If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
It has been said by others that obedience is the love language of heaven. We can see the truth of this in the way Jesus himself demonstrated his love of the Father by his obedience to him. As with how love often seems to us generally, these demonstrations of obedience seemed like things that would diminish or weaken the one who did them but that in fact nourished him deeply.
Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work" (see John 4:34).
Even though he was the God-Man his human nature most fully expressed itself in all it was meant to be through obedience. Although one might speculate that a perfect individual would not need commandments but could act freely under the impetus of one's own will, recognizing and choosing the good with no outside influence, Jesus himself did not act this way. Rather, he "humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross" (see Philippians 2:8). And was this important? Would things have gone differently for Jesus without this obedience? Such a thought experiment is impossible to answer since the premises would require Jesus to be someone other than he was. But considering it does highlight the beauty of Jesus prayer during the agony in the garden that the will of his Father and not his own human will be done. Jesus treasured the Father's command as something that empowered him to do what he himself knew he was meant to do, what his love was driving him to do, but that from which his human fear of suffering and death recoiled. Obedience empowered love for the humanity of Jesus in a way that the humanity itself simply did not have the resources to muster. But this obedience did not mean God the Father was merely using Jesus as a pawn to fulfill his own desires. Rather his Son himself desired to take this role and his Father was, as it were, giving him something more solid and definite as a basis for doing so.
And I will ask the Father,
and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always,
the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept
If we are willing to enter into this interplay of love between the Father and the Son we can be open to the presence of their Spirit, the Advocate, in our lives. This Spirit is the Spirit of adoption through whom we cry, "Abba! Father!" (see Romans 8:15). Therefore it is precisely through the indwelling of the Spirit that we experience the truth that we are not orphans. We learn the unexpected and profound fulfillment of God's promise that "I will never leave you nor forsake you" (see Hebrews 13:5) and that, "I am with you always, to the end of the age" (see Matthew 28:20). He fulfilled the promises of his presence in a more profound way than we could have guessed. Though he is no longer visible to the world at large in his humanity, he continues to live, not merely in our midst, but in our hearts.
On that day you will realize that I am in my Father
and you are in me and I in you.
When we express our love for Jesus we are responding to his own invitation to us. Because it is a response it is also a revelation of the one who is within us, prompting us, drawing us to more and more follow and his steps.
For Christ also suffered for sins once,
the righteous for the sake of the unrighteous,
that he might lead you to God.
We who are humans have often been burned by merely human obedience and are reluctant to follow anything we can't prove or authenticate for ourselves. But this does not change the fact that God has made us for himself. The lower things of this world were never meant to be the center of our lives, never meant to command or dominate our path. Lesser things are always inevitably too limited and finite themselves, too needly in their own right to direct us to our true good. But God is different. He is unlimited, in need of nothing. He does not command in order to satisfy any need of his, but rather so that he himself can direct us to our good. He does so, not as an hostile influence from without, but sweetly from the center of our own souls. As Augustine wrote, "You were more inward to me than my most inward part; and higher than my highest" (Confessions, Chapter 6 Paragraph 11).
When we come to understand why it so right and good for God to sit on the throne of our hearts rather than ourselves we begin to understand the joy people took in our reading from Acts when the Gospel was proclaimed and their great desire to experience the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in power. And as we understand that we begin to grasp the urgency of Peter when he wrote that we should always "be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope". There is always more to this hope we have received than we yet realize. The Spirit is always to lead us ever deeper into the depths of its reality. And as he does so we become better able to convey it to a world that is itself starved for hope.
Hear now, all you who fear God, while I declare
what he has done for me.
Blessed be God who refused me not
my prayer or his kindness!
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