The Spirit of Jesus's Commands

I've been procrastinating on this one. John 14:15 is one of those verses that sometimes makes me cringe. I know we're not supposed to admit that any Bible verses make us cringe or aren't our favorites, however, I'm trying to be honest and confront these verses as they come, and that means owning my biases. In John 14:15, Jesus says something, that, in many ways, seem simple. He says that if we love Him, we are to keep his commands.  Why would that cause me such problem? To answer that, I need to give some background on myself and my beliefs regarding Jesus in general.

I was raised in the Southern Baptist church, raised to believe in the Bible, and in a mostly literal interpretive framework. I went to a Catholic high school for academic reasons, before majoring in philosophy and religion at Cumberland College (now University of the Cumberlands) in southeastern Kentucky, which is a SBC affiliated school. Throughout my adolescence, I went throughout a process of  liberalization when it came to my theology. One of the places that started was noticing how, time and time again, Jesus emphasized an attitude of love over a rigid adherence to rules. I've tried to apply the general ethic Jesus embodied to the problems of today, rather than searching verse by verse for clues as to how one Biblical writer or another might have believed on an issue.

During college I began to advance this idea in classroom discussions, papers, and other places. The idea that Jesus calls us to an ethics, and not a set of rules. While it was rare to get outright hostility towards the notion, there was always a hint of caution in the response. It usually involved people indicating that there would never be any disagreement between the perfect rules of God and an ethic of love, and John 14:15 was the verse cited. You see, this verse, I was told, tells us that loving God means keeping His commandments, and therefore, an ethic of love is really the same thing as an ethic of following the rules. That was an idea that never sat well with me. I mean, hadn't they read the Gospels. Didn't they see Jesus time and time again flout the rules in favor of healing, or caring for people's needs, in the name of love. Each time, they had an explanation, about how the REAL rule said to do/not do X, and Jesus did Y, which was similar to X, but not exactly X, so the lesson isn't really about the relationship between people and rules, but about the precise definition of the rules.

I got frustrated. I felt like people were missing the forest for the trees. Did they really think Jesus's ministry was about refining the rules? cthey see that every word He said was about love, and not directed at commands, but about an inward attitude? He summed up the entire Law in two commands about love. Did people really think He did that, just so He could then bizarrely redefine love as following the law?

So, that's my baggage when I look at this week's passage, John 14: 15-21:

“If you love me, keep my commands. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— 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[c] in you. 18 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 21 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.”

As I was trying to look at this passage with fresh eyes, and tried to free myself of the baggage I mentioned, I found myself asking a question, one that I had always assumed had an obvious answer: "What ARE Jesus's commands." The presumed answer to that question throughout my childhood was simple, the commands of Jesus are the commands of all of the Bible, because the whole Bible is His Word, right?

What if we don't make that assumption, though? After all, Jesus was speaking to His disciples while He was still on Earth. Most of them were illiterate and barely knew the Old Testament, and the New Testament hadn't been written yet. So, maybe He was just talking about the things He told them were commands.

Based on that, I tried to do a quick survey of the commands of Jesus. There are many lists online that list anywhere from fifty commands to hundreds. Some seem to think that every time Jesus opened His mouth it was a command. I tried to look up when he used the word "command" (brief English search, not thorough, and no Greek scholarship, here), and I came up with only a couple of results. There was His description of the two great commandments, to Love God and Love Neighbor. There was also one chapter earlier, the only time He clearly enunciated a new command, telling them to love one another as He had loved them. Okay. So, maybe the commands of Jesus aren't as big a list of rules as I thought. Perhaps Jesus's "command" was the ethic of love I believed in all along.

Then Jesus does something interesting: He begins His famous promise about sending the Spirit. This is the set of verses that has launched Trinitarian doctrine more than any other. I've heard them preached on, discussed, expounded, read, and recited hundreds if not thousands of time, yet I rarely hear them in conjunction with the verse on commands. Usually the verse on commands is one sermon, and the verses on the Spirit are another.
However, Jesus talks about the Spirit and then COMES BACK to the command talk. The two are clearly connected.

Here's the puzzling thing, though. You don't need a Spirit to follow a list of rules. I'm a lawyer, I know this from experience. There's no real spirit in the law. The Spirit,  a "Spirit of Truth," particularly, is needed where there's doubt, and ambiguity. There's no ambiguity and a huge list of commands and rules. There IS, however, ambiguity in an ethic of love. There's ambiguity in figuring out HOW to love someone. There's a whole lot of ambiguity there. So, perhaps Jesus is telling us that in order to understand how to follow His commands, which aren't a big list of rules, but rather a few principles, we need a Spirit. Perhaps, then, the verse about following His commands isn't Jesus redefining Love into obedience at all, but the opposite. Love may be obedience, but obedience is love, and the only way to figure that out is with a living Spirit.

I spent so long bothered by that verse, feeling like Jesus had let the legalism slip back in at the last moment. I should have known better. I should have known I could trust Him. That's why I'm starting to love this project. It's two weeks old, and I've already been forced to tackle a verse that has plagued me for years, and it will do so no more. His command is love. Now that's Good News.