Thursday May 18
This text is a brief excerpt, dense and beautiful, from the discourses of the Last Supper. The harmony in the background is provided by the word agape, love, which is repeated strongly in the testimony of Jesus. It is a love that is comparable to a waterfall coming from the Father, shown in the Son and through him to the disciples who, in turn, will at the same time live and spread it to the world. If a barrier comes up, this vital flow is interrupted. So Jesus insists on staying, being in communion of faith and thus living with deep joy.
Alternative
What does love have to do with commandments? These two words feel and look like opponents. And for good measure there’s the word “if” in the middle! (see February 23), “You will remain in my love if you keep my commandments.”
It calls for a fresh look. If someone is showing you how to do something—how to drive a car, for example—he or she might say, “Follow these instructions now and you won’t go off the road, you will stay on course.” We don’t feel that this must be a bossy person: he or she is simply showing you how something is done. Likewise Jesus in this passage (and everywhere else) is showing us how to love. But the faith has mostly been presented to us in an authoritarian way, and it is hard to free it of that coloring; a stench of death continues to hang over many words.
Even in the Old Testament, the ten commandments (in their original setting) were presented as ways of remaining free! “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; therefore you shall have no other gods before me” and so on to the other nine commandments (Ex 20:2,3).
If someone gets the wrong idea, we call that misinterpretation. But there is another kind: it is when someone gets the wrong feeling. This often happens, even between friends; and it is much more serious than the other, because it is harder to sort out. When it comes to our religion we have to be alert to this. It should be a major part of a theologian’s work. We have to make a sustained effort to salvage the Scriptures and our faith from heretical feelings!