* * *
During his final evening with the disciples, in those last,
precious moments before his arrest, Jesus says to them:
“As the
Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my
commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s
commandments and abide in His love. I have said these things to you so that my
joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment,
that you love one another as I have loved you.” (Jn. 15:9-12).
Whenever we come to Scripture—particularly to a passage like this where
we are confronted with the very mystery of God’s love—it is important that we do
so with the hope and the expectation that God’s Word is a word that unsettles
our own. God’s Word is a word that unsettles
our own. You see, often when we speak of the love of God, we do so in such
a way that, without even realizing it, we limit God—we restrict Him to the level
of our everyday experiences. We come to Scripture with a certain understanding
of “the way that love works,” and then we map that understanding onto the way
that God must love us. There is a certain sense in which this is unavoidable, of
course, for we always bring our prior experiences and understanding with us
when we come before God’s Word or when we offer ourselves to Him in prayer. But
we must be careful not to let our experiences determine the meaning of God’s Word, for it is God’s Word that ultimately
determines the meaning of our experiences. God’s
Word is a word that unsettles our own. Thus, we do not come to an
understanding of God by taking what we think we already know of love and then
somehow magnifying that into infinity. Rather, we only truly know what love is
by looking first to the God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ. For as we read
in the first letter of John, “whoever does not love does not know God, because
God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8).
Our passage begins with a rather remarkable analogy.
Jesus tells his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.”
Now, the Father’s love for Jesus is a thread woven throughout the entirety of
John’s Gospel. We read in chapter three, for instance, that “The
Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand” (3:35). What’s more, we discover in chapter seventeen that the Father
loved the Son even before the foundation
of the world (17:24). It is no small thing, then, for Jesus to draw a
likeness between the love of the Father for him and his love for each of us.
Such a love is not only completely beyond our comprehension—for we know that
the Son is of one being with the Father—but it is beyond anything that we could
ever hope to merit. For even considered in his humanity, as a man among other men
and women, Jesus lived a perfect and holy life, without sin, without
selfishness, without blemish of any kind. Of
course he was loved by the Father—there was nothing in him opposed to the
love of God. But how many of us can say the same? Who among us comes close to
the obedience of Jesus Christ—that obedience that permeates his life and
ministry and eventually leads to his death on a cross? Who are we then, that Christ
has chosen us to be the objects of his love?
We are the recipients of God’s
grace, the vessels of His mercy (Rom. 9:23).
For “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died
for us” (Rom. 5:8). There is a sense then in which Jesus Christ is the mediator
of the Father’s love to us—a love whose only proper analogy is the love of the
Father for the Son. For in Christ, we too are sons and daughters of the Most High
God (Eph. 1:5). And because we are sons and daughters, “God has sent the Spirit
of His Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba!—an Aramaic word best translated as
“daddy”—and Father!’” (Gal. 4:6). By this, therefore, “we know that we abide in
Him and He in us, because He has given us His Spirit” (1 Jn. 4:13). This is the
God whom we worship. This is the One whom we adore. And in this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us first
(1 Jn. 4:10)
What, then, are we to make of the following verse? Here, Jesus
tells the disciples, “Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will
abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in His
love.” Does not such a verse cut against the grain of God’s gracious love for
us? How are we to reconcile such a statement with the gratuity of the Gospel? I
believe that St. Augustine offers us a helpful interpretation here. According
to Augustine, “it is not… for the purpose of awakening His love to
us that we first keep His commandments; but this, that unless He loves us, we
cannot keep His commandments.”[1]
Keeping the commandments, therefore, is an effect
of the divine love, not its cause.
“For from the fact that God loves us, he influences us, and helps us to fulfill
his commandments, which we cannot do without grace.”[2]
The correct order here is pivotal for our understanding of the Gospel. We
cannot earn God’s love, as we so
often seek to do, both in the realm of religion and that of human
relationships. All that we can hope to do is to respond to God’s love by the
power of God’s Spirit that dwells within us. And just as the Father’s love for
Jesus is the model of Christ’s love for us, so “Christ wants his obedience to
be the model of our obedience.”[3]
In seeking to respond in faith and with thanksgiving to the love of God, we
look to Jesus for a life lived in perfect obedience.
Now, so
that we do not become overwhelmed at the thought of such a task, Jesus proceeds:
“I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in
you, and that your joy may be complete.” Despite the terrible connotations that
the world so often attaches to obedience, especially
obedience to God, “Jesus insists that his own obedience to the Father is
the ground of his joy; and he promises that those who obey him will share the
same joy.”[4]
Whereas we are often made to think that obedience to God is a burden, a cruel
and oppressive limit to our freedom, Christ reminds us that it is precisely in such
obedience that we experience true, lasting liberation. Haven’t we experienced
this in our own lives? Haven’t we tasted the joy of living in accordance with
God’s will? And haven’t we also felt the pain, the guilt, and the isolation of our
own sin and the sin of others? There is no joy in sin; there is only despair.
There is no life outside of God’s love; there is only death. The man or woman
who has experienced the love of God, who knows what it means to be freed from
the captivity of sin, does not consider the Lord’s commandments a burden, but
declares with the Psalmist, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul”
(Ps. 19:7).
All of this, of course, begs the important question: what is the
Lord’s commandment? What does it actually look like to live in accordance with
God’s perfect will? Christ tells his disciples, “This is my commandment, that
you love one another as I have loved you.” It is with this simple commandment,
therefore, that our passage comes full circle. As the Father loves
Jesus, so Jesus loves us, and graciously mediates the Father’s love to us. And
because we are loved by God, we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to obey his
commandments—that is, we are freed to love others as Christ has loved us. Such
a love is not merely an affectionate feeling, but an active commitment to the
ultimate good of another. Such a love is costly, for “by this we know love,
that Jesus laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one
another” (I Jn. 3:16). To love is
to sacrifice everything for the sake of the other, to place the needs of
another above our own. And yet, to love in this way is to abide in the love of Christ and to share in his joy. To love
in this way is to be caught up in the rhythm of God’s love, to participate in His
glorious ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18).
Let us love then, not in
word or speech, but in truth and action (1 Jn. 3:18), ever mindful that “we
love because He loved us first” (1 Jn. 4:19). In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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