Here are two things I don’t like to mix: love and commandments. Since when is keeping commandments a sign of love? What happened to flowers and chocolate? Oh, it starts out okay; Jesus tells his followers, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”
That I get - the love which we have received is what we give to others; love is something we can abide in, hang out with. That sounds beautiful and comforting and profound and unconditional. But Jesus isn’t finished: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”
I know the psalms talk about how “the law of the Lord" is sweet like honey, but I think of commandments as “should” and love as “want to” and never the twain shall meet. This verse makes it sound as if God’s love is not unconditional, but highly contingent upon our ability to obey. Since I prize unconditional love above all theological concepts, and think obedience usually ends in failure, disappointment and self-condemnation, I react negatively to this word.
What if we change the “if” to an “as?” Jesus is not saying, “If you keep my commandments, I will keep loving you.” He says, “As you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” There is no change to the love in which we are invited to abide, only to our capacity for experiencing that love. Keeping Jesus’ commandments, he is saying, makes us better able to swim in the love of God flowing to, through and around us at all times. It puts us in the “head space” and “heart space” to receive – and give – the love of God.
Jesus made visible God’s love for humanity. He lived it, taught it, demonstrated it, and finally died and rose again to complete it here on earth. He says it was his fidelity to God’s commandments that made him able to manifest God’s love. Similarly, our fidelity to his commandments enables us to show forth his love in this world. We need only recall times when we’ve been in the grip of attitudes or behaviors that were outside of God’s will to know how easily our ability to love can become compromised.
Could it be that God’s commandments are not about our ability to “be good,” but intended rather to enable us to be Love? Perhaps I think of commandments as more guilt-inducing than loving because trying to live into God’s commands without the power of God’s love at work in us is an uphill climb. With God’s love flowing through us, it becomes more like riding a bike with plenty of gears, so we can keep a steady pace no matter what the terrain.
Where are you experiencing a lot of love in your life, from God or other people, or from yourself toward others? Where is it a little choked off? Are there adjustments you can make to the way you are thinking, acting, loving, to become more Christ-like?
It’s a chicken-and-egg thing. We can’t fully live into God’s commands without God’s love in us, and we can’t fully abide in God’s love without living the way God commands us. As we increase in each area, the other increases too – the more we abide in God’s love, the easier it is to live God’s way, until we discover that living God’s way opens us to more love than we could ever imagine. Now that's Good News!
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