“Spirit of Love”

A sermon from John 14:15-26

Isaiah 59:15-21 reminds us that the Holy Spirit was not unknown before Pentecost, or even before Christ. The people of God had known of the Spirit of God as long as they had known God, the creator of the heavens and the earth, the liberator of Israel, the God who spoke by the prophets. But in bad times, people longed for more of the Spirit, more continually, more permanently … longed for God’s personal presence.

Fast-forwarding five or six hundred years from the prophet Isaiah to the gospel of John, this portion of Jesus’ farewell speech to his friends and disciples brings back to mind that long-awaited promise of God’s spirit – already in Jesus’ time, we think, part of a complex of ideas that had become first century “messianic expectation.”

The gospel of John is known for its mysterious, mystical qualities. It differs, famously, from the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who tell the story of Jesus’ life and ministry and passion and death and resurrection in a way that’s governed by the plot, of the concrete events of Jesus’ life, and who emphasize a lot of Jesus’ practical teachings, like “don’t pray on street corners, pray in private” (Matthew 6:5) and “forgive people so often that you’re bound to lose count of how many times you’ve forgiven them” (Matthew 18:22).

John’s gospel takes a different approach. John tells a few long stories with long, long speeches by Jesus, that are full of deep, deep symbolic language, like “living water” and “bread of life” and “light and dark.” Symbols that keep getting deeper and more meaningful the longer we live with them.

This “farewell discourse” of Jesus’ is a good example of this. It forms much of the story of the last night Jesus spends with his disciples. It begins in chapter 13 with Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, and then giving them that new commandment to “love one another; as I have loved you so you ought to love one another” and ends five chapters later in chapter 17, with Jesus’ long high priestly prayer for his disciples, and in between we have Jesus’ long speech to his disciples preparing them for what’s about to happen, which includes his words about being “the way the truth and the life” and “the vine” that they need to abide in, and many many references to the Spirit … including in particular the short excerpt that constitutes the text for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (year A).

That text does include some of that mysterious, thought-stopping language, but it begins with a saying that is really not mysterious at all: “if you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.”

Not mysterious at all, because that probably strikes all of us as pretty obvious, just from what we know about ordinary human relationships. Even more obvious if we think of all the many things the Greek word that’s translated here as “commandments” can mean. Things like “instructions” and “directions” and “prescriptions,” all of which are the kinds of … things someone tells us to do because doing those things will lead to the end result we want.

The way following the step-by-step directions on the back of the package of pancake mix will actually produce pancakes, or something like them, for that breakfast in bed we’re making for Mom as a Mother’s Day present. Just as not following the instructions, thinking we can leave out the eggs and double up on the milk, will not get us pancakes. (Some of us have had to learn that the hard way.)

Jesus is pointing to a basic principle of human relationships: when we love someone, we do try to do what they ask us to do. It’s why many of us have gotten in the habit of doing things like … taking time to rinse our dishes instead of just leaving them sitting on the counter after dinner to get dried up and hard to wash, for instance; or stopping to put gas in the car we borrowed instead of leaving it almost on empty so Mom has to stop to get gas on the way to work, or refilling the ice cube tray (if anyone even has ice cube trays these days) when we take the next to last ice cube, or writing thank you notes – because someone we loved and cared about, someone we wanted to be happy instead of sad and frustrated and disappointed, told us to do those things.

That same principle, that when we love people we make the effort to do what they like, instead of only what we like all the time, governs the relationship Jesus’ disciples have with Jesus: if they love Jesus, they’ll keep Jesus’ commandments – instructions – directions – prescriptions – like the one he just gave the disciples in chapter 13. That one to “love one another.”

And although we know Jesus is speaking to the very first disciples here, we believe that, through them, he’s speaking to all later disciples, too … including us. So we take Jesus’ words to that group in the upper room as being meant as much for us as for them. That commandment about love is addressed to us.

And we probably know that Jesus’ command, or instruction, or prescription, points us toward the outcome, the end result, of a community that looks and acts like Christ himself. A community that looks like and lives like the body of Christ, which is living Jesus Christ’s kind of life in the world. “Loving God with all our heart and soul and strength” – that is, with everything we’ve got – and “loving our neighbor as ourself” and “loving one another as Jesus loved us” and “washing each other’s feet” and even “loving our enemies” …

All of which, as we also know, is still really difficult for us to do. Every Sunday morning we’re confessing to God and to one another just how difficult that is, in practice, and how unsuccessful we’ve been over the past week or so, at living the way Jesus told us to live … It’s still so easy for us to have other end results uppermost in our minds, like getting our own way, or taking it easy, or making a profit, or … whatever it is, that distracts us from our devotion to Jesus, that diverts our attention and makes us want something else a little more, or a lot more, than we want to be Jesus’ people, doing what Jesus told us to do, and doing it now and not putting it off till later.

We get so busy loving so many other things that we forget to love God.

It might be less difficult for us, though, if we could just be more aware of God, more of the time. If we had someone in our lives whose task it was … or at least, whose effect on us was … to remind us of what really matters … of what’s really good, instead of only relatively good; of how we really want to be living our lives, instead of how we automatically live them … someone who would remind us of what we really love, or should …

Which brings us to Jesus’ very next sentence, the one about the “other Advocate,” the Spirit of truth, the Holy Spirit. Now Jesus is starting to sound more like the gospel of John, because Jesus says the Spirit will “abide with you, and be in you.” That is, as theologian Dallas Willard defines “spirit,” will be a persistent “unbodily personal presence” – which is what “spirit” means, essentially – within you. More than a bit mystical, that. And Jesus goes on to promise that this Spirit, this indwelling unbodily personal presence, this Spirit of truth, will “teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you.”

And right about here, we sometimes get very confused. Because when Jesus describes the Holy Spirit as the “Spirit of truth,” we often get into our minds that Jesus is talking about the kind of truth that is “2 + 2 = 4” or that is some historical fact, like that “abolitionist Julia Ward Howe was an early proponent of Mother’s Day, and in 1870 issued a proclamation urging a Mother’s Day for Peace.” Which is a true fact, by the way.

But that seems not to be the kind of truth Jesus is talking about here, because he also says the spirit is someone “whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him …”. And over the years Christians have thought, over and over, that this means the Spirit witnesses to a different kind of truth, not the kind of truth of the science lab or the history book, but the kind that we know from the inside out, the way we know that a work of art or a sunset is beautiful, or know that we love our parents, or our children.

The kind of “knowing” that we do with our hearts, more than the kind we do with our intellects. That kind of truth.

And the vital truth of this kind that the Spirit of truth keeps teaching us and keeps reminding us of is that profoundest of all truths, namely, love. The love that God is, first and above all.

And then, the truth of the creative and redemptive love God has for the world – including, amazingly, us – and so, the truth of God’s Word of love to the world, the Word made flesh who is Jesus Christ.

The truth that this divine love is the loveliest thing we know or can know.

So lovely that catching a glimpse of it, a taste of it, works on us, tugs at our hearts, even when they have grown cold and stiff, calling to us, inviting us, and drawing us … more and more … into the deep truth that is God’s love for us, and into the way of life that responds to that love by loving, and by keeping Christ’s commandments.

So that the more we go along with, or perhaps allow ourselves to be carried along by, this Spirit of truth, the more we find ourselves loving Jesus, because the more we recognize the love of God revealed in and by Jesus, to which the Spirit bears witness.

And then, the more we find ourselves doing what Jesus says to do … and then, finding ourselves loving it a little more … and then, finding ourselves loving Jesus a little more, who got us into this life that we’re more and more loving to live … and then …

It’s hard to put this dynamic into words – which may be why the gospel of John strikes us as being so mysterious and mystical, and why Christian thinkers down through the centuries have struggled to get the verbs right.

Because on one hand, at every point in this process we recognize the work of God, doing for us what we can’t do and can’t imagine doing for ourselves. But at the same time, all along the way it seems to us, has always seemed to Christians, that we find ourselves making choices, and that those choices matter. That it matters whether we say “yes” to the Spirit of truth at work in our hearts and lives, or say “no” this time around …

John Calvin would tell us that we ultimately can’t resist the allure of God’s work of love, can’t ultimately resist God’s transforming grace. Even so, it persistently feels to most of us like we could cooperate with it more.

And in light of that feeling, we could think of our task as the church, as Christians, individually and collectively, as the task of cooperating more with the Spirit. The task of watching and waiting and listening for, and then paying attention to, and then following, and then celebrating and rejoicing in, Christ’s promised Spirit of truth, which is the Spirit of love.

Which, practically speaking, seems to mean that we want to learn to say every kind of “yes” there is to say to the Spirit, every time and every way we get the chance: Yes to that first inkling that we want to know more about Jesus; Yes to that first vague desire that we’d like to be part of this whole thing; Yes to the idea that maybe we ought to get to know the Spirit better; Yes to actually praying for the gift of the Spirit; Yes to waiting and watching for some sense of the Spirit; and then Yes to following that sense when it arises, to where it takes us; Yes to the desire to follow Christ’s instructions, and then Yes to actually following them, whenever the opportunity presents itself, and then Yes to doing that more and more faithfully and joyfully; Yes after Yes after Yes …

Yes to the Spirit of truth who is the Spirit of love, who is even now leading us further and further into the eternal life of Jesus Christ, whom we are learning to love more and more, as we keep Jesus Christ’s commandments, in the Spirit of love.

Image: “Open book 1,” by Alina Daniker alinadaniker, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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