John 14:15-29
If You Love Me
James Sledge May
22, 2022
When I was growing up, the Church was
nestled much more comfortably into the culture than it is nowadays. Stores,
movie theaters, and other activities all shut down on Sundays, ceding the day
to churches. In the south, where I was raised, schools also wouldn’t schedule
events on Wednesday evenings because many churches held suppers and Bible
studies on those nights.
Christ Taking Leave of His Disciples
Duccio di Buoninsegna, Maesta Altarpiece
Museo dell'Opera Metropolitana del Duomo
Siena, Italy
It was not unusual for a teacher to pray in my classrooms, and once a year, the Gideons came to my school and handed out their little pocket-sized Gideon’s Bibles. When I played on sports teams in junior and senior high school, we invariably said the Lord’s Prayer right before the game or match.
Billy Graham had a daily advice column in the local newspaper, and one of the local TV newscasts featured regular religious commentary from a prominent, local pastor. Christian faith was so intertwined with the culture it was at times difficult to tell when one ended and the other started. To a significant degree, the Church was propped up by this arrangement as the culture actively encouraged and even coerced church involvement.
To varying degrees, the Church had sold its soul in order to get this cushy arrangement, but nevertheless, it begin to disintegrate during the 1960s and 70s. For a variety of reasons, the culture decided it no longer needed to prop up the Church, and society started to become more and more secular. Many vestiges of that time still exist, things such as prayers to open sessions of Congress or prayers at presidential inaugurations, but by and large, the Church has been left to its own devices.
Denominations like Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Methodists benefited immensely from that old arrangement with the culture, and so we suffered more when the arrangement ended. Many long time Presbyterians felt like the Church had come unmoored, and there was a sense of being abandoned by society. For some of us, the realization is still sinking in that we are on our own, that we are alone in a world that isn’t sure that it needs us.
When the gospel of John was written, likely some 50 or 60 years after that first Easter, its recipients were feeling isolated and unmoored. We tend to think of the gospels as being written to introduce people to Jesus, but all four gospels were written to church congregations who already knew the story of Jesus. They were written to address certain concerns and issues that had arisen.
John’s congregation was a group of Jewish Christians who still thought of themselves as Jews. For decades this congregation had considered the local synagogue its home. They held some of their worship in members’ homes, but they still held meetings at the synagogue, attended local festivals at the synagogue, and considered themselves good Jews.
But the latter part of the first century was a tumultuous time for Judaism. The Romans had destroyed Jerusalem, along with its magnificent Temple in 70 AD. For all intents and purposes, that put an end to priestly Judaism and all that went with that. The center of Judaism shifted from the Temple to the synagogue. Rabbinical Judaism became the primary form of the faith and as a part of that power shift, Christian Judaism began to be pushed out of the synagogue.
The members of John’s congregation thought of themselves as Jews who followed their Jewish Messiah, Jesus. To lose their place in the synagogue was to lose their moorings. Their old support system was gone, and they felt abandoned, alone.
To people facing this predicament, the words of Jesus from our scripture this morning were especially reassuring. “I will not leave you orphaned… Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”
They are not abandoned or alone. Jesus himself will be with them. Close relationship with Jesus was not a one-time thing experienced only by a few fortunate disciples. Those who loved Jesus would find him dwelling in them. “…you in me, and I in you,” says Jesus. And the secret to all this is love.
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” If you love me… That can be a loaded, manipulative phrase. A young child might say to a parent, “If you love me, you will buy me that video game.” The statement isn’t true, but it is rooted in a truth that even small children have come to understand. Loving someone is supposed to be accompanied by particular actions that express that love.
Love isn’t something abstract. It must take shape for it to be real. That’s true of romantic love, and it’s even more true of the love Jesus speaks of in our scripture. When Jesus speaks of loving him, of loving enemies, or of loving one another, the gospels use a word that gets translated as “love” in English, but it is a very particular form of love.
The Greek of the New Testament has a distinct word to speak of romantic love, but that word is not used in the gospels, or anywhere in the New Testament. Instead is a word that has at times been translated “charity,” although is a much broader understanding of the word than we typically have today.
The love Jesus commands is not a feeling. It is a deliberate striving for the good of the other, even when that is personally costly. It is the love seen most clearly in the life of Jesus, who would even lay down his own life for the sake of others.
This sort of love is at the heart of who God is, who Jesus is. This is the sort of love with which God “so loves the world.” And this is the sort of love that keeps us in relationship with Jesus, with God.
I think I’ve previously shared a quote from Anne Lamott where she is talking about making her teenage son go to church. She writes, “Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don’t get to meet people who love God back. Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.”[1]
I think she’s right, especially when we’re talking about the sort of love Jesus commands. Self-giving love is difficult, more so when the person we’re supposed to love is unkind to us or has hurt us. But churches are supposed to be places where people learn to love as Jesus loved because churches are supposed to be Spirit filled places where the love of God is palpable. And the promise that Jesus makes us is that when we try to love, however imperfectly, the Spirit will be with us, guiding us, teaching us, empowering us to love in ways that mark us as the people of Jesus.
Sometimes I think that the church that I grew up in, a church that no longer exists, was so dependent on and intertwined with the culture that we didn’t worry much about the Spirit. We had the culture to support us as long as we did our job of training people to be good and moral. I rarely heard anyone talk about the Holy Spirit in that church.
But now we have the chance to firmly anchor ourselves to the love of God through the Spirit. When we strive to be a community of love, Jesus promises to dwell in us through the Spirit, equipping us to be an alternative sort of community that is marked by love.
“I will not leave you orphaned,” says Jesus. We are not on our own. When we seek to love one another, the love of God in Christ comes to us. God dwells in us, and the Spirit empowers us to be an amazing community that shares the grace, wholeness, and renewal of being God’s beloved with all whom we encounter.
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