John 14:15-21

At our wedding rehearsal, Debbie and I tried out two different pieces of exit music for the end of the service. The winner was the Thunderbirds theme tune: it had just the right rhythm for walking out.

The one we rejected, for not quite having the right rhythm, was the theme tune to The Simpsons.

I guess if we’d gone with The Simpsons, we’d have had to have served doughnuts afterwards, given Homer Simpson’s love for them.

And I’d like you to think about doughnuts for a moment. An outer ring, an inner ring, and the centre. Because that’s roughly the structure of our reading today. There is one theme in an outer ring, at the beginning and end of the passage, a second them in the verses just inside that, and a central theme in the middle of all of them.

Not only that, let’s remember that this teaching comes from what we call Jesus’ ‘Farewell Discourses’: teaching he considered so important he had to share it before his death.

Specifically here, the theme is ‘Loving Jesus.’

The outer circle asks, what does loving Jesus involve?

The answer is simple to state: we keep Jesus’ commands. At the beginning in verse 15 Jesus says,

If you love me, keep my commands.

At the end in verse 21 he says,

Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.

This isn’t the only place where Jesus tells his disciples that if they love him, they will do what he says. He will repeat that emphasis later in the Farewell Discourses.

Not only that, but I have also preached on this teaching from other verses before. I don’t have anything particularly new or different to say about them. I’m going to say much what I’ve said before, but maybe in slightly different words.

Keeping commands may seem a strange way of showing love. We don’t expect our friends to command us. But Jesus our great friend is still also our Lord. He does have a right to tell us what he wants of us.

Therefore, we see this as a special, souped-up case of what we know in ordinary friendships. If we love someone, we want to please them. We please Jesus, our Lord and supreme Friend, by doing what he asks.

In his letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle Paul tells his readers to ‘Find out what pleases the Lord.’ While we may sometimes struggle with his will for certain specific circumstances, his general will is easy to find out. It’s laid out in the Gospels, where we find his teaching. In terms of our general behaviour as Christians, what Jesus wants of us is fairly straightforward to discern. He wants kindness, humility, forgiveness, sacrifice, and so on. He calls us to do these things and adopt these attitudes as a sign of our love for him.

What we can’t afford to do if we love Jesus is just sit around doing nothing while we wait to find out his will. Even if we are waiting and praying about something particular in our lives, we still have plenty to get on with doing that will please him.

We don’t always find it comfortable. Jesus’ commands are often rather more challenging than we would like. Mark Twain once said that it wasn’t so much the words of Jesus he didn’t understand that troubled him, so much as the words of Jesus he did understand that bothered him.

That’s not to deny that sometimes Jesus’ commands need understanding in their context and their cultural background, but I suspect many of us would like to explain away some of his words at times, when instead he calls us to simple obedience out of love.

The inner circle of the doughnut asks not, what does loving Jesus involve, but how can we do it?

The answer comes in verses 16 and 17:

¹⁶ And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you for ever – ¹⁷ the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.

How can we love Jesus by obeying his commands when those commands can be so challenging? The answer is that Jesus promises to give us the Holy Spirit.

Now, we shall focus especially on the gift of the Holy Spirit in a fortnight’s time when we get to the Feast of Pentecost. But we cannot reduce the Spirit of God to one Sunday a year. Perhaps we do that, because the Holy Spirit is mysterious, strange, and disturbing to us. We remember the old name, the Holy Ghost, and get spooked.

But this section of John’s Gospel, the ‘Farewell Discourses’, is the part of the Bible where above all the Spirit is spoken of in personal terms. These passages, more than any others, are the ones that justify us speaking of the Holy Spirit as the Third Person of the Trinity. Just listen to the warm and tender way Jesus describes the Holy Spirit in the verses I just read:

Another advocate to help you and be with you for ever – the Spirit of truth.

An advocate is a legal official who speaks on our behalf. Advocates help us. The Spirit is with us for ever and is the Spirit of truth. That’s not a spook to be afraid of, but the holy and loving God to be welcomed.

Debbie and I decided recently that our wills needed to be completely rewritten. We first drew them up when the children were small and we were consumed with questions about guardians for them if we died before they reached eighteen. Now they are young adults, our wills need to be very different in content.

So, we arranged to see a friend we knew from our last appointment. Clare was church warden at the parish church, the Mum of one of Mark’s school friends, and a local solicitor. She dealt with probate when my Dad died. Now, she is rewriting our wills, according to the desires we have indicated. She will provide the words that we cannot. Were we to write new wills off our own backs, the words would be all wrong, and we would saddle our children with untold legal complications after we are gone. But Clare will know the right words for our situation and provide them for us.

In similar ways, Christians call on the Holy Spirit. We don’t have the right words to say, but the Spirit can provide them. We lack the strength to do the right things, but the Spirit brings us the power. We don’t always want to do what Jesus commands us to do, but we can say to the Holy Spirit, ‘I don’t feel willing, but I’m willing to be made willing.’

When we know what Jesus requires of us that would demonstrate our love for him, the Holy Spirit can guide us in the way of his truth and give us the spiritual muscle we don’t otherwise have to do it. The Spirit is always on hand for that, because as Jesus said, he is with us for ever.

Finally, the centre of the doughnut asks what the consequence of this loving obedience to Jesus is:

Here is what Jesus says about this:

¹⁸ I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. ¹⁹ Before long, the world will not see me any more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. ²⁰ On that day you will realise that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.

The consequence is a close relationship. A life that flows from the life of Jesus. A closeness with him just as he is close to the Father.

In a way, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Take any kind of human relationship – a marriage, siblings, a friendship, or almost anything you care to name. Then in that relationship one person takes the initiative to show great kindness and love. The other person responds in gratitude by finding things that please the first person. If that happens, and keeps happening, those two people will grow ever closer.

This is what happens in the relationship between Jesus and us as well. He has taken the initiative to show extraordinary kindness and love to us, and at immense cost – the cost of his life. Through that, he gives us salvation. We respond as I indicated in the first point with a love that we show by finding out what pleases him and obeying his commands. The Holy Spirit enables us to do this, even when it is difficult, as I said in the second point. As this keeps happening, so we draw nearer and nearer to Jesus, and he comes closer than ever to us.

Is this what we want? To know Jesus more deeply, more closely than we have ever known him? Is this not the best thing we could have in the world?

Does Jesus want this for us? Of course he does. He has made the first move. He took on human flesh. He lived and died for us. He has been raised from the dead and now reigns at the Father’s right hand, where he prays for us. And not only that: he delights in us, he rejoices in us, he loves us before we ever love him, and he calls us his friends. You can be sure he wants that close relationship.

What, then, if we were to delight in him, rejoice in his love, accept his invitation to call him our friend, listen to him, and make thankful sacrifices for him?

The next move is ours.