By James Riley Strange, Ph.D.
Professor of New Testament, Samford University
Love
John 15:9–14
As we deal with a worsening pandemic and its effects, these lessons become less academic. We know we rely on God and that God’s word is an incomparable gift. We renew our commitment to live out its precepts with God’s help.
This week we begin a series of six lessons on the messiness of relationships with fellow believers. Christians are not immune to difficult affiliations and strained bonds. After all, Jesus had to command His closest circle of disciples to love one another.
The study looks at six traits we can practice in order to heal our relationships and prevent further rifts. The word “practice” is key, for these traits require deliberation and repetition. All of them are rooted in the love that Jesus told His followers to show to one another, so we begin with love.
Today’s passage comes from the Last Supper in John, which lasts five chapters (13–17). At the beginning, not long after washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus gave the disciples “a new commandment:” “just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (13:34). Now He returns to that idea.
Read chapters 13 through 15 for context.
Love for others is to be grounded in God’s love. (9–10)
Jesus begins chapter 15 by saying He is the true vine, His Father the vinedresser and His disciples the branches. They must, therefore, abide (or remain) in Jesus in order to “bear fruit.” What is this fruit? It is mutual love for one another.
We can’t generate this love on our own. Rather, we draw it from Jesus, who is the conduit of God’s love to us. God, after all, is love (1 John 4:7–8).
Love for others is to imitate Jesus’ love for us. (11–12)
As with love, we are not the source of this joy. Neither are our circumstances its cause. This is why Paul could call on the Christians of Philippi to “rejoice in the Lord always,” regardless of what was happening (Phil. 4:4–8). Joy that emerges only from good circumstances is incomplete joy. Jesus completes our joy by supplying His joy.
Now Jesus repeats the “new commandment” of chapter 13. The disciples’ model for love is Jesus Himself, who “loved them to the end” (13:1).
He demonstrated this by washing their feet like a household slave (compare 15:15).
Love for others means sacrifice. (13–14)
Here Jesus reveals the greatest demonstration of love: “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Because Jesus died on the cross, many understand Him to be talking about a sacrificial death.
Very few people, however, will have cause to act out love in this way. Are we all, therefore, doomed to show lesser love? No, for the phrase can also mean to live sacrificially for one’s friends, which Jesus also did.
With that understanding, we can now agree that Jesus’ command really does apply to us in two ways: neither must we die for friends in order to lay down our lives for them, nor can we dismiss the commandment as hyperbolic or as applying only to the Twelve.
It also is clear this love Jesus commands is not affection alone but also acts of service. Why? Because the command to love includes Christian brothers and sisters for whom we have little fondness, or none. It includes those who have wronged us.
I am sure that acts of service have multiplied during this time. I have begun to open my online Samford classes by asking students what deeds of kindness they have done and what deeds have been done to them. Their responses warm my heart.
May sacrificial acts of love become our new normal, and may they remain when COVID-19 no longer threatens.
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