If you love me
Readings: John 14. 15-21
We’re following up directly on last weeks passage (preached by a visiting Priest during my annual leave and so not available on the website), and as a reminder we’re in the middle of a big chunk in John’s Gospel referred to as the ‘farewell discourse’ this is a long conversation Jesus is having with his disciples at the Last Supper the night he was betrayed. And it’s important to have that context in our minds whenever we read a part of the farewell discourse because it reminds us that when Jesus is talking about the future, what will happen, we are still pre-crucifixion, and so lots of what he says will happen isn’t in our future now, like we’re still waiting for it, but has already happened in the weeks that will follow this conversation, the weeks we are remembering at the moment as we journey through Eastertide.
And the question we are faced with in todays portion is this: how do we reveal our love for Jesus? What is it that shows we love Jesus?
Now if I asked you that question over tea and coffee later, without today’s Gospel reading, what do you think you’d say? You’d know I love Jesus by how much time I spend reading the Bible and praying. I spend time with him in those ways and that shows my love. Or perhaps you’d say that your love for him is shown in the way you worship, the passion you bring to that, perhaps not, we are British, and Anglican after all. Or maybe you’d say you can tell I love Jesus because I talk about him a lot, and I want to share him with other people, share the Gospel with those who don’t know him yet, that’s how you know I love him. Maybe something else.
All of those are great things, important things, it’s good to be doing all of that, but they don’t get to the core of how we show our love for Jesus. You can read the Bible and not be a Christian, simply analysing it or trying to draw lessons from it.
You can worship and your heart can be far from him. That’s a surprising one isn’t it. But it happens throughout the Old Testament, all the outward stuff looked great but God keeps telling them their hearts aren’t in it, they don’t truly love him. You can talk about Jesus all the time, but not really love him. I remember hearing the story of an evangelist who was sharing Jesus passionately before he was saved. He’d grown up in the church, knew all the jargon, all the stuff, wanted to share the Gospel, but hadn’t really experienced it for himself until later. Wonderfully God still used his work to enable people to come to faith, until finally he came to a living faith himself and could continue much more genuinely.
So how is our love for Jesus revealed then? Jesus says ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments’. If we claim to love him, we will do as he commands, we will live as he calls us to. And what I love about this is that it’s something really concrete, it’s something you can point to. It’s not rooted in having an emotional experience in worship, that’s something that’s intangible, wonderful when it happens, but also fleeting.
How do we know we love him? How do others see that we love him? We are living for him, living as he commands. Reading the Bible, praying, evangelising, they are all things he commands, so we’re meant to be doing those things. But it’s bigger than that, it’s a whole new way of life. And some of it will come more naturally to us than others, some of it will neatly align with our lives before we put our faith in him, some of it grate against it. To stick with those three examples, the more bookish among us may naturally open our Bibles more readily and spend time there, but may well recoil at the idea of heading onto the streets to talk to people about our faith. And there will be the extroverts among us who get excited about the idea and exercise of telling others about Jesus, it comes naturally, but perhaps find they may harder to still themselves to focus in prayer.
Living in obedience to him means growing in following him, in the stuff that comes more naturally, and also, perhaps especially, the things that don’t.
And it’s also worth pointing out following the recent Senedd elections that Jesus’ commands span across the political spectrum. Whatever our politics, whether we lean Left or Right, or somewhere in the Centre, we will find within Jesus’ commands stuff that neatly aligns with us, and stuff that challenges us, he doesn’t fit neatly on the Left or the Right. And so if you find that Jesus always agrees perfectly with you, or aligns perfectly with your preferred political outlook it’s worth looking at him again, looking deeper.
For example he commands us to care for the poor, the sick, the orphan, the widow and the refugee, stuff we’d classically align with the Left. But he also commands us to be subject to the ruling authorities and to earn our way in life, stuff that classically aligns more with the Right. He always challenges us, particularly in the excesses of political outlooks. Jesus’ commands both confirm and challenge us all in different ways.
Our love for him is revealed by our keeping of his commands. And he doubles down on it at the end of the portion we read today ‘Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me’. There’s no getting around this. If we claim to love him, but live as we please without reference to his commands, we reveal we do not love him, that our profession is either a lie, or that it has not yet been fully realised.
But the filling in this sandwich, is something joyous, something wonderful. Because as Jesus issues that declaration, he also tells us that he is sending another, another like him. That if we love him he will send to us the Holy Spirit, and that this Spirit is both the Spirit of truth, and our helper.
First the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth. Being fully God, just as Jesus is fully God (as well as fully human) the Spirit will bring to us the truth. If there is no falsehood in God, no lies, then all he can bring is truth. And as Jesus continues beyond our passage today he says that the Spirit ‘will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you’. The Spirit is given to enable us to hear and understand and retain Jesus’ commands. Because as we read his commands in Scripture it is the Holy Spirit who enables us to understand what Jesus us saying and it is the Holy Spirit who convicts us when we realise we have not kept them. He reveals both the truth of the commands and the truth in us, opens our eyes to see things more clearly. He shows us the truth.And so if you’re sat there thinking, gosh, if I love Jesus I should be keeping his commands, how am I going to remember them all? That’s why he has given us the Spirit, to remind us and teach us all that Jesus has said and taught.
And the Holy Spirit is also our helper. If you were listening to the first half of the sermon and starting to despair slightly, thinking of the ways you fail to keep Jesus’ commands, wondering if you really love him at all, I have good news. Firstly the fact you’re bothered by that reveals you do love him, secondly he doesn’t leave us alone to fight the battle, as he tells us, he will not leave us as orphans. And that language conjures up that image of helpless children who need support and help but haven’t got it, it’s been taken from them. Jesus will not leave us live that, he is sending the Holy Spirit. And this Spirit, who lives within us, empowers us to keep the commands of Jesus.
It’s not just us fighting on alone whilst Jesus watches on, keeping an eye out to check how much we love him. No, he has given us the Spirit who empowers us, strengthens and enables us to obey his commands.
I would encourage you to spend some time today, this week, reflecting on your life. Does your life reveal a love for Jesus in your following of his commands? Are you living for him, or are you still living as you see fit? Jesus tells us that if we love him we will obey his commands, but he does not leave it at that. Whichever it is take heart from his promise, that if we love him he will send the Holy Spirit to dwell within us, and that this Spirit will enable us to both understand and remember, and obey Jesus’ commands. And so our obedience no longer depends merely on the power of our love for him, but on the power of his Spirit given in love to us.
And as we reflect on our lives may we be encouraged by the wonderful promise he ends this section with: ‘The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them’. If we love him, the Father pours out his love upon us, and Jesus pours out his love upon us, and we will see him, for now in our hearts, but one day face to face.
Amen.