Jesus begins this passage with a command: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” But I do not hear this as a demand for obedience. Rather, it feels like the natural movement of love. When we truly love someone, we become deeply attentive to them. We do not want to wound, betray, or hurt the beloved in any way. Love itself creates a kind of carefulness. So keeping the commandments is about relationship.
This changes how I hear the rest of the passage. Jesus is speaking to disciples who are already troubled. It is the night of the Last Supper. Feet have been washed, Judas has left, and Jesus announces that he is going away. At some point, all of us know that fear. We fear abandonment, isolation, vulnerability. There are seasons in life when change, loss, separation, or grief can make us feel orphaned. We begin asking the same questions: What do I do now? Who will guide me? Who is with me? What will become of me?Into that fear Jesus speaks these tender words: “I will not leave you orphaned.” What a promise. He does not deny that there will be absence, transition, or even pain. In fact, in the same conversation he says both that he is leaving and that he is coming. There is a tension here: absence and presence, leaving and coming. Love often teaches us this mystery. Someone can be physically absent and yet profoundly present. Their love continues to shape, guide, and sustain us. He says that he will ask the Father to send another Advocate, the Spirit of truth, to be with us forever. The Advocate is not an external replacement for Jesus, as though Jesus departs and sends someone else to fill the vacancy. Rather, the Holy Spirit is the continuation of divine presence within us.
This is why the image of breath is so powerful. The gift is as near as our own breathing. God is not distant or withheld. The Spirit is not above us or beyond us but within us, animating our deepest desire to connect, relate, and commune.
Father Richard Rohr’s image of “minding the gap” helps here. On the London Underground, travelers are constantly warned: Mind the gap. There is always a space between train and platform. Spiritually too, we often live with gaps,between ourselves and God, ourselves and others, even within our own hearts. The Holy Spirit fills these gaps, but first we must recognize they exist. Often we are distracted by so many other pursuits,success, approval, control, possessions-that we miss the one reality closest to us.The Spirit is as available as our breath, yet so often unnoticed.
Perhaps this is why Jesus links love and commandments to the promise of the Spirit. Keeping the commandments does not earn God’s presence. Rather, it makes us available to the presence already given. Love opens our awareness. When we love—truly love—our hearts become spacious enough to recognize the God who already dwells within. This love is never abstract. It takes concrete form: loving neighbor, loving enemy, washing feet, crossing boundaries we would rather preserve. Every time love expands beyond the limits of our comfort, we resist the orphanages of this world—the places of isolation, exclusion, and self-enclosure.To live without love is to remain trapped in those orphanages, even while God’s promise still stands.
The beginning and the end of everything is love. Only within this exchange of love do we come to know God,as living presence, as close as our own breath.
- Lilly Pushpam PBVM
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