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If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love.
We don't think of obedience as being in any way connected with love. Americans in particular are suspicious of anything other than unrestricted freedom, and tend to oppose anything that feels like an attempt to control us. However, if we listen to Jesus we immediately see that he understood things differently. His relationship to his heavenly Father was defined in terms of obedience to his commandments. But this was vastly different from the obedience proper to slaves or even employees. This was instead the obedience proper to a Son whose Father was perfect and loved him with a perfect love. There was no suspicion or coercion involved in obedience of this kind. Jesus chose to obey because he trusted his Father, and because he wished to reciprocate the unlimited love he received by doing only and exactly what his beloved Father wished in return.
We are not merely being asked to keep some abstract laws. Much less are we being asked to submit ourselves in an ultimate sense to any self-serving human systems of authority. It is not as though we are being asked to follow the laws of a state so that we can enjoy the privileges of citizens. It is much deeper than that. We are being invited into the relationship of Jesus with his Father. We are invited to it in terms expressed as commandments because those terms express the absolute priority the Father is meant to have in our lives. They could not be suggestions, as though the Father's will must ultimately pass the scrutiny of merely human judgments. No, instead we need to abandon the suspicion about his will that characterized the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Commandments in this sense are different from suggestions because we can only respond wholeheartedly to commandments if we trust the one from whom they come.
I have told you this so that
my joy might be in you and
your joy might be complete.
The point of our obedience is not that the Father or Jesus gain anything from it, but rather we ourselves. To obey does not denigrate us as we are wont to imagine. Rather it ennobles us, making us more like Jesus himself. It was his trusting relationship to the Father that was the source of his own joy. It is that very joy that he invites us to share.
Remain in my love.
For us, the commandments ensure we remain united to God by ensuring we don't prefer those things which are contrary to it, all the many forms of disordered self-love. The goal of the commandments is therefore good. And Jesus himself, the perfect example of living for such a goal, is imminently compelling. Why should we continue to hesitate or hold back? What we have been asked is not the "yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear", spoken of by Peter. It is rather the yoke that is easy and the burden that is light to which Jesus himself invites us.
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