While I wholeheartedly believe in grace doctrinally (as expressed above), at times I find myself lacking the emotional freedom grace promises. In short: I can believe in grace, but do not always feel or experience grace. And I am not alone.
Today we explore that tension.
Jesus says: “Stay at Home” and Relax
These weeks after Easter, I’ve offered articles exploring Jesus’ familiar words in John’s gospel, “abide with me and I with you.” However, in this pandemic “stay at home” era, I’ve reflected on how John commentator Dale Bruner translates “abide” with the imaginative, more contemporary phrase “stay at home.”
“Just as much as the Father loved me–there! That is how much I have loved you. Make your home in this special love of mine (and relax).” (John 15:9)
Bruner explains why he adds the final two words:
“Jesus invites us to make ourselves at home [abide] in his love for us, which is a love that is just as large as his Father’s love for him.
This fact should overwhelm us–to the point that we can relax a bit in our new home when we think of our homemaker (and so my parenthesized addition–“and relax”–to catch the sense of Jesus’ remarkable promise).”
I’m not sure I have ever seriously considered what Jesus promises here.
I can easily comprehend that the well of the Father’s love for Jesus is deep and inexhaustible. The love between God the Father and God the Son seems far beyond human comprehension.
Yet Jesus tells us we can “make ourselves at home” in his love for us: “which is a love that is just as large as his Father’s love for him.” When some of us sang in Sunday School about God’s love as “deep and wide,” we were singing about this inexhaustible well of love.
What is it like to “stay at home” with Jesus?
We all know what it’s like to be on our best behavior. Perhaps a meeting with colleagues, perhaps a gathering at our kid’s school, even a small group at church. For most of us, home is the one place where we can completely, genuinely relax.
Home is where we feel safe. Home is where we feel free to say things or express opinions we would not in public. Home is where our mental filters are less engaged (although I know I definitely still say inappropriate or hurtful things at home).
If home is the one place we (hopefully) know we are most loved, it is (consequently) also the one place we can most relax.
If the Father’s overflowing love for his Son becomes the home into which Jesus invites me, then “at home with Jesus” is the one place I can genuinely, existentially, relax. THIS IS GRACE.
What amazing good news! We could spend a long time discussing what relaxing with Jesus looks and feels like.
But Wait! Can we relax?
With God, can we ever just kick back and relax, as we might hang around our backyard BBQ grill with family?
The next verse states the other side of the paradox:
“When you keep my commands, you will be making your home in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and am making my home in his love.” (John 15:10)
This verse seems to stipulate that our “making our home” with Jesus is a direct result of keeping his commands. This sounds like works-righteousness or “keeping the Law” which the apostle Paul so clearly warns us about so often.
If keeping Jesus’ commands is a pre-requisite to making our home in his love, none of us ever will.
Augustine addressed this dilemma in the 4th century:
“It is not that we keep His commandments first, and that then He loves [us]; but that He loves us, and then we keep His commandments. That is that grace, which is revealed to the humble, but hidden from the proud.
Once again, God’s grace precedes our obedience. This prevenient grace (the theological term) can (and does) actually empower our obedience. It’s not that grace lets us off the hook from keeping Jesus’ commands. Grace in some powerfully mysterious way helps us do that which we cannot do–keep Jesus’ commands by drawing on the power of the love we have already received.
Jesus washing his disciples’ feet is an excellent example. Jesus takes the initiative to first wash the disciples’ feet, no strings attached. Then, having already washed them, he asks,
“So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:14)
As many authors have observed, the Christian life is like breathing: Relax and breathe in Jesus’ love (“make your home” with him); breathe out by sharing the love you receive with others.
Jesus Shows Us the Way
Bruner add this final comment:
“The tension of living rightly just might have been something that the truly human Jesus also experienced, and so [in John 15:9-10] he can call us to imitation–and to prayer for his help.”
Did even the fully human Jesus Christ experience “breath in/breathe out” with his heavenly Father?
There is good evidence to think so. Jesus withdraws to lonely places to spend hours in prayer (breathing in) before most major events like choosing his disciples; most famously, he does so in the Garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion. Was he not “going home” to fortify himself for what was to come?
Perhaps Jesus also experienced (more than we realize) the tension of relaxing in the Father’s love while also keeping his commands?
Like many paradoxes, the key to living in the tension is taking both sides with equal seriousness, like an iron filing suspended within the tension of the exactly opposite force fields of the north and south poles of a magnet.
Easy to say. Hard to do!
To discover this creative, living center, I must move toward that pole which tells me “make my home in Jesus’ love…and relax.” What about you?
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