Carlos Padilla—Year A Easter 6

Anthony: Let’s transition to our next pericope of the month. It is John 14:15–21. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for the sixth Sunday of Easter, May 10. Carlos, would you read it for us please?

Carlos: Yes, sir. It says:

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. ¹⁶ And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. ¹⁷ This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you. ¹⁸ I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. ¹⁹ In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. ²⁰ On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. ²¹ They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.

Anthony: There’s a lot there. So, if you were preaching this text, this pericope to your local congregation, what would you proclaim?

Carlos: You know the first thing that jumps off this, the page, is that we’re going to be comforted by this Spirit of truth. And when I look at the word truth, for me, it means a reality. I know it really seems … it hit like that word commandment is sometimes still a bad word to me. Like, you’ll obey my commandments. So, it’s like, man, am I back under the law? Am I back under my own weight to understand and believe Jesus? And is it true that, man, if I really do the commandments first, then he’ll love me as a transactional gospel?

But I think the truth is that when the Spirit of truth comes, he reveals Christ and the reality of our condition in him, and that supplies the faith to now do the commandments in a graceful context. I always think of Exodus 20, before Moses gives the Ten Commandments. The power to do the commandments is in the verse before where God says, “I have delivered you from Egypt. Therefore, you’ll have no other gods before me.” So, I think the Spirit of truth is giving us the preceding revelation that empowers the ability to fulfill the commandments, not the need to.

Anthony: Yeah, that speaks to the indicatives of grace. We first look at scripture to find where God is, because that’s where grace is. And he empowers us and activates us to actually live out a response, which is the imperative. But the indicative is always primary, right, when we come to Scripture. But often, we come looking for ourselves and what we’ve got to do.

Carlos: That’s true.

Anthony: And we miss the point when we do that. What does “another advocate” or “helper,” “comforter,” suggest about the Spirit’s ministry and the everyday experience of followers of Jesus?

Carlos: I think it takes the weight off having to do it, like you said. He comes to comfort our broken efforts, the broken system, and realign those to the efforts of Christ. What’s big for me is verse 18, where it says, I will not leave you orphaned. I’m coming to you. Why?

Because we are in an orphan mindset where we think we’ve got to earn God’s love, or we think we’ve got to continue to fulfill and obey before he can even love us, that acting as anything we do changes his disposition towards us or makes us more likable or more lovable. And I think that’s what the Advocate comes to do. He comes to nourish those places in our hearts where we think we can contribute to this beautiful thing called grace.

Anthony: Yeah. And I’m thinking about contributions, Carlos, and you’ve already talked to this to some degree, but JB Torrance would always talk about not throwing people back on themselves.

Carlos: Sure.

Anthony: But we also find that there is, the Spirit is drawing out a response in us. It’s not about earning, but there’s still effort, man. Ministry feels like hard work at the end of the day. So, how do you balance that? That, yes, we don’t earn anything but there’s still an effort in our participation in the divine life. What say you?

Carlos: Yes. I think you just hit it right there. And I think one of Torrance’s primary sayings is that it’s about participation, not cooperation. There’s nothing that we do in our participation that makes this more real, but rather we are discovering what’s already real and what’s behind that discovery is what empowers the faith.

People say, it’s like yeah, so we don’t have to have faith anymore because Jesus did this. It’s like, no, the gospel actually supplies faith. It doesn’t demand it, it supplies it. And I think that’s what the Spirit comes to do. He comes to show you a love that’s unforsaking. And when you abide in that love, like you said, the natural response that love creates is to love other people, to be obedient, to fulfill commandments, not in a legalistic way, but like you said, in a way of covenantal love and a reality, not out of federal or of transactional, of inklings, absolutely.

Anthony: And you said a word that kind of got me thinking, went down a rabbit trail for just a brief second. You talked about how commandments can be maybe a dirty word. Obedience can be for some people, even people who think through a Trinitarian lens. But obedience, the way I look at it, Carlos, it’s like when we see the goodness of the Father revealed in Jesus, we want to go and do what he’s doing. We want to do it like him. We want to love like him. He’s so good and faithful. What other response can there be, but this loving participation or obedience to the goodness of God?

Carlos: Yeah. Karl Barth calls that, once you see that the divine commandment of God, where commandment, no longer a bad word, but rather it’s the divine empowerment to carry out the mission you’re created for.

So, I think that’s a huge way of turning it because it’s really easy, even in the grace terminology, to turn to a legalistic mindset — still having to do to get transactional reality. But the thing is, too, I think the meta narrative in Scripture is that there’s nothing we could do to do this because if we could be obedient enough, faithful enough, are obedient to the commandments enough, then we wouldn’t need Jesus.

[Anthony: Yeah. Amen to that. And it’s as if … I’m thinking about TF Torrance who said, “The whole universe revolves around the love of God in Jesus Christ, and all of its motion, including our participation, depends entirely upon him.”

[Carlos: Amen and amen.

Anthony: Amen.