A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.
John 13:34
The Measure Moved
Jesus calls this a new command, and the question worth asking is what's new about it. Loving people wasn't a new idea. Leviticus 19:18 told Israel to love your neighbor as yourself, and Jesus quoted that verse himself when someone asked him which commandment was the greatest. The subject hasn't changed at all.
What changed is the measure. Not as yourself. "As I have loved you."
That's a harder standard than it sounds, and you can tell how hard by looking at the situation he says it in. This is the night before he dies. He has just washed the feet of the disciples, including the feet of Judas, his betrayer. When Jesus says this, Judas has just left to go and sell him out for a handful of coins.
Peter is still in the room, and in a matter of verses Jesus will tell him he'll deny knowing him three times before the rooster crows.
So the command is bracketed by a betrayal already in motion and a denial in the making. When Jesus says love one another, he isn't describing something warm and fuzzy. He's talking about those men, in that room, whose failures he can already see.
I wrote about the same night in What It Means to Abide, two chapters later, where Jesus tells them to remain in him. Both instructions were given to people who were about to abandon Jesus in His darkest hour.
Start In Your Own Room
We're good at admiring the harder-sounding commands from a distance. Loving your enemies preaches well, and it's easier to nod at than to practice. This command gives us no such escape. "One another" is the people already around you.
Start with the friend who let you down in a way neither of you has mentioned since.
Start with the family member you love but don't especially like.
Start with the person you've decided is difficult, though you made that decision a long time ago and things have changed.
As A.J. Swoboda wrote in The Gift of Thorns, "the answer to loneliness is deep and real relationship and community in God's good garden, not marriage and sex isolated from covenant community." That kind of community doesn't assemble itself. It's what this command builds, one refused grudge at a time.
The verse right after this one tells you why it's worth the trouble. "By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another." Jesus picked the evidence himself, but he didn't pick our doctrine or our certainty or how well we defend the faith. He picked how we treat each other. People who will never read our arguments can watch that.
Prayer
Jesus, thank you that you loved us before we were worth loving, and that you set the measure yourself instead of leaving it to us. Help us to love the people you've put around us, including the ones who have already let us down. Where we've been polite instead of loving, forgive us, and show us the difference today. Make us the kind of Church that people can look at and know who we belong to. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.