“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35) Jesus gives his followers a new command. He commands then not just to love one another in the same way people had always been loving one another but to love one another in a brand new way, in the brand new way that Jesus loved people.
This brand new way of loving ousted the idea that love could reside solely in the realm of feeling. Rather this brand new way of loving would require a willing because Jesus was not calling his followers to a lovely, fluffy idea but rather to a serious concrete program of intentionally loving people in a way that would challenge long held traditions and upset deeply felt convictions. Those who would choose to follow Jesus were called to fall in love with sinners, to cultivate an attraction to the unattractive, a desire for the undesirable, and love for the unlovely.
In Luke Chapter 6 we get a glimpse of Jesus walking out this new kind of love. On the day of the Sabbath Jesus is strolling through the fields and he picks some grain because his companions are hungry. The Pharisees immediately accuse him of breaking the law. On another Sabbath morning, Jesus was teaching in the synagogue and there was a man whose hand was disabled. With the Pharisees watching closely, Jesus invited the man to stand in front of everyone and he healed this man completely. The Pharisees were furious on both accounts.
The Pharisees claimed that Jesus had broken the law and that this is why they were so furious. But the law was to keep the day holy and to refrain from work on the Sabbath and Jesus did not break this law. What Jesus did break when his disciples ate food from the field on the Sabbath and when he healed people on the holy day was a complex system of traditions about Sabbath observance, an intricate and detailed list of does and don’t based on religious ideas. And that made the Pharisee furious.
Jesus loved in a way that called into question all religious traditions that were not loving and as is still the case today that can make those who have lived by these traditions quite uncomfortable. It is good for us to be reminded that if you and I are going to love in the way Jesus loved, if we are going to follow his new command that we just might find ourselves on the opposite side of some long held traditions and not everyone will love us for this.
I know a young man: a North Park graduate who wanted to start an afterschool program in his church. The church was initially open to the idea until a few incidents occurred. Because of the crowd of kids that came there was soon some property damage to the church, the carpet got worn, a window got broken and the long held law of stewardship began to trump the law of love. There were some disagreements between some of the church kids and the neighborhood kids and the law of training up our children in the way they should go began to trump the love and care of children who were not being trained up at all. And then there was the worship service. The neighborhood kids began to come to worship and they never followed the rules and the long held laws of orderly worship began to trump "let the little children come to me."
A new command I give you. Love each other as I have loved you. It’s a new way of loving, a way of loving that calls into question all religious traditions that have become unloving. Let me be clear about this, if you love each other as Christ has loved you it could get scandalous. You and I will be caught loving people who find themselves on the other side of religious traditions. Tax collectors, prostitutes and sinners will be found around our tables and we will be loving them long before they give back the money they have stolen, long before they have given up their tricks and while they are still in the middle of their mess.
I think often we are afraid that if we love in this new way that we will be breaking the law and that somehow we won’t be as righteous as the rest but let me remind you that the scriptures say that loving this way fulfills the law. “Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”(Romans 13:10)
Jesus broke religious traditions that did harm to his neighbors. He made people in his own party pretty upset by showing no partiality for persons. He crossed borders and boundaries that had long been established by custom and creed. Because he loved in this new way, sinners like you and me, sinners who would not have been invited into the synagogue, found a place at the Saviors table. “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
As we pursue community with one another I pray that we will not just love in the same old ways that everyone else loves, but that we would commit to Jesus’ new command to love as we have been loved. In this way, because we love in a way that bears a striking resemblance to Jesus I pray that our community would know whose disciples we are.
