A new commandment (John 13)

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” From the Gospel for today, the Gospel of John, the 13^th chapter, the 34^th verse.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.    

     I’ve been puzzling over today’s text for a while. “I give you a new commandment.” New? Really? Don’t we all suppose that the command to love is common to all religions? Or, at least, that it is a universal moral value, that precedes the Gospel? I went looking through my concordance, to find the earliest appearances in the Scriptures, of “love” as a noun and a verb, at least in the Revised versions of the English Bible. As a noun, it first appears in Genesis chapter 29, verse 20, where it says, “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.” As a verb, it first appears in Leviticus chapter 19, verse 18, where it says, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The first we can appreciate, as an expression of intense personal devotion, and we admire it on that basis. It is not presented as a command. Clearly that kind of love has existed for a very long time, long before the Gospel.

     The second one we’re familiar with, of course, although we may not have thought of it in the context of grudges and vengeance. And it is a command, the first command to love, in the Scriptures. It appears in a long list of rules and laws relating to property and animals and sexual relations and so on and on. The command to love turns up in Deuteronomy, as a command to love God, and the stranger.  So early on the command includes not just the right attitude to take to personal disputes, but also strangers and all the way up to God himself. So we understand that the concept of love as personal devotion, and the command to love as a religious and social duty, go back a very long way, to the earliest period mentioned in the Scriptures.

     So it would seem that there is actually nothing new in the command to love, which Jesus is giving us in today’s Gospel. After all, the concept is very old, and God himself has spoken the command; what, then, is Jesus adding to it, if he is adding anything at all, that would make it new? How can Jesus make it new, considering that love is supposed to be a universal condition, and a universally understood command, long before Jesus gets to it?

     There is a lot packed in to today’s Gospel, and the command to love comes toward the end of it. So the Gospel writer is making a connection between the new commandment and what comes just a few lines before. And later on in the Gospel, Jesus himself says more about what makes his commandment new.

     Jesus says, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.”  Jesus has just foretold his betrayal by Judas, and here he is saying that the betrayal, and the suffering and death that will follow, are the way to glory, to new life in God. And those events, and the resurrection and ascension, reveal the nature of the love that Jesus commands. The love that Jacob has for Rachel, and the command in Leviticus to love our neighbors (and not bear grudges against them) are only the beginnings, the very early beginnings, of an understanding of love which ultimately takes us beyond them.

     Jesus says “Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.” “Just as I have loved you.” This is the difference, the new thing, that Jesus is adding to the old commandment to love. He is the difference, his life in God is the difference, and he is including us in that life. And that inclusion in God’s life is what makes it possible for us to love as Jesus does. Later on in John’s Gospel, in chapter 15, Jesus says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.” Jesus says it again, “Love as I have loved you.” And he adds to it. So the meaning of the new commandment is unfolding before us. There is a strong sacrificial element in the love that Jesus is talking about. Jesus lays down his life for his friends. But that life, that love, return in the Resurrection, and are taken up into God in the Ascension. Jesus includes us, his friends, in it.

     God is glorifying not only Jesus in this Gospel, but us, his friends, as well. When, in the reading after today’s Gospel, Jesus says to Peter, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now, but you will follow after,” he is talking not only to Peter, but to all of us. He is saying that he is taking us with him through death and resurrection and ascension, into life in God. “Glory” means “light,” the light of God. We are included in that light, thanks to the love of God in Jesus, and that light shines through us when we love one another, as Jesus commands us to do. And that light is the light of the world.

     So we have come a long way from the natural love of Jacob for Rachel, and the basic command to love our neighbors. We haven’t left them behind, but we include them in the deeper, wider love which Jesus reveals to us. Jesus fulfills the old law in himself, and includes us in that fulfillment .
     “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

    

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.