All Will Know (John 13:25)

 


Saturday, May 24, 2025


Psalms 56; 57

Exodus 34:11-26

John 13:21-35


All Will Know (John 13:25)


By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.


Family is wonderful. Family is also difficult. As the old saying goes, you can pick your nose, and you can pick your family, but you can’t wipe your family off on the couch.


Jesus gives us a new commandment – to love one another. Surely this isn’t new; didn’t he teach us to love our neighbours and enemies back during the Sermon on the Mount? There are plenty of ideas of why this commandment is “new”, most of which surrounds the idea of unconditional love.


That Jesus teaches us to love all people, and to love them incredibly, is true. But here, tonight in the upper room immediately before his arrest, what is new about this commandment is that he is teaching us about what the love between Christians is to be like. Loving fellow Christians can, at times, be the most difficult type of love to show.


Perhaps it is because we are so close on what we agree on, that what we disagree on becomes inflated in its importance. Christians who agree on the fundamentals – the incarnation, the deity of Christ, his passion, death and resurrection, his ascension into heaven, and his coming again – are family. As family, we ought to get along. But we find this so difficult, especially when we disagree on things like how we ought to worship God, or where we ought to focus our energies when loving the outside world.


These sorts of ferocious disagreements between people who agree on everything else happens all the time. Just consider the factional fighting in political parties, or other religions. The fiercest fights often happen between so-called comrades.


Yet Jesus gives us a new commandment: to love one another, just as he has loved us. There is so much we don’t know about Jesus, and so much we think we know but we have all wrong, and yet he loves us to death and back again. So we ought to love our fellow Christians who don’t know the same things about Jesus as we do, or know things about him that we think are incorrect.


“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) All who do this are our brothers and sisters, and we ought to aspire to love them all just as Christ loves us.


Who do you find easy to love? Who do you find difficult to love? How does Jesus love you? How might you express that love to your fellow Christians tomorrow at church?


Lord of love, who commands us to love and gives us the grace to do so: inspire in our hearts such desire for the well-being of our fellow disciples that the whole world may know of your glory and truth.


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