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).

There is a detail just before all this that I cannot get past. When Jesus came round with the basin, Peter pulled his feet back. He did not want it. He told Jesus plainly that he would never let him do it, and Jesus answered that unless he allowed it, he could have no part with him (John 13:8).

I understand Peter completely. It is far easier to be the one serving than the one served. Giving keeps me in control and lets me feel useful, even a little above the other person. Being loved like that, knelt in front of and cleaned when I have done nothing to earn it, exposes how much I actually need. Yet that is exactly where the command starts. “Just as I have loved you” means I have to be loved first, basin and all, before I have a thing to pass on. The pride that will not receive will never manage to give.

It is worth saying that the watching world did notice, at least at the start. An early Christian writer named Tertullian recorded that outsiders, looking on at the believers, would say with a kind of wonder, see how they love one another. The love was visible enough to be remarked upon by people who did not share the faith and had no reason to flatter it.

What they were seeing was not a clever scheme. It was ordinary people sharing their meals and their money, sitting up with one another through illness, looking after widows and the poor, treating a slave and a free citizen as equals at the same table (Acts 2:44-45). None of it was loud. It simply could not be explained by the usual rules of who owes what to whom, and it pulled people in. The command of that last night was never meant to stay inside the upper room. Jesus said everyone would know, and for a while, watching his people, everyone did.

I have heard this verse used as a gavel more times than I can count. Someone raises something hard at a church meeting, a leader who needs confronting, a decision that needs undoing, and out comes John 13:34 to 35 like a full stop. “Can’t we just love one another.” Said that way it is not an appeal to Christ’s love at all. It is a demand for silence, dressed up as scripture.

The tell is what gets dropped. People quote “love one another” and let “just as I have loved you” fall off the end. So look at who is in the room when he says it. He knows precisely what Judas has gone out to do. Within a few sentences he will tell Peter, to his face, that he will deny him three times before the night is over (John 13:38). That is not a love that keeps the peace by keeping quiet. It bears the cost and tells the truth in the same breath, and by Friday it is on a cross.

Stitch “love one another” on a cushion and leave the rest in the drawer, and what you have left is a command any decent person manages on a good day. Jesus gave far more than that, and he gave it to people who were about to fail him.

The first time I tried to teach these two verses I made a mess of them. I led with the command, spent twenty minutes on how we all ought to love each other better, and watched a roomful of tired people sink quietly into their seats. They heard homework. I had handed out an ethic and called it a gospel.

Given the chance again, I would not say the word commandment for the first ten minutes. I would put people back in that room instead. The door still swinging where Judas went out. A bowl of water gone cold and grey, because the feet are already washed by the time he opens his mouth. The eleven who are left, with no idea at all what Friday holds. Let a group sit in that until it gets uncomfortable, and do not rescue them from the silence too quickly. The command only lands once you can smell the room it was given in.

Then read what he says, slowly, and let the middle of it do the work. The command tops and tails the sentence, and everything of any weight rests in between, on what he had already done before he asked a thing of anyone. If your people walk out humming “love one another” and not “just as I have loved you”, you have handed them the bookends and kept the hinge for yourself.

This verse belongs at a Maundy Thursday foot washing more naturally than almost anywhere else, because that is the room it was first spoken in. It sits well at a commissioning too, or when you welcome new members, because it names exactly what they are joining: not an organisation, a people bound together by a particular kind of love.

Where I would not use it is in an unresolved conflict, aimed at the person who was hurt rather than the one who did the hurting. I have watched it handed to someone still bleeding from how a church treated them, as though the cure for their grief were to love a bit harder. That gets the order backwards. Jesus loved first, all the way to the cross, before he asked anything of the eleven. Say this to the wounded before the wrong has even been named out loud, and you are asking them to carry a cost he carried himself, and to carry it early, alone, and on your say-so rather than his.

This is not a saying you can lift out and put on a card, though I have watched it done often enough. It sits near the front of an unbroken stretch of talking that runs from the supper table to the garden, chapters 13 to 17. Follow it forward and watch what happens to it.

In chapter 14 he tells them not to let their hearts be troubled (John 14:1). In chapter 15 the fruit he wants from the vine looks a great deal like this same love, stayed in and held onto (John 15:9 to 12), and then, almost in the same breath, a warning that the world will hate them for the very reason it hated him (John 15:18 to 20). Then chapter 17, and he stops instructing them altogether. He prays. Out loud, with them listening, he asks his Father that they would be one, as he and the Father are one (John 17:11, 21 to 23). Then he stands up and walks them over the Kidron valley to the place where the soldiers will find him (John 18:1).

I cannot see that arc whole without something going tight in my chest. The command does not stay a command. Four chapters on it has turned into a request Jesus makes of his Father on their behalf, as though he knows perfectly well that telling them will never be enough to get them there, so he goes over their heads and asks for the thing himself, with the torches already moving somewhere out in the dark.

Here is what bothered me for years, and I am not sure I have fully made peace with it. He does not say love everybody. Leviticus had already told Israel to love their neighbour as themselves (Leviticus 19:18), and Jesus himself had pushed that wider still, out past the neighbour to the enemy and the persecutor (Matthew 5:44). And now, on the last night of his life, the command he calls new draws a circle round the room. One another. Each other. The eleven men sitting in front of him with clean feet.

For a long stretch that felt to me like a step backwards. A narrowing. The faith turning in on itself and calling the huddle holiness. What shifted me was not an argument, it was noticing what he hangs on it. The badge is not that Christians love people in general. It is that they love each other, in view of everyone. And loving the far-off stranger is easier than we like to admit, partly because the stranger goes home. The person you are stuck with, whose voice carries through the wall, who took the other side at the meeting and sings the wrong verse loudly: there is no exit there. He puts the proof exactly where the friction is.

It still leaves me uneasy on bad days, because a circle can harden into a wall, and I have known churches that loved one another beautifully and nobody outside at all. He does not sound worried about that. I am, sometimes.

If you want to know what this love actually looks like on the ground, John will not tell you. He hands you a measure, “just as I have loved you”, and leaves you to read the content of it off a towel and a cross. So I go to Corinth for the detail, and I would read 1 Corinthians 13 straight after this passage rather than instead of it.

What gets me there is not the beauty of the chapter. It is the address on the envelope. Paul is writing to people dragging each other into court in front of the neighbours (1 Corinthians 6:1 to 8), lining up behind rival names as though the gospel were a team you support (1 Corinthians 1:11 to 13), and squabbling over whose gift outranked whose. And into the middle of that mess he sets his description of love, wedged between the chapter on gifts and the chapter on their shambolic meetings (1 Corinthians 12 to 14). Patient. Kind. Not envious, not puffed up, keeping no account of a wrong suffered (1 Corinthians 13:4 to 7).

This is one of the earliest places in the New Testament where you can watch believers plainly failing at the command from the upper room, and the apostle answers by refusing to soften it. He never concludes that the standard must have been unrealistic, given it so obviously was not working. He gets more specific, not less. Faced with the same evidence I think I would have quietly lowered the bar and called it grace.

Whoever put his name to 1 John, the letter is soaked in the language of that last night, and it was written to people who had not managed it. Read it and you can feel the draught coming under the door. A group had gone out from them, and the writer will not pretend otherwise about what the leaving showed (1 John 2:19). Some argument, some rupture, and the people holding this command in their hands could not hold together.

Then look at what he does with the wreckage. He does not change the subject or lower his voice. He goes at it harder than anyone in the New Testament: the man who claims to be in the light while hating his brother is in the darkness even now (1 John 2:9 to 11), and hatred of a brother is put in the same bracket as murder (1 John 3:15). He also calls the command old and new in the same breath (1 John 2:7 to 8), which delights me every time, because it tells you he knows exactly which night he is quoting from.

I find that steadying rather than depressing, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see why. The failure is not some modern embarrassment we have to explain away to a sceptical friend at work. It is right there in the New Testament, in the very family that heard the command first, and nobody tidied it out of the record. And the answer given at the time was not to retire the command. It was to say it again, louder, to whoever was still in the room.

There is a reading of this verse that only occurs to you once it has happened to you. Jesus says the world will know by the love between his people. Turn that over slowly. If the love is missing from a room, the one who pays for it is not the watching world. It is the person it was withheld from, who was standing right there, who came in hoping to see something of God and got the back of everyone’s head instead.

I am not going to tidy this. If you left a church and the phone never rang, and you have since heard this verse quoted warmly by the same people, then you have been on the wrong end of the exact evidence Jesus said would prove him. I will not tell you that you misread it. You may have read it perfectly.

What I hold onto, and I offer it knowing how thin it will sound if you are still in the middle of it, is that he gave this command to men he knew would break it before sunrise. He gave it anyway. Then he went and died for them. So the command was never a description of how his people reliably behave. It is a description of what he is like, put into the hands of people who are not like that yet. If the church failed you, that did not disprove him. It proved that we still need what he handed over that night, and that some of us have not received it. I would not press that on anyone as a cure. It is simply what is left when I stop pretending.

• 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.