ἀγάπη

καθὼς ἠγάπησέν με ὀ πατήρ, κἀγὼ ὑμᾶς ἠγάπησα· μείνατε ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ τῇ έμῇ. — κατὰ Ἰωάννην 15:9

kathos egapesen me ho pater, kago hymas egapesa: meinate en te agape te eme. — kata Ioannen 15:9

Just as my Father loves me, I also love you: in my love remain. — John 15:9, translation mine¹

God's love, eternal and unchanging, is the firmament upon which our faith stands. As Moses testified, “The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4b, ESV) and Christ reiterated, “the words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does His works” (John 14:10, ESV), we may trust on the testimony of at least two witnesses that Christ does indeed love us as the Father loves us. If we do not trust Christ to testify about Himself, though self-testimony be admissible even in our courts today, we may “believe on account of the works themselves” (John 14:11b, ESV) that Christ performed and on account of the testimony of the evangelists who were eyewitnesses. We have ample reason to respond as Moses exhorted Israel to “love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5b, ESV).

The fervency of this admonition springs from the striking difference between love which comes from God the Father and what the world passes off as love. Jesus explicitly tells His disciples to remain in the love that is His, which in turn is the Father's. John's use of the emphatic possessive pronoun έμῇ in postnominal appositive position demarcates this divide. Whereas Christ demonstrated such utterly sacrificial love on the cross as to put all others above Himself, most of all the Father, to whom Christ submitted in an excruciating act of obedience, the world loves only that from which it stands to gain in comfortable and countable acts of reciprocity.

Some may ask what Father, whose love is so unshakeable and impeccable, would send His own Son to die as an object of wrath. To those who doubt God's love, Isaiah rebuts:

• Who has measured the Spirit of the LORD
• or what man shows Him His counsel?
• Whom did He consult
• and who made Him understand?
• Who taught Him the path of justice,
• and taught Him knowledge,
• and showed Him the way of understanding?
• Isaiah 40:13-14, ESV

Man is as nothing compared to God. Until man can create his own universe from nothing and establish its physical and moral laws and define love, he must accept God's definition in this one.

We have it on good authority that “anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love” (1 John 4:8, ESV) and that with God “there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17b, ESV) and that God will not give His glory to another (Isaiah 48:11). God wants to make it undeniably clear that His love exceeds the love of the world, and to demonstrate this unsurpassable love, He died for us not when we were His friends but when we were His enemies. “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9-10, ESV).

Only in Christ can we have true peace, for as Jesus declared to His disciples, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you” (John 14:27a, ESV). One need only look to the present age, to say nothing of the millennia of human history, that the world gives detente, not peace; conditions, not grace. God, on the other hand gives us an assurance that is true, a hope outside ourselves. Christ emptied Himself and became that which God hates, namely sin, to draw us to dwell in the Father's love. As it is written, “for our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21, ESV). The debt of our sin had to be paid first so that God might indwell us by His Holy Spirit and not destroy us in our wickedness. The Holy Spirit then acts as our counselor, teaching us to obey the Father's commands which are given to us through His Son, who by completing us in love helps us to love completely.

¹ Translator's Note: I have rendered the two aorist verbs from John 15:9, ἠγάπησέν and ἠγάπησα, as indefinite presents in English, whereas most modern translations use the present perfect for this verse. Use of the present for aorist verbs is not unprecedented, as Martin Luther rendered the same verse thus in German: “Gleichwie mich mein Vater liebt, also liebe ich euch auch. Bleibet in meiner Liebe!” (John 15:9, Luther)

I believe John 15:9 and the previous two verses primarily conform to the pattern of Greek known in grammatical circles as the gnomic aorist, which is used to express eternal truths, as with proverbs. Given the proverbial nature of what Christ is relating, it seems appropriate to render the verses in befitting English idiom. I would possibly even venture an emendation of my previous translations such that John 15:7-9 would read “If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, whatever you may be wishing, ask, and it shall come to be for you. In this my Father is glorified, that you should bear much fruit and become my disciples. Just as my Father loves me, I also love you: in my love remain.”

In this way, the present subjunctive θέλητε (thelete, “you may be wishing”) is drawn out to remind the Christ follower that whatever his immediate and present need and desire in life, the aorist imperative invitation to ask (αἰτήσασθε, aitesasthe) always stands. This is in accord with the Scripture that encourages us to “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16b, ESV). If we remain in Christ and seek the will of the Father, He will grant whatever we ask.