Day 27 (Tuesday): John 13:34-35
Today’s Passage
Read the passage – John 13:34-35
The challenge of the New Commandment is to actually put it into practice. Jesus did not say love those in the church who you like but told us to love all believers. The New Commandment is added to the commandments to love God and to love our neighbour. The result of loving other believers is that everyone will then know that we are disciples of Jesus. In other words, our love for God’s people translates into others comprehending what Christian faith is about.
Questions to Consider
- How does the New Commandment challenge you?
Prayer
- Bring healing and hope to those who are hurting or searching.
- Pray that we will have a deeper love for each other in the church and that we would also love the Christians in the other churches around us. Ask that people would see our love for one another and that they would see authentic Christianity. Ask forgiveness for when we fall short of this commandment.
Go Deeper
D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press; W.B. Eerdmans, 1991), 484–485.
The new command is simple enough for a toddler to memorize and appreciate, profound enough that the most mature believers are repeatedly embarrassed at how poorly they comprehend it and put it into practice: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. The standard of comparison is Jesus’ love, just exemplified in the footwashing; but since the footwashing points to his death, these same disciples but a few days later would begin to appreciate a standard of love they would explore throughout their pilgrimage.
The more we recognize the depth of our own sin, the more we recognize the love of the Saviour; the more we appreciate the love of the Saviour, the higher his standard appears; the higher his standard appears, the more we recognize in our selfishness, our innate self-centredness, the depth of our own sin. With a standard like this, no thoughtful believer can ever say, this side of the parousia, ‘I am perfectly keeping the basic stipulation of the new covenant.’
The new command is not ‘new’ because nothing like it had ever been said before. The Mosaic covenant had mandated two love commandments: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength’ and ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ Jesus taught that all the law and the prophets were summed up in these two commands. John himself can elsewhere recognize that in certain respects this is ‘no new command’ at all. Why, then, should he here report that it is ‘new’?
Its newness is bound up not only with the new standard (‘As I have loved you’) but with the new order it both mandates and exemplifies. This commandment is presented as the marching order for the newly gathering messianic community, brought into existence by the redemption long purposed by God himself. It is not just that the standard is Christ and his love; more, it is a command designed to reflect the relationship of love that exists between the Father and the Son, designed to bring about amongst the members of the nascent messianic community the kind of unity that characterizes Jesus and his Father.
The new command is therefore not only the obligation of the new covenant community to respond to the God who has loved them and redeemed them by the oblation of his Son, and their response to his gracious election which constituted them his people, it is a privilege which, rightly lived out, proclaims the true God before a watching world. That is why Jesus ends his injunction with the words, All men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. Orthodoxy without principal obedience to this characteristic command of the new covenant is merely so much humbug.
