God's Gospel Truths
John 15:12-17
12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other.
Pondering Point
The wording of this command from Jesus, to love as I have loved you, opens a door to remind ourselves about how we are supposed to love others. It’s not simply about loving people in general. Nearly everybody offers some degree of love in some fashion to some other people, right!?! That is not what is at issue with Jesus; it is the way of loving that is at issue – learning to love in the way of Jesus.
Jesus loved different people in different ways. Some he healed, others he chided. With some he spoke gently, to others he spoke harshly. But His actions were always based in love. Who was He speaking to in this situation? It was His closest disciples. How did He love them? He gave them His time, invested in them, taught them, ate with them. He prayed for and with them, was honest with them, even chided them at times. And not to be forgotten, as Jesus said this same reading, there is no greater love than a man giving his life for his friends. This is His type of love for these disciples.
So the point isn’t to love in and of itself; in fact this teaching of Jesus acknowledges that we can love people inappropriately – in ways that Jesus would not affirm. We are to love the way that Jesus loves – or at least as close to it as we can get.
Prayer
Father God, in the name of Jesus, help me to love others the way that Jesus loved His disciples past and present, including me. Amen.