Sometimes I feel like a broken record here. But to my defense, Jesus’ teachings are for the most part pretty straight forward and variations on a few themes. We’re just not very good at embodying them. But, at the risk of repeating myself, one of the strangest and most frightening trends in contemporary Christianity is the prevalence of ‘Christians’ who claim, for one reason or another, that we don’t need to follow Jesus’ ethical teachings. The irony of this is that these people are generally among the first to insist that Jesus is our “Lord” and our “King” — as though disobeying one’s Lord or King has ever ended well! But, if we needed another reminder of what exactly Jesus, our Lord and King, expects from us, today’s Gospel reading makes it clear right from the jump.
The passage in question is part of a larger discourse in which he tries to prepare his disciples for his eventual departure (more on that later), and takes the form of Jesus’s answer to a question from one of his disciples, who’d asked him how it is that he will reveal himself to his followers but not to the whole world. Jesus begins his response:
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. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me. (John 14.23-24)
Here we have it as plain as day: If we love Jesus, we will follow his teaching; if we do not follow his teaching, then we do not love him. It’s as simple as that.
If this is the case, then loving Jesus looks like rejecting ideas of ritual purity and performative religion, like advocating for the poor, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and lifting up the downtrodden and oppressed among us. He then adds that both he and his heavenly Father will respond to this kind of love — love in action — by dwelling with us. Then, he insists that this message is not his own, but comes straight from God.
He continues:
I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you.’ If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe. (John 14.25-29)
This gets a bit messy and needs some unpacking. The overall context of passage is that Jesus is warning his disciples that he won’t be with them forever, but that he won’t leave them abandoned. Just a few verses before, he’s told them of the coming of the Holy Spirit, whom he calls ‘the Advocate’. Now he repeats that teaching: He won’t leave them abandoned but, in proto-Trinitarian language, the Father will send them the Spirit in his (Jesus, the ‘Son him whom the Father is well-pleased’ ‘s) name. This Advocate will continue to teach them, reminding them of his own teaching.
This gift of the Holy Spirit is equated with Peace, God’s shalom that is the presence of just, whole and healed, good-faith relationships in the world. How is this? Because, the Holy Spirit empowers us to embody Christ and his peace-making ways in the world. As James Alison put it:
It is not that the Holy Spirit is simply a substitute presence, acting instead of Jesus, but rather it is by Jesus going to his death (and, by giving up his Spirit bringing to completion his creative work — “It is accomplished,” tetelestai — [John] 19:30) that all Jesus’ creative activity will be made alive in the creative activity of his disciples. The memory of Jesus here … is thus not in the first place the cure for the absence of the teacher, but the bringing to mind, and thus to the possibility of creative practice, in dependence on Jesus, of Jesus’ creative activity. This is the sense of the peace which Jesus leaves with his disciples: not the peace which is the result of the suppression of conflict, or the resolution of conflict, such as is practiced by the mechanism of expulsion of the world, but the creative peace that brings into being: the primordial peace of the Creator from the beginning. (The Joy of Being Wrong, 190)
Paradoxically, Jesus concludes, the disciples should be happy that he’s going away because this gift of the Holy Spirit is a greater gift than his human presence with them.
So here we have it once again: If we call ourselves Christians and claim to love Christ, we must do as he says. This isn’t a matter of legalism, but rather its opposite. For if we truly love him by loving our neighbour as ourselves, then the Holy Spirit will dwell within us and empower us to follow him more faithfully, initiating God’s peaceable kingdom here on Earth in our just, whole, and healed relationships.
This is a wonderful teaching, but one a quick glance through Christian history suggests has been very hard for us to live out. So it’s a wonderful gift and promise here in today’s Gospel, but also a wonderful challenge for us. Inasmuch as our relationships — in our families, churches, and communities — are not healthy, then we must repent, continually, in and from the heart, and try again to follow his words at every step in every day.
Matthew Root 
It seems that many contemporary Christians (and throughout time) are insisting that we’re playing a game of Hide and Seek and we have to be ready for Christ to say “ready or not, here I come”, instead of the Paschal tradition that the game is over. We are supposed to tell people the gospel that the game is over, not that they need to be threatened with getting caught.
LikeLike