John 14:15-21 Commentary

We are in the Easter season and we’ve spent the better part of it remembering all of the different ways that Jesus spoke of the Easter power to come even while he was still here with his disciples. We pick up this week right where we left off last week. Jesus called himself the way, the truth and the life and promised the disciples that if they had seen him, they had also seen their Father, God.

Now, Jesus speaks of that other member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, connecting all three persons of the Godhead together with us through a call to love and obedience. Jesus says that he will ask the Spirit to be with us as he has been with us—Jesus says “another Advocate,” implying that the people of God have already had one with them.

But the way that the Spirit is present with God’s people is fundamentally different to the way they experienced it with Christ even as it is fundamentally the same. This is the paradox of life with the Trinity… It is the same in that it takes faith and trust to see God with you, the ability to wonder and stay present to the way that God is remaining, or abiding, in us. Whereas Jesus abided with them in a separate body, the Spirit will mostly be an internal presence.

Trinitarian theologians point to passages such as this one to highlight how having union or awareness and relationship with one person of the Trinity means that you know and have union with each of the persons of the Trinity. That’s because the Father, Son, and Spirit are in eternal and inseparable union with one another: envision that union being opened up to you through the link you have with the Father, or with the Son, or in this case, with the Holy Spirit. Just as Jesus said that seeing him and knowing him was proof that they could see and know the Father, he says it again here but in a slightly different way. The Advocate will remain even as he goes, but his beloveds will still be able to see him and to know that he lives. And as they do so, they will live too, and they will know that Jesus is in his Father.

But even more, Jesus is telling us that God has made it so that we enter into their bond. There will be a time that we know that Jesus is bonded to the Father and we will know it because Jesus is bonded to us: “you in me, and I in you.” Because, as Paul puts it, “we are hidden with Christ in God,” we will live. Our eternal destiny is to exist among the persons of the Trinity. The life, death, resurrection and ascension of the incarnate person of God was all leading up to this destiny of being given in love, received in love, and having God revealed to us as fully as we are able to receive (verse 21).

But Jesus doesn’t want them to just think of it as a future reality; it is something to begin to have and to know now. This is why Jesus promises that another member of the Trinity will come and be with them: they will not be orphaned, God is coming to them even now. And the way Jesus invites us to participate in this reality as much as we are able to now, is through loving him by keeping his commandments. Obedience to the new way of life that Jesus has modelled as he fulfilled the law of God perfectly, that’s the picture of participating in the life of God here on earth. Letting those commandments and their purpose sink deeply into us where the Spirit transforms them from dead letter to lively spirit-filled action, that is the way we express and experience God’s love for us, for the world, and for God’s very self.

Textual Point

Sometimes during the Easter season the lectionary makes our minds work a little overtime to keep the timeline straight. We might chalk the inclusion of pre-resurrection texts up to the fact that there many less stories in the gospels post-resurrection, but I think there’s more theological significance to it than that. The lectionary is reminding us of the Easter morning words of the angel who told the women to remember what Jesus had said. Those words apply to so much more than the promise of the singular resurrection event: they apply to all of Jesus’s teachings as the path to ultimate new life with him.

Illustration Idea

I’ve done more bread making in the last two years than most of the rest of my life. (I’ve been helping our daughter build up a tolerance to eggs—a new doctor overseen approach to dealing with infant and toddler food allergies called a food ladder.) I’ve learned, through experience, that some instructions really do matter. Most of us are aware, for instance, that baking ingredient ratios matter, but did you also know that salt kills yeast while sugar feeds it? Or that the temperature range for the liquid that you put the yeast in really does make a difference? Too hot and it kills the yeast, too cold and the yeast will not be activated. Doing what the recipe says in the way that the recipe says to do it (if it’s a good recipe) is the difference between claggy dough and airy deliciousness. By doing it right, I show love for my daughter; just as by keeping God’s commands I show love for Jesus and for everyone else God loves.