Love One Another, As I Have Loved You

It helps me to remember exactly where we are when Jesus says this. John has just told us that Judas took the bread and went out, and that it was night (John 13:30). Only then, with the betrayer gone into the dark and the cross now hours away, does Jesus turn to the eleven who are left and give this command.

I want to sit a moment on who is in the room. These are not impressive men. On other nights they have argued about which of them is the greatest. One of them, Peter, will deny he ever knew Jesus before the night is out. Jesus knows all of this. He has watched it for three years. And it is these people he has just knelt in front of with a towel and a basin, and these people he now tells to love one another as he has loved them. I find that ordering tender and a little frightening. He does not wait for them to become loveable first. The love comes before the deserving, which is, when you think about it, the only kind of love that could ever save any of us.

The honest question the passage raises is what is actually new here. Leviticus 19:18 had already told Israel to love their neighbour as themselves. That was not a forgotten verse, so Jesus is not inventing love out of nothing.

What I notice is the small phrase that carries all the weight: “Just as I have loved you, you also love one another.” The newness is the standard, not the subject. The old measure was the self. The new measure is him. And he says it on the very night he means to prove what that love costs.

The love John keeps describing through these chapters is the giving kind rather than the getting kind, and it is worth saying plainly, because it is easy to sentimentalise. This is not mainly a feeling you fall into. It is a direction you face. In the next chapter Jesus puts it more starkly still, that the greatest love lays down its life for its friends (John 15:13). The towel was a rehearsal. The cross was the thing itself.

Here is the part I keep coming back to. Jesus could have named any number of marks by which the world would know his followers. Right doctrine. Bold preaching. Miracles worked. A holy life. All good things, and he chose none of them as the badge. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Think about what he is risking by saying that. He is hanging the credibility of the whole thing on how Christians treat each other, and that is a hostage to fortune we have not always redeemed well. The watching world has often seen the church quarrel and split and wound its own, and has drawn its conclusions accordingly.

But the logic underneath is beautiful. No one has seen God (John 1:18, and John says as much again in 1 John 4:12). So how is an unseen God to be seen? Jesus’ answer is that love between his people makes him visible. When believers genuinely lay down their preferences for one another, the room fills with evidence of someone the eye cannot reach. The love is not a clever strategy for evangelism. It simply is the showing of God.

I want to resist making this grand, because the cross was grand and our obedience usually is not. Most of the time, loving one another as he loved us happens in unspectacular places. It is choosing not to fire back the cutting reply I have already composed in my head. It is going to the person at church I find hard, the one whose manner or opinions grate on me, and sitting with them anyway. It is forgiving a brother or sister before they have apologised, which is exactly the order Jesus did it in.

I have failed at this more often than I have managed it. The people hardest to love are rarely strangers. They are the ones nearest: the spouse, the colleague, the fellow Christian whose particular faults I have memorised. And the love Jesus asks for is not the warm sort I feel on a good day. It is the settled, gritted, this-will-cost-me sort I have to choose on a bad one.

What steadies me is the order of the sentence. “Just as I have loved you” comes first. I am not asked to manufacture love from an empty tank. I am asked to pass on what I have already been given, in full, at the cross. As John would later put it, our love is only ever a response to his (1 John 4:19).

• Who is the person God has put nearest me that I find hardest to love, and what would “just as I have loved you” actually look like towards them this week?
• When I am wronged, do I wait for the apology first, or am I willing to forgive in the order Jesus did, before it is earned?
• If an outsider judged my faith only by how I treat other Christians, what would they honestly conclude?
• Where am I trying to love out of an empty tank, instead of receiving his love for me first?

If you would like to keep going, you could sit with more passages on love and other themes or read slowly through this Gospel in John.