There’s a line from Jesus that has been sitting with me lately, the kind that follows you into ordinary moments: “If you love me, you will obey my commandments.”

 It can land like a test, or even a threat. But read slowly, and it begins to feel less like a demand and more like a diagnosis. Less as pressure, and more as a mirror.

Love, in Jesus’ framing, is not primarily a feeling. It is directional. It moves. It aligns itself with something outside the self.

But most days don’t feel particularly spiritual. They feel like emails, the school run, scrolling too long, half-paying attention to something, worrying about what else is on the to-do list. Love, in that setting, becomes vague—more about intention than action. But Jesus doesn’t leave it vague. He ties love to obedience, and obedience to something concrete: loving God, and loving your neighbour.

The “commandments” Jesus speaks of are not an arbitrary list. They gather themselves into what he elsewhere calls the Greatest Commandment: to love God, and to love your neighbour as yourself. Not sentimentally, but concretely. Not when convenient, but when costly.

Which is where it gets uncomfortable. Because “neighbour” is not an abstract idea. It’s the person on the bus you avoid eye contact with. It’s the colleague you quietly compete with. It’s the family member you’ve decided is just too difficult to really engage.

It’s quite challenging to realise how easily we redefine love to fit our mood.

And then I think about Paul in Athens, standing in a culture that was sophisticated, plural, intellectually alive, in the shadow of the Areopagus – that great home of philosophy – surrounded by altars to every conceivable deity. One, famously, was dedicated “to an unknown god.” This was a culture hedging its bets, intuiting that there must be something beyond their grasp, but unable to name it. They sensed something beyond themselves, but couldn’t quite name it. So they kept their options open.

Our modern world can feel remarkably similar!

Paul’s response is striking. What you worship as unknown, he says, I proclaim to you. There was a time, he continues, when God overlooked such ignorance. But not anymore. Now, God has made himself known.

That claim lands differently in a culture like ours. We are not obviously religious in the same way ancient Athens was. We do not build altars on street corners. But we are not neutral either. And we have knowledge through science and the long lived experience of human history that the ancient world didn’t yet have.

Our moral instincts—our language of human rights, dignity, equality, compassion—did not emerge in a vacuum. They are the long echo of the Christian story, of so many centuries when Christianity was the shared religion of Europe and America, and gave the moral and ethical meta-narrative to society. The idea that every person bears inherent worth, that the weak should be protected, that love is the highest good: these are not self-evident truths in human history. They are inherited ones.

And yet, increasingly, we treat them as if they require no foundation.

We want the fruit without the root.

We appeal to love, but detach it from the One who defined it. We invoke justice, but unmoor it from any shared account of what a human being is, or why they matter. We assume a moral consensus that, in reality, is slowly dissolving beneath our feet.

And when those values start to clash, when one person’s version of “love” contradicts another’s, we don’t have a shared language to resolve it.

In that sense, we are not so different from Athens. We too live among altars to an unknown god – except now the unknown is not something we admit, but something we ignore. The faith in God that Jesus taught, which became the Christianity of the Early Church, is too challenging for us now, so we water it down and fill it with rules and traditions and boundaries – instead of accepting the command to step outside the boundary, and to love without demanding conformity.

Jesus’ words in John 14 cut through this ambiguity, through this Gordian Knot of rules, traditions, orthodoxies. Love is not whatever we decide it to be. It is revealed. It has a shape, a direction, a person at its centre.

“If you love me, you will obey my commandments.”

Not because obedience earns love, but because love, rightly understood, cannot help but move in that direction.

To recover that is not to retreat into the past. It is to rediscover the anchor we have quietly lost—the source from which our deepest moral intuitions once flowed, and without which they begin, slowly but surely, to drift.

At present, our collective moral compass might be described as living off an inheritance we didn’t collectively earn, slowly spending it without noticing the account is running down.

I’m starting to wonder if that’s why things can feel slightly untethered, even when life looks fine on the surface. We’ve kept the language of love, but loosened it from its source.

So maybe Jesus’ words are less about imposing something new, and more about inviting us back to something we’ve quietly drifted from.

Not grand gestures. Just a different kind of faithfulness, lived out in the ordinary.

Revd. Talisker

Photo by Sven Wilhelm on Unsplash