Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 17, 2020

O God of Love, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

One of the things that has happened in this terrible time of pandemic is that our scripture stories of courage in the midst of devastation have become so much more real to me. As I said last week, the world-wide disruption caused by the covid-19 pandemic is deeply revealing, disclosing, exposing, clarifying – an apocalypse of biblical proportion. For many of us, our sense of time is all messed up, and I’m starting to think about recent chronological time as “before the pandemic era” and “after the pandemic era.” In these last eight weeks, it has seemed like time has been folding, very much like our Gospel reading for this morning – past, present and future feel particularly distorted and layered in this continuation of Jesus’ very long valedictory speech that is set in the evening before his nighttime arrest. This portion of Jesus’ parting words always reminds me of the instructions that my mother used to leave when I was in high school before my parents went away for a trip (and I always feared that they would leave us orphaned). I am the oldest child, so the list of instructions was accompanied by my mom’s admonition for me to use my best judgment. Okay, I would think, I will, but have you met my brothers and my sister?

Those of you who have heard me preach, know that I am endlessly fascinated by literature – both in the broad landscape of genre and form, and in the weeds of word choice and punctuation. The “farewell discourse” in the Gospel of John, written in the most popular Jewish literary genre of the time. The essential Jewishness of this text is important to highlight, with its emphasis on love as the center of the life of the community. Christians imitated and adopted the Jewish emphasis of love as the core value, the organizing principle of the people of God.[1] Jesus said to his closest followers, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” This sentence trips many people up because it sounds manipulative or coercive. But that’s really not what’s intended.  The word “if” can also be translated “when,” with a sense of probability. The verb “keep” is future active indicative (I know, I’m in the grammar weeds). So it’s more like when you love me you will be keeping my commandments. The word ‘keep’ here means watch over, attend to carefully, hold dear. When you love me you will be attending to my commandments carefully; you will be holding dear my commandments. 

It’s always good to review Jesus’ commandments according to John. In the Gospel of John, Jesus gives a lot of teaching speeches, but very few things that he says could be called commandments (and what gets called “The Great Commandment,” is not mentioned in the Gospel of John at all). There are, however, ten things that Jesus said in the Gospel of John that could be considered commandments. It’s a pretty good list. Here they are in order of appearance:

1. Do not complain among yourselves. (Jn. 6:43)
2. Do not judge by appearances.  (Jn. 7:24)
3. Anyone among you who is without sin, be the first to throw a stone (at the woman caught in the act of adultery…. no one threw any stones, by the way.) (Jn. 8:7)
4. Walk while you have light [and] … believe in the light, so that you may become children of light. (Jn. 12:35-36)
5. Wash one another’s feet. (In John, there is no commandment to remember Jesus in the sharing of bread and wine) (Jn. 13:14)
6. Love one another. (Jn. 13:34) 
7. Love one another. (Jn. 13:34)
8. Love one another. (Jn. 13:35) (this is not new, by the way, it’s old)
9. Do not let your hearts be troubled. (Jn. 14:1)
10. Believe in God, believe also in me…but if you don’t believe in me, believe in my works. (Jn. 14:1…11)

Then there’s a kind of a bonus commandment at the end of the Gospel, given to Peter after Jesus’ death, that we might understand as being for the foundation of the wider church: “feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep.”

Why would an extra commandment be a good thing? Well because the word for commandment (mitvah in Hebrew) and (entolay in Greek) doesn’t mean in either language quite what we tend to think in terms of a demand. Rather a mitzvah or an entoláy is a charge or a commission – an indication of intentionality – an expression of divine desire or longing and a statement of divine faith in people – a statement of belief, a creed if you will, that people can do the right thing if we’re told what the right thing is. I often say that the amazing thing about both the First and Second Testaments is that they are a vast collection of stories about God’s belief in people against all odds, in spite of mountains of evidence that it’s humans who are unbelievable!

A commandment in the Bible really is not a finger-shaking kind of order. It’s a behest – an urgent ask –that describes what God hopes for God’s people and what it means to be God’s people. And the best clues to that are in the verbs – the action words. In the commandment “love one another,” the verb love is in a form [2] which indicates continuing action. Grammatically, the verb is not in the form of a demand or an imperative. So too, in Hebrew, commandments to love are in the imperfect tense (which indicates incomplete action). If you love me, Jesus says, you will be loving one another (it’s a description of the future). When you are loving one another, that’s what loving Jesus is, that’s what loving God is, according to John. It’s all of a piece. Another way of putting it is that keeping commandments is not a condition but a sign. It’s not a sophomoric, “if you love me you will prove it by doing everything I ask.” It’s more like, “if you are planting impatiens, you will be watering them if you want them to live.” “If you are loving me,” Jesus is saying, “you will be loving one another,” and vice versa.

Jesus’ commandments are the signs or consequences of the central commandment – the most important commandment of the Torah – the Sh’ma, which is in the form of a direct order. The command is this: Listen. Hear. God [is] One. The most pressing directive in the Torah is to listen deeply to and for the Holy One. The promise is that when you listen, you will love God and you will love one another. That’s what happens when you listen with your whole being, with your whole life force, according to the Torah. Indeed, loving is a sign that you’ve been paying careful attention – that you have been attending carefully and listening deeply. The theology is quite circular here – listening deeply results in loving. Loving enhances listening. Loving God and loving neighbor is the way to loving Jesus. Loving Jesus is a way of listening to God. 

Now inevitably, the question comes up, well what if I don’t? It’s related to the questions What if I can’t? and What if I don’t want to? Their corollaries are:  well, he’s not doing it! and she’s not even trying! (And of course, this wouldn’t have had to be written down if everyone had been holding Jesus’ teachings dear.  Have you ever noticed what happens to love when either fear or self-righteousness takes over? [3] Have you ever noticed what happens to love when resources seem scarce or winning becomes most important?) Jesus’ answer in this passage is that God’s spirit will advocate on our behalf (as Jesus has been doing). And I think that this spirit will also advocate on God’s behalf (as Jesus has also been doing – because God clearly needs an advocate as well.) This spirit is holy because she is an advocator, advisor, counselor, consoler, exhorter, encourager, appealer, helper, champion. 

The Spirit in this passage can be understood to be all of those things (and more), which is to say, whatever is needed to support the mission. Jesus is saying to his followers, “I will not leave you orphaned.” Here the word in Greek is orphanous, so it’s tempting to translate it narrowly, but it literally means helplessly bereft, not just technically without parents. Jesus will not leave his followers helplessly bereft and unprotected. A better way to translate Jesus saying, “I am coming to you,” is “I am coming into you,” “I am entering you.” [4] Jesus is reminding them that his Spirit of Truth is in them, even if it is hard to see or feel in a community being torn apart by conflict and by fear, which is what scholars suspect was happening to the community for which the Gospel of John was written.

So for you, the voice of the Spirit of Truth might be the voice a beloved mentor or friend, the voice of a parent or grandparent, a voice in your head that connects with the love in your heart to become the Spirit of Truth in your soul, that is an advocator, advisor, counselor, consoler, exhorter, encourager, appealer, helper, champion – that leads you to brave and loving actions that do justice to the dignity of every human being, holding the teachings of Jesus dear, carefully attending to them. It’s also true of the voices in the head of this parish that connect with the love in the heart of this parish to become the Spirit of Truth in the soul of this parish – this Emmanuel Church in the City of Boston. Listen deeply because the voice of the spirit of truth is expansive and liberating, showing the life-giving and love-giving ways forward when all we can see are the narrow places, the tight spots and the hard and sad endings. We can know the voice of the spirit of truth best, most clearly within our intersecting communities of accountability (the parish is one, and I know many of you have others – the more, the better), in the rhythm of action and reflection, in the din and in the quiet. Together we can, in the words of 1 Peter, make an accounting for the hope that is in us with gentleness and reverence, and move bravely into the future.

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