John 14.11-15
Sometime in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s, fellow authors took the fiction writer Flannery O’Connor to a dinner party in New York City. At some point during the high society supper, the table talk turned to the sacraments— Eucharist and Baptism. An avowed Christian, Flannery O’Connor’s orthodoxy made her a curiosity among the self-styled enlightened guests. The author later reported an incident from the dinner to her friend and correspondent Elizabeth Hester in a letter dated December 16, 1955.
O’Connor writes:
“I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. . . . She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.
Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.
I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if the sacraments are symbols, to hell with them.””
Every Sunday the sermon concludes what the Book of Worship terms “the Service of the Word,” and the liturgy then pivots to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. I will invite you to the Table. Because I will make the invitation precisely in his particular Name— and in no other name, for he alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life— the invitation extended to you will be the LORD’s own invitation. The loaf and the cup are no more symbols on this Table than they are empty signs on the altar at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. When it comes to the sacrament, the only difference between the medieval Catholic Church and the Reformation is that Martin Luther refused to speculate beyond the fact that Christ Jesus gives himself to us in his gospel word. If Christ is truly present in his uttered promise (if the proclamation of the word of God is God’s word) then Luther did not need an additional explanation for how Jesus can be likewise present in his visible words of water, wine, and bread.
The Protestant Reformation did not demystify the sacraments; it sacramentalized the preached word.
It is not the case that we do not believe Christ is truly present in wine and bread; but rather, we already believe Christ is truly present in the word that attaches to bread and wine. Therefore, in Sermon 101, John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, insisted that believers have a duty to constant communion. We have an obligation to take and to eat, not just every Sunday but as often as we can; we do so exactly because Christ has promised to meet us here.
In loaf and cup.
Christ is the host who feeds his body the church with creatures of bread and wine that are nothing other than himself. Thereby, once again, the God who is All-in-All will be in you. This is what the LORD promises.
If it is just a symbol, then to hell with it.
Because if it is not true that Christ Jesus pours out his life into us— feeds us with his faithfulness, abides in us through his edible words— then what he says next in the Upper Room in his Godspeed sermon is law not gospel, “If you love me, then you will keep my commandments.”
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In the Synoptic Gospels, no sooner has John baptized Jesus in the Jordan than the Holy Spirit flings Mary’s boy into the wilderness where the Adversary encounters him across forty days and forty nights. Satan tempts the Son, setting his lure in full conditional sentences. A full conditional sentence contains two clauses: the first a dependent clause, expressing the condition, and the second a main clause, expressing the consequence.
For example:
If you are the Son of God, then tell this stone to become bread.
If you worship me, then all this power and glory will be yours.
Jump off the temple and land safely, if you are the Son of God.
The Devil speaks in if/thens, which makes it odd to hear Jesus so speaking in his Farewell Discourse. He has just promised Philip that he will do whatever we ask in his name, but now he is speaking in terms of conditions and their consequences. Why is Jesus speaking in ifs? Is he setting conditions on his and his Father’s love?
In his Epistle to the Galatians, Paul scolds the backslidden believers:
“The only thing I want to learn from you is this: Did you receive the Spirit by obeying the commandments or by trusting what you heard? Well, then, is God richly supplying you with the Spirit now and working miracles in your community by your obedience to the commandments or by your faith in what you heard?”
But in the Upper Room, Christ appears to contradict his apostle; Jesus does not say, “If you love me, you will trust my gospel.”Why does he stipulate obedience rather than faith or desire as the measure of our love? If the consequence is not evident in our lives— that is, if we break his commands or are imperfect at keeping them, then does that mean the condition is not really present? Does it mean we do not truly love him, or he us?
Let’s be honest.
If the proof of our love for him is our performance of his commands, then Christ’s parting word is law not gospel. And the law, the scriptures say, always only accuses us.
Lex semper accusat.
And which commands does Jesus have in mind in this if/then? After all, Jesus is the Triune identity who revealed the law to Moses. The hand that inscribed the commandments into tablets of stone had a hole in it. Does Jesus mean therefore that the proof of our love for him is to do what only he can do— obey the commands in their entirety?
If the proof of our love is our ability to uphold all his commands, then…
To hell with all of it.
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On November 4, 1963— just a few years before his death, the theologian Karl Barth met with a group of youth pastors from Rhineland, Germany at the Bruderholz Restaurant in Basel, Switzerland. During the day-long discussion, a Lutheran pastor named Poll asked Professor Barth a question, “What do you have against the forgiveness of sins as the starting point and the summation of gospel preaching?”
Barth replied:
“What do I have against it? I have against it that I read in 1 Corinthians 1.30, “Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God,” then that means for “righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” The New Testament invites us to open ourselves to other possibilities beyond the forgiveness of our sins.”
A pastor named Held then followed up with a question about the proper place of obedience and discipleship under the gospel, “In what sense is evangelical preaching on works possible?”
And Barth answered:
“I think of the promise of God in which God declares to us, “I will be your God, and you shall be my people,” despite the fact that you are sinners from head to toe, despite the fact that up to the final moment not only some things but rather everything will speak against you, “I will be your God and you my people.” With this promise, a call is issued to us at the same time, to give a response. The quality of our work is not the point here: to offer wonderful prayers, produce good theology, carry on impressive missionary work, and practice loving works toward the neighbor; such praiseworthiness is not the issue. The issue is that we— with our works— give answer to God in all modesty. Among sighs! In all modesty! Under the worst pressure! In the certainty that we continually need to start again. But works must occur!
We are set on a road, and this road wants to be walked.
Certainly there will be stumbling and falling on this way. But this call to obey, to be his people is there. But always with an eye on Christ, in communion in Christ, only by coalescing with Christ.”
We walk the road of obedience only by Christ coalescing with us.
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“If the sacraments are symbols, to hell with them.”
Reflecting on her retort at the Manhattan dinner party, Flannery O’Connor wrote in a letter to her friend Elizabeth Hester, “That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about the sacrament, outside of a story, except that the body and blood are the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”
The sacrament is the center of our existence. The sacrament is where and how and when Christ coalesces with us. Just so, it is the condition for our obedience.
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“If you love me, you will keep these commands of mine.”
Preaching on this passage, Saint Augustine immediately quashes any notion of meritorious performance of the commandments as proof of our love for Christ:
“How can we love so as to receive Him, without whom we cannot love at all? Or how shall we keep the commandments so as to receive Him, without whom we have no power to keep the commandments? Or can it be that the love wherewith we love Christ has a prior place within us, so that, by thus loving Christ and keeping His commandments, we become worthy of receiving Him? Such a thought is altogether wrong.”
Just as we ought to approach this verse in light of the Table to which we will come, we ought not abstract this verse from the Upper Room in which Jesus speaks it. The context is key. In his Farewell Discourse, Jesus has posited two special commands— only two commands. Christ’s first command is that we let ourselves be loved (“washed”) by him. His second command is a plea repeated through the Fourth Gospel; we are to “believe into Jesus.” And the consequence of this believing belovedness, Jesus says, is that we love one another in humility— in a foot-washing fashion.
These are the commands of his that we will keep if we love him.
Not only are the commands fewer than we may have feared, the list is not law. The promise is implicit in the logic of these commands of his. We are to let ourselves be loved by him and we are to believe in him. That is, our believing in him is the receiving of his love. And just as the Father begets the Son, the Son’s love in us begets love beyond us— by us and through us. As my teacher Robert Jenson puts it, “the hypostasis of the Son is nothing other than his obedience to the Father;” likewise, the presence of that hypostasis in us (coalescing in us) is nothing other than our obedience.
“If you love me, you will keep these commands of mine.”
The Devil speaks in if/thens.
Jesus is not setting a condition on love.
Jesus is describing a condition he sets for us.
Once again, the context is critical. Already in the Upper Room Jesus has promised us that he will take us to himself; so that, he is not absent the world, he is nowhere else but where we are. Just after this verse, Jesus promises that his Holy Spirit will abide with us forever— the same Spirit that Christ from his cross will pour into our hearts. Later in his Farewell Discourse, Jesus will promise that, through the Triune work of cross, resurrection, and ascension, the Father and the Son both will make their home in us. In other words, Christ’s farewell is actually a coming closer— a new nearness.
Jesus is not setting a condition on love.
Jesus is describing a condition he sets for us.
As Chris Green puts it:
“We keep his commandments, we live out his will fully, because his love—his love for the Father, his love for us— has been poured out into our hearts. Indeed, we cannot keep from fulfilling his word. Despite what we feel, despite what we fear, it is difficult not to do his Father’s will because the love that moves the sun and the stars moves us.”
From within us.
He makes himself the center of our existence.
His love constrains us.
This is simply the literal translation of the passage.
The introductory Greek word ean means here not if but when. Jesus is not questioning the love of his disciples for him. He is assuming it. This is why the verb which follows is neither an imperative nor a subjunctive. It is a simple future tense, “You will be.” Thus the literal translation of verse fifteen— what Frederick Dale Bruner calls the grace translation— is, “When you disciples love me, you will be keeping these commands of mine.”
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The poet Mary Karr grew up during the 1960’s in a turbulent home with raging alcoholic parents. Though they lived in the Bible Belt of Texas, the gospel was as foreign to Karr as stability or sobriety. Her parents succeeded only in passing down to their daughter their addiction and agnosticism. Her success as a award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist and consequent rise into cultured society only lured her further into looking down on the claims of Christianity. Then one day a random— or, providential— petition from her little boy upended her life.
It was as if her son had said, “To hell with all that.”
As Mary Karr recalls:
“I was an agnostic my whole life. Then my son got me to go to church when he was little. He said he wanted to go. I said— cynically, “Why do you want to go to church?” And he said, “To see if God is there.” And, I mean, what other reason is there to go to church? And I thought, “Well, I don’t like taking him to soccer either.” So we did this thing— we called it “God-O-Rama.” We went to all these different churches where our friends went. We went to a zendo, a Jewish midrasha and Southern Baptist churches. At the Catholic Church, I met this really amazing priest, Father Joseph. I realize now how almost no one else could have converted me. He was exactly what I was not interested in. But he was incredibly humble. He lived his life as though whoever came in front of him was sent by Jesus. Which is to say, he lived like Jesus was at the center of him.”
Having discovered herself a believer, Karr soon found herself at prayer. And having found herself at prayer, Karr later recognized moments for obedience put in front of her.
As she puts it:
“I pray every morning. I do probably ten or fifteen minutes of centering prayer and then maybe ten minutes of lectio divina. Lately, I have been doing the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner,” as a kind of mantra. And then there are those moments; sometimes they are very strange.
For instance, there was a moment recently where I walked out of my house and there was a man screaming on the street, a big guy screaming at the sky, “Murder or suicide, murder or suicide!”
Everybody was walking around him. Ignoring him or avoiding him or afraid of him. I started to walk around him too, but then the thought just came to me— I was moved to think it, “This man is my brother, and he is suffering.” So I just walked back over to him and said, “Excuse me, isn’t there another door? Isn’t there a third option other than murder or suicide?” And he cocked his head at the sky and started to think. I don’t know what he thought, but I know he didn’t do either murder or suicide. I remembered being a little afraid of him and I tried to be in that place and think that the call to speak to him really was a call from God or the Holy Spirit guiding me to try to connect with somebody who might have been in pain.”
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When you love me, you will be keeping these commands of mine.
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To the youth pastors gathered at the Bruderholz Restaurant in Basel, Karl Barth added, “Of course I hear in the New Testament, “Your sins are forgiven,” but then Christ immediately says, “On your feet! Take up your mat and walk!” Does anyone truly think that with the work the LORD had laid before him, the man on the mat had any other choice but stand up and attempt the next step?””
Of course he had no choice. Jesus was not simply before him, commanding him to take up his mat and walk. Jesus was within him too.
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Hear the good news:
You can keep his commands. No, you will!
Do not take your sin and your shortcomings more seriously than you take Christ in you— that’s to make the sacrament a mere symbol.
To hell with that!
You can keep his commands. You will! For your faithfulness is nothing other than his faithfulness coming alive in you. Your only resource for obedience to Jesus is Jesus. But this is not bad news; this is the good news! Christ goes away precisely in order to come nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Just so, we cannot keep from fulfilling his commands.
The God of the gospel is better than we can even want to begin to imagine, for the movement of Jesus upon you is not from less to more or from weak to strong or from good to better but from all to all. Every Sunday he makes new in you what is already full. And thus you can live all-in for God because the God who is All-in-All is in you.
From sinners, Jesus makes saints possible.
He does so by making himself the center of their existence.
How can this be?
It is no more knowable than how a morsel of bread can be the body of Mary’s Maker. Nevertheless, come to the table. Take and eat. As it turns out, Mrs. Broadwater, Flannery O’Connor’s dinner companion, was incorrect all those years ago.
Jesus is the most portable person of the Trinity.
