A Different Love

A Different Love

Read: John 13:31-38

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

John 13:34

“I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.”

—Mother Teresa

IN WORD Have you ever asked yourself what is new about this commandment? Jesus says it is new, but what element of it was not already given in the Old Testament? The commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves was prominent in Jewish theology before Jesus came. It’s scriptural from all the way back in Leviticus (19:18). So what’s new?

Jesus clarifies after His initial statement: We are to love one another as He has loved us. That’s what is different. That’s more than loving our neighbors as ourselves. That’s making deep, painful sacrifices for them. It is a matter of seeking their good above our own. No prior commandment has made such specific claims on us, defining for us what real love is. No definition will suffice in teaching us what kind of love this is; only an illustration will do. And the illustration is Jesus. The way He loved others is the way we are to love others.

We are reluctant to embrace such love. We know it will make radical, life-altering claims on us. We will not be able to walk down the road and pretend we don’t see the beaten man lying beside it, as Jesus’ earlier parable illustrates. Whatever form the victim takes in our lives—an emotionally wounded friend, a homeless vagrant, an outcast of our culture, a disease-ridden sinner—we are to love as Jesus loved. That’s new, and that’s hard.

IN DEED Do we take these words of Jesus seriously? Perhaps the historical portrayal of Jesus as a man who went about doing good and helping people has made us think simply of increasing our level of generosity. But Jesus asks more of us than that. We are first to realize how radical His love is; and then we are to embrace it as our own. We receive it and we give it—even, as Jesus did, to people who do not deserve it. This is indeed a new commandment. It has the power to change everything about us.