
10:14: “So then, Jesus said to them plainly, “Lazarus died. 15 And for your sakes I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.”
The 6th signs, like all the others are made to help us “believe”, grow in the act of believing, and be purified in it.
10:25: “Jesus said to her, “I am the Resurrection, and the Life. The person who believes in me, even though he dies, will live; 26 and everyone who is living and believes in Me, will never die. Do you believe this?” 27 She says to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one expected to come into the world.””
Believing is to get close, to draw Divine Life from Jesus: this will make us live. Again, as in John 20:30-31, Jesus stresses on the necessity to believe that he is the Christ, the Son of God.
11:40: “Jesus says to her, “Did I not tell you, that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” 41 They therefore took away the stone. And Jesus lifted his eyes aboveward, and said, “Father, I thank you, that you have heard me. 42 But I already knew that you always hear me; only for the sake of the crowd standing around did I say this, so that they may believe that it was you who sent me.”[…] 45 Many of the Jews therefore, of those who had come to Mary and seen what he did, believed in him.”
Believing, will help us “enter in Jesus” and be touched by His Divinity: we’ll “see” then “the Glory of God”. Jesus makes the Miracle (Sign) so people “may believe”. We have the same logic as in 20:30-31: the Signs are here to help us go from the humanity of Jesus to His Divinity.
12:37: “But, though having done so many Signs right in front of them, they were not believing in Him, 38 so that the word of Isaiah the prophet would be fulfilled, which said, “Lord, who has believed our report? And the Arm of the Lord, to whom has it been revealed?” 39 Because of this they were not able to believe: that again, Isaiah said, 40 “He has blinded their eyes, and he has hardened their hearts, so that they would neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts, nor look back around, such that I would heal them.” 41 Isaiah said these things, because he saw Jesus’ glory, so he spoke about Him.”
The goal of St. John is not to show us all the Signs that Jesus made, but to focus on 6 of them, setting them as halts/healing of healing, purification and transformation. It is true as well that the sign is meant to be seen, and through seeing it, we are invited to go beyond it and benefit directly by the healing Power of the Holy Spirit. This journey of growth and purification improves our capacity to believe, until we reach a point were we are ready, transformed in Him, not having any obstacle between Him and us. We then reach the Side of Jesus (John 19:34) which is for John the opened heaven (John 1:51). The Disciple is formed, and is capable of accessing the depths of His Master, and capable of drawing Blood, Water, Holy Spirit. One accesses the Divinity of Jesus, His Glory. One “sees his Glory”. Paradoxically His Glory appears on the Cross (much before the Resurrection). Do you see his point?
12:44: “But Jesus cried out, and said, “The person believing in me, is not believing in me but in the One Who sent me, 45 and the one looking upon me, is looking upon the one who sent me. 46 I have come into the world as a Light, so that everyone believing in me may not abide in darkness.”
First: believing as we see it is a progressive journey into accessing the Divinity of Jesus. The Father and the Son are one God, one Nature. So if we believe in Him (i.e. access His Divine Nature), obviously we access the Divine Nature of the Father. There is only one Divine Nature. Secondly: The Divine Nature is Light and Love. Light and Love are our food and oxygen. “believing” in Him means accessing His depths, His divine Nature: Light a Love.
13:19: “Yes indeed: I am telling you before it happens, so that when it happens, you may believe who I am.”
“when it happens” means: when the suffering, the crucifixion, and the death on the Cross will happen. Remember this leads to an opening of Heaven (the Side of Jesus), the access to the Divine Nature in Jesus is facilitated again. Believing who He IS, means: accessing His Divine Nature.
14:10: “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The statements which I say to you I do not speak from myself, but the Father abiding in me is doing his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. But if not, believe because of those works. 12 The person who believes in me, truly, truly I say to you, the works that I do, that one also shall do, and even greater than these shall do, because I am going to the Father. 13 Indeed, whatever you shall request in my Name, this I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 If you ask me for something in my name, I will do it.”
Same as above: believing is accessing the Divine Nature of the Son – the same Nature of the Father. Accessing the depths of the Son means being transformed in and united with Him. This means that He is alive in us, and works with us, through us. We do “greater works” because He is in us and through us. It is a much bigger victory and realisation.
14:28: “You heard how I said to you, ‘I am going away, and will be coming to you.’ If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. 29 And now I have told you, before it happens, so that when it happens, you will believe.”
When the His Side will open, we can access Heaven (the Divine Nature).
16:31: “Jesus answered them, “For now you believe? 32 Behold, an hour is coming, and indeed has come, that you will be scattered apart, each to his own, and me you will have abandoned, alone. Yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.”
The last step in the purification happens during the Passion.
19:35: “And the one who has seen has borne witness, and his testimony is reliable, and he knows that he is saying something true; so you may believe.”
This moment is of paramount importance: at the Cross, John sees the side of Jesus opened, and he discovers that this is the Real Door to Heaven. He testifies to us, so we know where we should go in order to receive the Holy Spirit.
20:8: “Then at that time the other disciple entered, the one who had arrived to the tomb first; and he saw and believed. 9 For they did not yet understand the scripture that he had to rise from the dead.”
What he saw is mentioned the verses before: “He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen.” John is presenting us here a very deep aspect of Jesus: the “Total Christ” is Head and Body. We are his mystical Body (see John 2:21). What John saw and made him believe is first that unity of the head and the body, but as well, and much more, the fact that the Head now is Risen, and is going to Ascend, and the Body (them) is still on earth, continuing the mission of the Son. John saw the cloth separate from the linen, the head separate from the body. He saw that, and believed: the unity of the one Total Christ, and the two different parts of Christ: his Head and His Body. They communicate, they belong to one Mystical Person, one “Total Christ”. Who believes is part of the Body. “To believe” is to be hocked to the Head, communicate with the Head and draw from it the Divine Life. He believed in the Resurrection: that the cloth that had been around Jesus’ head was folded up by itself, risen, separate from the linen. The Head though is distinct, but not cut from the Body.
20:27: “Thereupon he says to Thomas, “Bring your finger here, and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believing.” 28 Thomas responded and said to him, “My Lord and my God.” 29 Jesus says to him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those believing without having seen.”” This is really one of the highest points in St. John’s Gospel: this finger, introduced in Jesus’ side, and, as a result, being touched by Jesus Divine Nature: “my God”… All this movement in fact is the movement itself of “believing”. Seeing the divinity of Jesus, entering into his Human Nature more deeply, and finally reaching His Divine Nature.
