Earl Palmer, the senior pastor at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle, where I attended as a college student at the University of Washington, preached on this same passage. In his sermon, he said, “Doesn’t Jesus sound like a mob boss when he says, “If you love me, you’ll keep my commandments’?” Sounds like there are strings attached to this offer of love as if it’s an offer they can’t refuse.
It made me think of The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece of a a film.
The movie follows Michael Corleone, reluctant heir apparent to the family business. His family, the Corleones, is one of the most powerful mafia families in New York. The Godfather explores the slow transformation of Michael, who at first distances himself from the family business, desires to live a life free of crime, and seeks to legitimize the family’s crime business. He, however, slowly becomes a cold-blooded killer like his father when he becomes the head of the family.
There is a famous scene in which Michael becomes the godfather of his nephew at his nephew’s baptism. The baptism takes place in an ornate Catholic Church.
As he takes vows to reaffirm his own baptism in order to become his nephew’s godfather, he makes such vows such as: “Do you renounce Satan and all evil?” After each vow, the scene shifts to how each head of rival crime families are brutally murdered, all of which had been orchestrated by Michael himself.
It’s a 5-minute-scene that hauntingly contrasts holiness and horror, good and evil, right and wrong.
It’s quite clear that Michael is lying through his teeth when taking these baptismal vows. He renounces all evil, at the very moment he’s committing the evil of murder. His actions don’t match his words or what he professes to believe about God in that moment. If he truly meant those baptismal vows his response to his rivals would not have resulted in bloodshed.
If he truly followed Christ, he would renounce the temptation to do anything to anyone in order to gain power. His response would be different.
When Jesus says “keep my commandments,” he’s not saying “in order to earn my love you must keep my commands.” What Jesus is saying is that if we love him, we will respond by keeping his commands. There will be a change in our actions.
When we keep the commands of Jesus Christ, we are responding to, not earning, the love of God.
What did Jesus command? To love God, and to love your neighbor as yourself. If we truly love Jesus, we can’t help but love him back by loving our neighbors as ourselves.
It’s no question that the disciples are doing their best to love Jesus. They all left livelihoods and communities to follow him. But they never quite get who Jesus is.
But now Jesus is telling him he’s about to leave them. But it is only a physical departure. He won’t abandon them. He won’t leave them as orphans without anyone to speak for them.
In Jesus’s time, there was no foster care system that provided shelter, food, and protection for children without parents. Orphans were on their own, left to fend for themselves in the streets. There was no one to protect them or speak on their behalf. An orphan at that time could also be understood as someone who lost a beloved teacher or guide. In this case, the disciples were about to lose their teacher, Rabbi, guide, and friend. While they never quite grasped exactly who Jesus was, they loved him and knew he loved them in return. And they were about to lose him. What were they supposed to do without him? Who would lead them?
Jesus reassures them they will not be alone. He promises another advocate – the Holy Spirit (the first advocate being Jesus). An advocate is someone who does for us what we can’t do for ourselves. What we can’t do with our own strength and intellect.
Mark Labberton, pastor and author, shared a story about how someone advocated for him. He says this:
“I went to the IRS office in Oakland. I waited. And I waited. Eventually I was escorted through a warren of cubicles to the one where I was to meet the agent who would assist me. Alone in the bowels of a large IRS office—without hope. Yes, I think that captures it. The agent there listened to my case, took all the relevant paperwork and excused herself to consult with someone else. I waited ten minutes. Then fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. Thirty . . . forty . . . forty-five minutes. No one checked in. As far as I could tell, the agent had disappeared. No apparent sign of life—just a cubicle in the void. Suddenly, the agent was back. She handed me a sheet and said simply, “There, it’s all done. It’s settled.”
I honestly did not know what she meant. I assumed she was saying that she had taken the first step. What she meant was that the whole process was settled. She turned the paper over and revealed the nine signatures she had acquired all the way up the IRS ladder so the case was now closed, and closed in my favor. There, in the midst of a warren of bureaucratic anonymity and powerlessness, I encountered a person who became my advocate, who heard my appeal and who took the initiative to do on my behalf what I could never have done for myself.”
In the same way, the Holy Spirit, as our advocate, stands in for us. It does what we cannot do – understand God’s love for us.
Jesus was the first advocate who did what we could not do – be perfectly obedient to God.
Scripture to support this?
25 “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. 26 But the Advocate,[k] the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you. John 14:25-26
26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes[a] with groanings too deep for words.–Romans 8:26
The Holy Spirit helps us understand all that Jesus taught, said, and did. The Holy Spirit intercedes on our behalf when we have no prayerful words of our own. The Holy Spirit helps us respond in love to God’s love.
Without the Holy Spirit, we can’t be connected to God and Jesus.
The Holy Spirit is the spirit of God with us in the physical absence of Jesus Christ.
If the Holy Spirit is God, and the Holy Spirit helps us understand the love of Jesus Christ, then it’s safe to say we can’t even understand who God is without God’s help.
In helping us understand God’s love the Holy Spirit keeps us connected to God.
The Holy Spirit reminds us that God is with us forever, something that we keep forgetting.
According to Jesus, not everyone can perceive the Holy Spirit. It’s not that the Holy Spirit isn’t available to all; it’s that not everyone chooses to receive what the Holy Spirit offers.
This brings me back to that baptism scene in the Godfather.
I read an interesting analysis of that famous baptism scene. According to that analysis, it could be that Michael Corleon doesn’t think he is breaking the vow to renounce all evil and declare Jesus as Lord. He’s reconstructed his own reality where his enemies should be killed. After all the other mob bosses had hurt and even murdered people in the Corleone family. It could be that Michael is justifying his acts of evil with the idea that “God loves me so much he wants those who have hurt my family and me to suffer.” With that kind of theology, Michael’s acts of murder are made right in the eyes of God.
But according to Scripture, murder and violence is never the answer. But I think we too can fall into that same trap. We are so about God’s love for us that we don’t think about God’s love for others. For decades the American Church has focused so much on having a personal relationship with Jesus that we forget about Jesus’s love for others. Our faith is personal, but not individual.
When we make our faith so individual, we fall into the same trap as Michael by using God’s love for “me” as justifying our disregard for others.
The Holy Spirit is God, who helps us not fall into that trap. The Holy Spirit helps us to not lose sight of others as beings who are also made in God’s image and also deeply loved.
What the Holy Spirit promises is a connection to God that can never be severed. The Holy Spirit keeps us connected to Jesus Christ. It is the still small voice that quietly nudges us in the way of Jesus. The way of demonstrating a radical love for our neighbors even when it costs us something. Essentially, the Holy Spirit helps us respond well to the love of Christ by enabling us to love God, our neighbors, and ourselves more deeply. When we do that, we are sharing the love of God with others in a world that needs the hope of Jesus Christ.