LEARN FROM THE BEST by Dennis Wallstrom

“So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other.”   John 13:34 (NLT)

“A new commandment” is given by Jesus on a night of stunning exposés and crushing heartbreak.  The disciples can scarcely absorb it.  But they will remember it, because he made it unforgettable.   His urgent words follow his ground-level tour on his knees of 12 pairs of dusty feet, basin and towel in hand.  The stations of the cross, memorialized in the film “The Passion of the Christ” and centuries of Christian tradition, were preceded by the equally humble 12 stations of the feet.  And then, the shocking reference to a betrayer in their midst, and the sudden departure of Judas.

“Now,” Jesus said, “The Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.”  (John 13:31)  What is “new” and urged upon all who follow him, is linked to what is “now.”  The “now” in John’s Gospel, or what is referred to repeatedly as “the hour,” is the center of the story of Jesus, and of our story.  It is literally the crux (Latin for “cross”) of everything.   Though it involves agonizing humiliation, death, and seemingly is a huge chasm away from all that one might call “love,” it is the glory of Jesus.  John devotes half his Gospel to the intricate details leading up to that “now.”  Jesus on his knees before us, is now.  Jesus betrayed and abandoned, is now.  Jesus dragged along unsparingly for public display and execution, is now.  But for John—and for us—Jesus sending the Comforter, Jesus preparing a place for us, Jesus with his face like the blazing sun and his voice like many waters, is also now.  All of it is collapsed by John into a singular word:  glory.  It is the radiant, unfiltered display of who Jesus is, and it shines as brightly while he is crouched low on a rough-hewn floor before our feet or raised up exposed for execution, as when he commands the universe as Lord of Lords.

What is new for us is not new to him.  It is his eternal glory, “glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.”(John 1:14)  And we have seen it, and been touched by it!  As John also wrote, “We declare to you what we have seen and heard.”(I John 1:3)  And because of the “now” of Jesus, what is new to us is possible: “We love because he first loved us.”(I John 4:19)  So His new commandment is not a fresh weight of demands placed on weary, aching hearts; it is his invitation for us to join him in his glory, to occupy our place with him, to radiate from our inmost being the “now” of exactly who he is.

D.W.W.

Think about it:  What do I admire the most about what Jesus showed me about love?