Sunday’s Readings: Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 17.22-31; Psalm 66.7-18; 1 Peter 3.13-22; John 14.15-21

I READ John 14.15 in NRSV English, then checked the Greek. The NRSV followed the trendy Greek text exactly: “If you like me, you’ll keep my commandments.” So why did I even have an earworm saying something else?

My earworm was the creation of Thomas Tallis (c.1505-85). How often I even have heard — and sung — his setting of John 14.15, as “If ye love me, keep my commandments”! It has been said that Tallis, unlike his later contemporary William Byrd, was not a spiritual partisan within the conflicts of their times; that, as an alternative of advocating for one side or the opposite, he simply wrote to encourage those that heard his music with “a luminous joy in the fantastic thing about everlasting things”.

As if it weren’t difficult enough to choose from two options for John 14.15, a 3rd reading of the verse can also be possible: “If you like me and keep my commandments . . .”. My favourite commentary on John’s Gospel commends that reading. In terms of grammar, our alternative is between three “moods” of the verb: indicative (“You will keep”: NRSV, NIV), subjunctive (“If you . . . keep”: Raymond Brown, commentator), and imperative (“Keep!”: Latin, AV; based on an older Greek text).

No great doctrinal matter is dependent upon this, and yet the alternative continues to be vital. Even if it doesn’t change our theology or our ethics, it will probably make a difference to our relationship with Jesus, by directing our understanding of the link between Christian love and obedience, as we go in regards to the every day business of living our faith.

That is why I make no apology for spending a lot time on what’s, in spite of everything, a “jot or tittle” (Matthew 5.18). (I also cannot resist sharing the undeniable fact that “jot”, in Greek, is iota — the smallest Greek letter, “i” — which needn’t have been translated in any respect, for individuals with no knowledge of Greek are conversant in the expression, “not one iota”.)

This puzzle of meaning in John 14.15 jogs my memory of the girl caught in adultery (John 8). Jesus tells her: “Go, and don’t sin again” (8.11). Was his refusal to sentence her contingent on her not sinning again, or did he mean to encourage her, by not condemning her, to not sin again? I hope the latter. Either way, it suggests that we do have a level of capability to obey Jesus’s commandments. I prefer to read this story as yoking together love and obedience quite than making Jesus’s love depending on our obedience.

In the Gospel for Easter 6, older translations of John 14.15, taken in isolation, are less absolute, less prone to demoralise: “If you like me, keep my commandments” is like saying, “Let your love for me be what inspires you to attempt to fulfil my commandments” — specifically, that “recent commandment” mentioned within the previous chapter (13.34). Within the context of the passage as a complete, the image which emerges is one by which love is each cause and effect: “If you like me, you’ll keep my commandments” shades into “They who’ve my commandments and keep them are those that love me.”

I could be apprehensive if 14.15, in isolation, made people think that, without fully keeping Jesus’s commandments, they may not truly love him. The old version makes humanity’s participation in divine love an inspiration quite than a deterrent. Fulfilling it completely will at all times be beyond us, but love at all times comes first, while keeping commandments flows from that love.

Isolating a phrase, word, letter, or iota, from its context, after which making it bear a weight of meaning beyond the natural capacities of human expression, is dangerous. John 14.15 is barely a small component in a posh of circuitous and overlapping themes. The pattern becomes much more complicated if we take the Gospel along with John’s letters. Shades of meaning can shift as the sunshine of our attention falls on them; once we move on, the shadows return.

However we translate it, we must always not overwork 14.15 while failing to see it as one element of an prolonged revelation and reflection on human and divine love. If read fastidiously, it will probably help us to ask whether our obedience to Jesus is the cause or the effect of our love for him. Then — whether the imperative is polite (“Please keep!”) or peremptory (“Keep . . . or else!”) — as Philip has just said (John 14.8), “We shall be satisfied.”