Sixth Sunday of Easter; 14 May 2023; Easter 5A (RCL); Acts 15:22-31; Psalm 66:7-18; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14: 15-21.
If you love me, you will guard my commandments. Or even protect. τηρέω (tereo) means to guard something precious. So this is not about following the rules, but holding on to something precious. Jesus delivers these lines as part of the larger Farewell Discourse. In the first fourteen verses of this chapter (which we hard last week and often hear at funerals), Jesus promised that he was leaving, but he would come again to take his disciples to himself. He told them, “Let not your hearts be troubled.”
Again and again in this discourse, and elsewhere in the Gospel, Jesus had adjured his disciples to love one another as he has loved them, and has said that no one can have greater love than to entrust one’s life to one’s friends. In the context of the Farewell Discourse, these sayings have the effect of convincing the disciples that they can love Jesus even after he is gone, by loving one another, rather than by simply pining for the past.
At the end of last week’s reading (the verse immediately before this week’s reading), Jesus promised that anything the disciples asked in Jesus’ name, he would do, so that the Father might be glorified. We often hear this as an indictment against our own failure to ask rightly (why has grandma’s cancer gone away? I’ve asked in Jesus’ name). In those earlier verses, Jesus has promised that the one who trusts in Jesus will greater works than he has done. And we get a clue to what Jesus means by doing greater works from the opening verses of chapter 9. When they encounter the man born blind, the disciples ask who sinned, the man or his parents, that he was born blind. Jesus replies that he was born blind so that the works of God might be revealed. The works of God are anything that brings people to a deeper understanding of God. And now, it is the disciples’ turn to be doing those works.
In these verse, Jesus promises the disciples that he will be in them, and we can infer that since we (the disciples) are also in him, and he is in the Father, then we too, are in the Father. And another Advocate (or better Paraclete) will reveal the truth to us. All of this implies, I believe, that John’s community understood itself, after Jesus’ death and resurrection, to be the channel of God’s revelation to the world (which cannot receive the Paraclete, but can receive the disciples’ words). If we ask for this, Jesus will do it.
So, keeping Jesus’ commandments is not a matter of following the rules, but guarding something precious, namely the revelation of God in Jesus. The community of those who love Jesus and one another as Jesus loved them (that is, us) is guardian of the ongoing revelation of God in the world. When Jesus appears to his disciples on Easter evening, he says, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Then he breathes on them, and says, “Receive Holy Breath. If you release the sins of any, they are released to them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” The community of disciples is the channel of the spirit to the world.
Paul’s speech, as composed by Luke, in our reading from Acts is a wonderful bit of rhetoric. Paul (Luke) opens with a standard Stoic trope about the boundaries and times of various kingdoms being determined by God (or fate), and by the end of the short speech has moved on to a Jewish understanding of coming judgment, to the Christian idea that Jesus is to be that judge. And Luke accomplishes this feat in a few short lines. Whoever he was, Luke had clearly been to school.