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 modern Greek text exactly: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” So why did I have an earworm saying something else?
My earworm was the creation of Thomas Tallis (c.1505-85). How often I 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 religious partisan in the conflicts of their times; that, instead of advocating for one side or the other, he simply wrote to inspire those who heard his music with “a luminous joy in the beauty of eternal things”.
As if it were not difficult enough to choose between two options for John 14.15, a third reading of the verse is also possible: “If you love me and keep my commandments . . .”. My favourite commentary on John’s Gospel commends that reading. In terms of grammar, our choice 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 depends on this, and yet the choice is still important. Even if it does not change our theology or our ethics, it can make a difference to our relationship with Jesus, by directing our understanding of the link between Christian love and obedience, as we go about the daily business of living our faith.
That is why I make no apology for spending so much time on what is, after all, a “jot or tittle” (Matthew 5.18). (I also cannot resist sharing the fact that “jot”, in Greek, is iota — the smallest Greek letter, “i” — which need not have been translated at all, for people with no knowledge of Greek are familiar with the expression, “not one iota”.)
This puzzle of meaning in John 14.15 reminds me of the woman caught in adultery (John 8). Jesus tells her: “Go, and do not sin again” (8.11). Was his refusal to condemn her contingent on her not sinning again, or did he mean to inspire her, by not condemning her, not to sin again? I hope the latter. Either way, it suggests that we do have a degree of capacity to obey Jesus’s commandments. I prefer to read this story as yoking together love and obedience rather than making Jesus’s love dependent on our obedience.
In the Gospel for Easter 6, older translations of John 14.15, taken in isolation, are less absolute, less likely to demoralise: “If you love me, keep my commandments” is like saying, “Let your love for me be what inspires you to try to fulfil my commandments” — specifically, that “new commandment” mentioned in the previous chapter (13.34). Within the context of the passage as a whole, the picture which emerges is one in which love is both cause and effect: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” shades into “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.”
I would be worried if 14.15, in isolation, made people think that, without fully keeping Jesus’s commandments, they could not truly love him. The old version makes humanity’s participation in divine love an inspiration rather than a deterrent. Fulfilling it completely will always be beyond us, but love always comes first, while keeping commandments flows from that love.
Isolating a phrase, word, letter, or iota, from its context, and then making it bear a weight of meaning beyond the natural capacities of human expression, is risky. John 14.15 is only a small component in a complex of circuitous and overlapping themes. The pattern becomes even more complicated if we take the Gospel together with John’s letters. Shades of meaning can shift as the light of our attention falls on them; once we move on, the shadows return.
However we translate it, we should not overwork 14.15 while failing to see it as one element of an extended revelation and reflection on human and divine love. If read carefully, it can 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.”