Jesus said to his disciples: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth . . . Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him. If a man loves me, he will keep my word. My Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him.” (John 14.15-16, 21, 23)
When Randy Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2008 and was given only a few months to live, he decided to write a book, leaving to his wife and his three small children as well as his colleagues, friends, and students some of the lessons of life that he had learned. He called the book, “The Last Lecture,” and it has become a classic, much like MItch Albom’s “Tuesdays With Morrie.”
While it is impossible to capture in a few sentences the many lessons that Pausch left behind, a few will show the depth of his gift to those he loved by writing the book. One of the most famous quotes from the book is “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” Another is “Forget complaining. Work on the solution.” As we can see by these examples, the book is a compendium of life lessons that he bequeathed to those he had loved.
If we are to fully understand the passage that we hear today from the Gospel of John, we have to see it as Rabbi Jesus’ “last lecture.” In fact, scholars refer to this section of the Johannine gospel as the “Farewell Discourse” of Rabbi Jesus, the name derived from the fact that it is a lengthy conversation that Rabbi Jesus has with his disciples at the Last Supper on the night before he is wrongfully executed by his enemies.
Most all of us know–or will learn–that a dying man doesn’t want to waste his words. When a man stares death in the face, he finds it easy to decide what is important and what is not important, and his words usually reflect that decision. The “Final Discourse” of Rabbi Jesus is to be understood in the same way. It is a dying man’s last words to his disciples, telling them what he considers the most important lessons that he wants to leave them.
With the clock ticking, his betrayer already wrangling with his Master’s enemies over the price for his head, Rabbi Jesus distills the many lectures he has given to his students into a few words of wisdom, putting before them the essence of his life and his teachings. Of course, as they listened to him, they should not have been surprised by what he had to say to them. Nor should we.
As we hear him speak to the disciples at the Last Supper, he connects the twin virtues of love and loyalty into a single sentence. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” With those few words, he made clear to his followers that love for him cannot be separated from loyalty to him, proven by their keeping his commandments.
We have to admit that there is something very clear-sighted in Rabbi Jesus’ conjoining these two attributes. We know–as he apparently does as well–that it is very easy to say we love someone. It costs us nothing, except a few words that flow easily enough from our mouths. We do it all the time, the bumpers on our cars plastered with all kinds of attestations of love, from how we love our cats to how we love our kid’s school.
But Rabbi Jesus cuts through the shallowness of our many so-called loves and irrevocably connects love for him with loyalty to him, spelled out in keeping his commandments. In other words, we aren’t allowed to say we love Rabbi Jesus unless we also show we are putting into practice his commandments. Without the latter, the former is empty. Said another way, our words are empty if they aren’t backed up with our deeds.
Since Rabbi Jesus makes clear that the bond between the two–love and loyalty–cannot be broken, it serves us well to have a clear understanding of what he means when he says “keep my commandments.” If we take his words seriously, then we may want to ask which commandments does the Rabbi want us to fulfill. After all, that would seem logical, particularly with our propensity to propose our own commandments and call them holy writ.
According to scholars, Rabbi Jesus states three commandments in the Gospel of John. They are: first, “If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (John 13.14-15); second, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, just like I have loved you; that you also love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13.34-35); and, third, “Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me” (John 14.1).
When Rabbi Jesus states that loyalty to him will be found in following his commandments, it is safe to say that these three are the ones that he has in mind, particularly since each of them was articulated only moments before he says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” So, if we are to determine the measure of our loyalty, we do it by looking specifically at our faithfulness to these three commandments.
The first–the command to wash one another’s feet–is a command to serve others. And the parameters of service are defined by footwashing, a deed done by slaves in ancient times. In other words, when we seek to serve others, we are not to select the easiest or the most appealing means to accomplish the task. Instead, we test our mettle by doing that which is most difficult and the most challenging for us.
So, for a person with a measurable income, it requires little to make a donation to some worthy cause. However, it asks much more of that person to spoon out a meal at a soup kitchen. Or again, for a person with a tight schedule, it is easy enough to put one of our unworn coats in the annual coat drive. It takes more from us to work the coat drive, going through the collected coats and delivering them to the persons in need.
When footwashing is the standard for service–as Rabbi Jesus makes clear it is–then for us to choose something that we don’t mind doing and, not incidentally, that requires minimal effort from us fails to meet the standard set by the Rabbi who stooped down, removed the sandals from the feet of his followers, and washed their dirt-layered feet with his own hands.
Similarly, the second commandment–to love another as Rabbi Jesus has loved others–requires a depth of forbearance and tolerance that are unfamiliar to most of us. The type of love that the Rabbi exemplified is a love that is reinforced by actions, not by feelings. If we allow feelings to dictate whom we will love, then our love will be very limited and very self-serving. On the other hand, if we define love as something we do for others, then it is neither restrictive nor proscriptive. Our deeds define our love, not our feelings.
In this way, Rabbi Jesus elevates love to a higher plateau than the ordinary love that we talk about and say we practice. With our crooked hearts guiding us, the ones we love are generally the ones who love us back or who benefit us in some way. It is a rarity for us to love the unlovable person, the unforgivable person, the unreachable person.
And yet, if Rabbi Jesus made anything clear, it is to these very people that we must give our love, the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely. And when he asks us to love them, he asks us to prove it by our actions, not by our words. We can talk about our love for the poor until the cows come home, but if we never lift a finger to do something for the poor, then we can’t call it love, only bombastry.
The third commandment–not to let our hearts be troubled, but instead to believe in God and to believe in the Son of God–requires us to find God in those places and in those times that appear to be godforsaken. We are expected to have courage and aplomb regardless of the conditions in which we find ourselves, our confidence and our stability found in our rock-solid belief that God is in charge of our lives, not our enemies or our persecutors.
As we all know, it is easy enough to lose heart and to lose our faith when trials and setbacks assault us, destroying our way of life or planting doubts about our future well-being. And yet, Rabbi Jesus tells us that we must hold firm to our trust in God’s goodness, in his power to right the wrongs, and in his long view of human history rather than our short view of events that seek to overwhelm or overpower us. Whatever the circumstances in which we find ourselves, troubling as they are, we must believe that God is the bridge over troubled water.
Taken together, these three commandments that are found in the Johannine text require us to reshape our days and our deeds in accordance with the ways and the words of Rabbi Jesus, the standard bearer for the way of life that he calls his disciples to live. Rather than conform to the ways of the world–a place that prefers darkness to light–we are to mold our daily lives in imitation of the life of Rabbi Jesus, the light that shone in the darkness.
If and when we are able to accomplish this, to live fully and unhesitantly by these three commandments, then–and only then–can it be said that we truly love Jesus. Always, the test of our love is connected to the practice of these commandments–selfless service, overflowing love, unflinching trust in God. A failure to live out one or all of these commandments negates or severely compromises a love for Jesus that we may say with our mouths, but do not practice with our hands.
Our mistake is always to disassociate our love for Jesus (“love me,” he says) from our loyalty to Jesus (“keep my commandments,” he says), believing we can somehow love Jesus without fulfilling his commands. It is a fool’s errand to try to separate the two. So, if nothing else, this last lecture by Rabbi Jesus to his followers reminds all of us to fact check our deeds before we open our mouths.
–Jeremy Myers
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