Jesus talking about love in the midst of crisis is always relevant. Jesus saying each other is the way to know God is even more so.
Knowing the love of God requires admitting it can be known.
Easter 6A | John 14:15-21
The thing about reading John is that it gets heady. It is the tangled strands of ideas about God that sound like they need unwinding. Perhaps gently, so you don’t knot them and are forced to get the scissors.
But John is also emotionally direct and immediately rewarding. We really only have to find where the thought starts to see where it goes.
So let’s look for it together.
We could go back to last week when we heard about the many rooms and the frightened disciples. Or we could go all the way back to the beginning when there was the Word and the Word was with God.
Maybe we could retrace our steps through the story: the wedding, baptism, Nicodemus, the woman at the well, the feeding of the five thousand…
We’d eventually make our way to Mary and Martha trying to save their brother from death. Which, of course, they can’t. And yet Jesus prophetically raises him from his slumber and invites them to unbind him and let him go.
The story then takes us to Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem—a story full of bittersweet anticipation: victory and death. A twist on expectations and the deep abiding picture of love and devotion that continues to confound us.
The story would take us to this last supper, a moment when Jesus knows far more than the others. He knows what the coming hours would bring. And no amount of telling the disciples truly gets the point across.
Jesus washes their feet.
And more than any words he says, this would stick with them. A teaching most memorable. Serve, humbly.
He feeds the traitor.
He doesn’t stop Judas or shun him. Jesus feeds him like he is equal to the others. A haunting teaching.
Jesus gives a new command.
He says to love one another. Love each other as he has loved them. That’s how everyone will know you: what will make you uniquely identifiable: your uncommon love.
He predicts Peter’s denial.
And in the middle of everything else, the rock the others turn to won’t be silent; he’ll be wrong. He’ll refuse to join Jesus in persecution.
Thomas and Philip speak up.
Not James or John or the suddenly mute Peter. Jesus says that in spite of the dark times ahead, they must trust God. Follow the new commandment to love one another. Jesus has a plan.
Thomas wants to be sure of the way. How can we know? And Jesus says Trust. Because it isn’t about knowing for sure, but of trusting in the one who loves you.
And Philip wants to see God. Which is just something people of faith are not supposed to want. This is as audacious a request as they come. And Jesus’s perplexing response is just as audacious. Have you not seen me? If you’ve seen me, then you’ve seen God. Which is actually far less about Jesus’s divinity than it is about how God is found. In humanity.
Finding Father
When we go looking for it, we see that the strands of our story are really more like a single thread of many colors and variations. That Jesus is bringing them into a holy relationship with the God of their longing.
And God can’t be found by rule—by authority or legality. We don’t find God in a process or an arranged social order. We don’t “find” God at all. Because God never went missing.
The word that connects Thomas and Philip’s questions and Jesus’s message about the Spirit, hope, and connection is Father. Jesus doesn’t compare God to a Father, but orients them to the existing relationship. We are all God’s children. And unlike human fathers, God is always present, never leaves for work, never dies.
“I will not leave you orphaned”.
Always in relationship and always alive in faith. A relationship which is manifested in the Spirit.
The Paraclete
Jesus describes the coming Spirit as a Paraclete which is translated a few ways, but at its root means Advocate. Not as a lawyer on behalf of humanity in a dispute with God—which would distance us from the Father. But as an advocate from God to advocate for our health and wellness with one another.
I’m reminded of health advocates who speak up on behalf of the patient or legal advocates who speak up on behalf of the poor. They are with you, supporting you, protecting you, and often moving the powerful to resist harming you.
And I can’t help but think of my Dad slipping me $20 for gas when I visit or helping me change a tire. Acts which aren’t just protective or necessary or responsibilities. These are acts of presence when I’m afraid and overwhelmed. And much more than anonymous kindness, they are acts of abiding love in our particular relationship.
Jesus isn’t revealing the foundation of Trinitarian theology. He’s showing us that God’s love is present, even when we can’t see it or know it or even believe it.
God’s love is accessible. Not like an ATM, of course, but also not only in metaphor. It’s found around us, in abiding love and presence in the other people who know that same love and seek to reflect it out into the world.
The Command
This is keeping Jesus’s commandments. Loving the love of God into the world. In our homes, Facebook chats, and Zoom calls. Loving the love of God to our neighbors and friends, clerks and delivery persons, with smiles we have to speak, even as wearing our masks says I love you.
Our faith isn’t built on the contents of our hearts and minds alone, or judged for our actions by a jury of our superiors. It is renewed daily by the presence of God that can be seen in other people. And can be known in acts of love.
God is with you. Always with you. Present in the anxiety. Frustration. Loneliness. Present in the hopes and joys. Present in weariness and late nights. The cravings and irregular patterns. Loving us in all the ways we refuse to love ourselves. Loving us in ways we refuse to see. In spite of us, because of us, with us, and within us.
God is here now and you are loved truly, wholly, and unapologetically.