On loving seeing
John 14:15-21 Easter 6
If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
First, for Jesus and his contemporaries, the commandments were deeper and richer than mere commands. Not laws; precepts that are simply to be obeyed, no questions asked, the commandments were lore; the whole accumulation, over generations, of what it means to be a human being. How to live fully as a child, a parent, how to work, be in a family, die; all that is essential to human life and community.
The Ten Commandments are the PowerPoint slides of a whole culture. Behind each commandment is a whole way of being. Honour your father and your mother, or Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, are not rules to be followed, but the headlines for all the cultural norms, stories, and practices that underlie those brief reminders and give them flesh and meaning.
Commandment as law is something to be done. Commandment as lore is something to be; a way of life, a story about life that you embrace and inhabit. Law is observance; lore is emersion.
So, what are Jesus’s commandments?
The first three mentions of commandments in John’s gospel are commandments that the Father has given to Jesus. In the first of these, Jesus recognises that the Father has given him the power of agency; he can lay down his life and take it up again (John 10:18). In the second and third, the Father has given him a commandment about what to say and what to speak (John 12:49; 14:31).
Behind these headlines/PowerPoint slides lies the radical reality of a deep, engaged relationship between the divine and the mortal. In the ancient world, the relationship between father and son, and between heir and father, was the vital determinant of the health of the family/clan. Jesus is called Son of God, close to the Father’s heart (John 1:18). This relationship is intimate.
Father is this gospel’s favourite way of speaking of divine reality. In the ancient world, families and clans were centred around fathers: They made the weather. Father, for Jesus in John’s gospel, is the one around whom the whole of the created order coalesces. In the beginning is how the gospel and the first ancient story of the origin of everything begin (Genesis 1:1; John 1:1). Father is the first mover, the originator and sustainer of life. To experience Father, in John’s gospel, is to experience deep connection to reality as it was created to be in original goodness, to be in resonance with all that is, to be fully human, fully alive, and fully present (John 1:14; 5:19).
They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.
Living out of this divinely engaged worldview, this intimate divine/mortal relationship, this experience of full and abundant life, it makes sense that Jesus’ other mentions of commandments are all connected to love (John 13:34, 35; 14:15, 21, 23, 31; 15:10, 12, 17).
In this gospel, love is the word the author chooses to denote the relationship between the divine and the mortal, between the creative energy that birthed the universe and all that was birthed. Love denotes the interaction and interdependence of everything that exists. It is the glue of the cosmos, the connective tissue that holds all things together.
And it is more. Love does not just bring and hold all that exists into one whole; love is the nature and elements of all that exists. Love is both the structure and the architecture of the universe. It is the Strong Nuclear Force and Electromagnetism—it creates the very essence of all that is. The likely author of John’s gospel will put this later in a letter as: God is love (1 John 4:8, 16).
Because love is connexional energy, we experience it as relational. Jesus and the author of John use Father and Son, children of God, Son of Man, and friend to express and explore the relational dynamism of this universal reality in our individual and collective reality.
Those who have Jesus’ commandments are those who are immersed in and operate in lore-not-law love-made reality. We could rewrite Jesus’ words here as, “Lovers live in love and know they are loved, and love will reveal love’s universal truth.”
To have and to keep Jesus’ commandments is not to have a list of tasks to accomplish but to have and experience abundance, grace, and joy. Those who know they are living in the reality of a love-made, love-functioning, love-generating universe do not need to be commanded to live in love and truth any more than they need to be commanded to breathe—love is all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28).
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.
Another Advocate is in keeping with the abundance reality of this gospel (John 2:10; 6:13; 10:10). Here is the grace upon grace true nature of the universe enacted (John 1:16). An additional experience of the uncontainable dynamic reality of the creational goodness? Yes, please!
The Spirit of truth, the experience of reality in all its creationally good light and life, is here starkly contrasted with the world.
This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him.
In this gospel, the world is any system (Rome, in the first and second centuries) structured around power and control, hubris, and the fragile fantasy that human beings are lords of the earth and reality’s final arbiter. It is to this cosmos of chaos that the spirit brings order in the first Genesis creation story (Genesis 1:1-2). It is to this patently fabulous construction that John’s new, in-the-beginning story brings the Spirit of truth, illuminating reality: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it (John 1:1-5).
However, the pseudo-shadow world of empires, systems, and desperate ego schemes energetically refuses reality like a late sleeper refuses the dawn; He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him (John 1:10). In the gloom, we invent explanations and stories for the dark, unknowable shapes around which stumble and trip: we do not see or know.
The Jesus of John’s gospel lives fully immersed in and engaged with the truth of existence; in an unmediated, interdependent relationship to the divine and all that emerges from divine action (John 1:1-2). Like a son enveloped in a father’s love, Jesus does not need fantasies to construct a life but can live secure in the truth that his life is a free gift of grace (John 1:14)
You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you. I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
The truth, Jesus says, is eternally with us and in us. While self-righteous refusal remains and myopic energy and ego persist, not seeing becomes such a habit for us that we are convinced we do not see because there is nothing to see. However, when we fully live, embracing cosmic reality/truth, when we see that the good wine, the living water and abundance are everywhere, always, we begin to see truth everywhere (John 2:10; 4:9-10; 10:10). Our minds/psyches/spirits become tuned to see. Truth cannot be thwarted; it is always coming to us, continually and dynamically being cosmic reality: as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14).