Sermon for Sunday, May 10, 2026 || Easter 6A || John 14:15-21
Today we are going to have a nuts and bolts sermon. After several sermons in a row with lots of ancient Greek and complex theology, this morning we’re taking a step back and looking at one of the fundamentals of our faith. Over the next ten minutes, we’re going to explore what Jesus commands us to do.
Today’s Gospel reading follows on directly from last week’s. Jesus is sharing what Bible scholars call the “Farewell Discourse,” which is Jesus’ long talk with his disciples before heading out to the garden where he will be arrested. The Farewell Discourse spans about 20% of the Gospel According to John and includes many of Jesus’ most famous sayings. One of them is this: Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
These words got me curious this week in my sermon prep, so I searched all four accounts of the Gospel for every instance of the word “commandment” to see when and how Jesus uses this word. (For those of you keeping score, the word “commandment” shows up 25 times in the Gospel.) And do you know what I found? Apart from when Jesus is talking specifically about the Ten Commandments, every time he speaks to people about commands, he’s talking about love.
In the Gospel according to Matthew and the Gospel according to Mark, Jesus summarizes the law found in the early books of the Hebrew Scriptures. He distills the law down to two commandments: ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ (Mark 12:29-31; Matthew 22:37-40)
The first of these two great commandments comes directly from the book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Bible and the last of the Torah, which are the books of Instruction in the Hebrew Scriptures. In Deuteronomy, Moses speaks to the Israelites right before they begin their conquest of the Promised Land, reminding them of how they are supposed to live due to their relationship with God. These words that Jesus quotes begin with the “Shema Israel,” the heart of Jewish faith and worship: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
I was talking on Tuesday with my rabbi friend, Marc, who shared with me how these words are used in the services at the Jewish temple in Waterford. The words of the Shema fall in between two prayers. The prayer before the Shema is a prayer about the God of Love being present in creation. The prayer after the Shema is a prayer about how we respond in love to God’s presence. So, in the Jewish service, the call to listen to God is surrounded by God’s love and our response to God’s love.
This response, in the Jewish service, continues to quote Deuteronomy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” In the Gospel, Jesus adds, “with all your mind,” to this list. Jesus commands us to love God with all that we are, with every facet of our being: emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical. To love is to be in deep and abiding relationship, to embrace the weaving movement of God. So loving God means that we devote our entire selves to our relationships with God. We don’t hold anything back, especially the parts of ourselves that we aren’t too fond of or proud of, the parts that embarrass us or make us feel guilty. Even those parts we bring to our relationships with God because God’s love compels us to love God with EVERYTHING that makes us who we are. This EVERYTHING is our Being, and our love of God is our giving ourselves back to the Foundation of All Being.
And then comes Jesus’ second great commandment, which follows along perfectly from the first: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Loving God with all that we are grants us the grace to love every part of ourselves, including the parts we don’t bring out in public. When we love ourselves, when we accept ourselves, we can love and accept our neighbors too. We can weave ourselves together in a vast web of relationship. We can find the face of Christ shining back at us from behind the faces of everyone we meet, including ourselves when we look in the mirror.
St. Paul takes this distillation about loving our neighbor to its logical conclusion. Paul says, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:8-10)
So, God’s love for us grants us the grace to love God, to love ourselves, and to love our neighbors. This overarching love allows us to fulfill the law, to live in ways that bring abundant life to all Creation. And this brings us back to our Gospel reading today: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” At first, this statement sounds like marching orders: “If you love me, here is a list of things you must do.” But what Jesus is really saying is that loving him is the fulfilling of the commandment because loving Jesus means loving everyone and everything that has the creative spark of God within – which is EVERYTHING.
At multiple times during Jesus’ Farewell Discourse, Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” The love that Jesus shared with his friends, with his enemies, and with the world is a love that transcended all boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, gender, power, even the boundaries of space and time and life and death. The eternal love of God sits at the center of the vast web of relationships, anchoring the strands, linking every connection, drawing all of Creation into a deeper and more abiding relationship with God.
Each of us is a strand in that vast web. We listen to the God of love speaking the ability to love into our hearts, our souls, our minds, and our strength. We respond by loving ourselves and our neighbors. To love is the only command Jesus gave us. Love is the great commandment. So love without limit, and know the joy and the power of embracing the eternal love of God.
Photo by Edge2Edge Media on Unsplash.
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