While the disciples are obsessing over certainty of belief, conviction, knowing what the future holds, where all of this following Jesus is going, and what God wants for the world, Jesus tries to assure them that they already know the way.
They have what they need. And on top of that, they’ll have the Holy Spirit with them. The promise of Jesus’s presence.
All of this is very good. And yet he wants them to get something else through their heads: do the work.
He tells them to keep his commandments. Which, remember, isn’t a lot. It’s love God and your neighbor as yourself. This isn’t an exhaustive list, nor is it a terribly challenging collection of rules.
It is, however, the center of our common gravity. And this alone makes it the heart of our faith.
So when Jesus says to keep his commands, it isn’t as a taskmaster. He’s reminding us that this is how we trust, how we love him. That trusting Jesus involves doing the things he has asked.
This is neither glib nor novel and should be evident. But remember that he’s saying this after telling his followers about the way and Thomas literally asked him how he’s supposed to know. And then, when Jesus tells him that he knows because that’s what we’ve been doing, Philip is like, prove it first. These clowns aren’t listening because they’re obsessed with something else. A kind of accuracy and certainty that should seem awfully familiar.
This, friends, is what most of us are contending with, I suppose. A demand for certainty when Jesus has already given the evidence, has already promised we know how to do this.
So, perhaps we might paraphrase the gospel this way: get to the work of loving your neighbor already.