03 May 26 | This Is How They Will Know
The new commandment sets a new standard — not love as you love yourself but love as Jesus loved — and the evidence that it is being kept is visible to the watching world.
The Gospel: John 13:34-35
I give you a new commandment: love one another.
As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.
This is how all will know that you are my disciples,
if you have love for one another.
Today’s Focus
Judas has left the room and the passion is in motion. What remains is the core community and Jesus gives them the commandment that will define everything they are to be after he is gone. The commandment is new not because love was unknown but because the standard has changed. Leviticus said love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says love one another as I have loved you. He has just washed the feet of the one who will betray him without anyone knowing it was Judas. That is the standard. The love of the cross, given regardless of what the other person has done or will do, is the pattern the commandment commands. And the mark of that love is not private devotion. It is visible to the watching world. All will know you are my disciples by this. The community that loves its own in the way Jesus loved provides the world with a visible image of what divine love looks like in human form. What the watching world sees in how believers treat one another is either evidence for who Jesus is or evidence against it.
In the Margins
Judas has just left the room. The departure happens in darkness and sets the passion in motion. What remains in the upper room is the core community, the eleven who stay, and it is to them that Jesus gives the commandment that will define everything they are to be after He is gone.
The commandment He gives is described as new, and the Greek word used, kainos, does not mean recently invented. It means new in kind, qualitatively different, belonging to a different order of reality. The same word is used for the new covenant, the new creation, the new Jerusalem. The love commandment itself was not unknown. Leviticus 19:18 had already commanded Israel to love the neighbor as oneself, and Jesus had cited it as the second greatest commandment in the law. What is new is not the command to love. It is the standard by which that love is now measured.
As I have loved you. That single phrase is where everything changes. The measure in Leviticus was self-love, a natural and accessible baseline. The measure Jesus sets is His own love, demonstrated in the foot washing they have just witnessed and about to be demonstrated finally on the cross. Remember, Jesus has just washed the feet of the one who will betray Him and no one knew it was Judas. Jesus performed the lowest task for someone that would ultimately lead to His death. That is the standard of love.
John 15:13 will make the standard explicit. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. The love Jesus commands is not warm feeling toward people who deserve it. It is the decision to give what belongs to oneself for the sake of another, regardless of what they have done or will do. Judas ate at the same table. Jesus washed his feet too.
The aorist tense Jesus uses, I have loved, describes a completed action whose effects continue into the present. The love that has already been shown is the pattern for the love now commanded. This is not an abstract ideal. It is a concrete historical demonstration the disciples have experienced in the basin and the towel, and are about to experience in the cross. John’s first letter will return to this ground repeatedly. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. The love commanded is not a moral achievement to be worked up. It is the participation in and extension of the divine love already poured out.
The visibility of this love is what Jesus focuses on in the second verse. All will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. The mark of discipleship is not stated as correct doctrine, ritual observance, or institutional affiliation. It is love visible to the watching world. The knowledge belongs to those outside the community. Tertullian in the second century recorded that pagans observing the early Christian communities said simply, see how they love one another. The visible life of the community was its most powerful testimony in the first centuries. It remains so.
This is the commandment Jesus leaves with the eleven on the night before He dies. Not a creed to affirm or a practice to perform, though both of those matter. A love to embody, measured against the love of the cross, legible to everyone who watches. The community that loves its own in the way Jesus loved provides the world with a visible image of what divine love looks like in human form. What the watching world sees in the church, in how believers treat one another, is either evidence for who Jesus is or evidence against it. That weight is exactly what Jesus intends when He says this is how all will know.
Reflection Question
When the people around you watch how you treat other believers, what do they see?
A Small Invitation
If this reflection helped you, consider sharing it with someone who may benefit from hearing this message.