Commandments and Love - Reflections on John 14:15-21, Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A

by John C. Holbert on Wednesday, March 18, 2026

         We return this Sunday to the speech in John’s Gospel where Jesus tells the disciples that he is about to leave them. He is, of course, speaking of his upcoming denial, trial, death, and resurrection, although those disciples, like their counterparts in the Synoptic accounts, are having a very difficult time understanding what he is going on about. Both Thomas and Philip ask questions that appear to be no more than ignorant queries that would not have been asked if they had been paying attention to Jesus in the first place. “Where are you going, Jesus,” asks Thomas, “we do not know the way?” Well, replies Jesus, “I am the way,” which by now you should have realized. “Lord, show us the Father,” pleads Philip, and Jesus retorts, “Have I been around so long, and you still do not know me? I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” It seems a continual problem in all four of the gospels that the distinctive trait of the disciples of Jesus is their decided inability to understand what their master is saying and doing. Sounds rather like some of us, his latter-day disciples!

         Because discipleship ignorance is front and center in the narratives, unfortunately we may also expect that it will be a great problem for them to grasp perhaps the most important connection that Jesus emphasizes in this departing speech, namely how love is connected to Jesus’s commandments. He states this connection clearly, boldly, and apparently devoid of ambiguity: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). How are we to define “commandments” here; exactly what are the commandments of Jesus? Most obviously, the language of “word,” “words,” and “commandments” (John 14:15,21,23,24) are different ways of saying the same thing: the call is for faith in the revelation of God in and through the word of Jesus. However, we cannot limit the fuller meaning of “commandment” only to that one conviction. Without doubt, the language of “commandment” must also mean the demands of the covenant, particularly as those demands are found in the book of Deuteronomy (see, for example, Deut.5:10; 6:5-6; 7:9; 10:12-13; 11:13,22). Each of these passages from the book of the Hebrew Bible that serves as the underpinning of the central meanings of Judaism, speaks unequivocally of the relationships between the love of God and the keeping of God’s commandment. Jesus asks his disciples to do the same: love of Jesus will without fail produce the keeping of the commandments of God.

         Note an important idea that this connection does not imply: keeping the commandments of God does not engender God’s love for those diligent commandment keepers. Quite the contrary is the truth. God’s unbreakable love is the impetus for the keeping of the commandments, not the result of that keeping. In other words, both Deuteronomy and the Gospel of John make it quite clear that first we are loved by God, and for John by Jesus, and then we are enabled to keep the commandments of God. It is a regular confusion among some Christians that Judaism taught that keeping God’s commandments led to God’s love—hardly! God’s love, as John makes certain, and as Deuteronomy makes certain, makes the keeping of the commandments possible. Without the unbreakable love of God (Hebrew chesed), the possibility of commandment-keeping is rendered moot. 

         But, if Jesus leaves us, as he is about to do, according to John, how may we persist in keeping the commandments? The answer for John is found in 14:16-17: “And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Paraclete to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he abides with you and will be among you.” Just who is this Paraclete (Greek parakletos)? The word has generated an enormous scholarly debate, and I can hardly rehearse all of that here. Suffice it to say that the noun comes from the verb meaning “to summon,” “to appeal,” “to request,” or even “to comfort.” What Jesus appears to promise the disciples is the eternal presence of one very like himself after he leaves the earth in his resurrection glory. The paraclete will be the “Spirit of truth,” and as such will hold the disciples accountable for maintaining that connection between love and commandments, that connection which is nothing less than the truth about what Jesus has come to proclaim, he who is way, truth, and life.

         It could be said that what John implies here may best be summed up in 1 John 2:3-4: “Now by this we may be sure that we know him, if we obey his commandments. Whoever says, ‘I have come to know him,’ but does not obey his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist.” Anyone who claims love of Jesus and God, but does not keep the commandments, does not hear the words of the paraclete and becomes merely one of the world who neither sees nor knows Jesus at all. All this high-flown verbiage can be made far more simple: those who claim to love God, but who do not follow the commands of that God, do not in fact love God at all, no matter how loudly and piously they make those claims. Indeed, the very essence of Christian belief may be summarized in that central conviction: if love of God does not lead to following God’s commandments, love of God does not in fact exist. And it is, says Jesus, the mysterious paraclete who will always and continuously hold our straying feet to that divine fire.