Read John 13:31-35 . Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you”. The words are so familiar. And maybe, if we are feeling low, we take great comfort in the last part that we hear. “I have loved you”. Jesus loves us, so we feel empowered to love others. We can think that “as” means “because”.
But “as” here doesn’t mean “because”. It means “in the same way that”. Jesus says to love one another in the same way that he has loved us. How does Jesus love?
Jesus loves expensively, sacrificially. Jesus dies on the cross because of love. God loves the world. He sends his only Son. The Son is in the Father, and the Father in the Son. They are one in love. They love the world – a love that seems to be lost on hopeless, hating people who don’t love back.
Jesus doesn’t let us choose whom to love. We don’t have that choice. God so loved the world – all creation. Jesus made it plain in Matthew. He said, “Love your enemies” (Mt 5:44). That’s hard. It’s hard to love people who may only give you a hard time back.
But Christians are nothing special if they only love the people who love them back. “If you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?” (Mt 5:47).
On the other side, people see us as false if we name groups and decide to stay away from them. We have no right to judge a whole group by our thoughts about how they behave in general. Back in John, Jesus knew that Nicodemus was a different kind of Pharisee. And in John 4, Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman with a mess of men in her life. A woman, a foreigner whom his people distrusted, and one who was even an outsider among her own group. Can we love like this?
Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Weird now, and even weirder then. It’s not the done thing. You don’t get your teacher to wash your feet. You don’t even expect your friends to. You do it yourself, unless you have a slave. Peter couldn’t stand it. He objected. But Jesus told him there was no choice. This was his way. Jesus knew his disciples. He knew Judas would betray him. He knew Peter would deny him. He knew they were weak. But he washed the feet of them all.
Can we love like this? That’s what Jesus asks for when he says “Love one another, as I have loved you”.
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