Text Study for John 13:31-35 (Part Four)

Toward the end of Martin Luther’s The Freedom of the Christian, Luther offers a section entitled “Concerning Works for the Neighbor.” Luther roots works of love for the neighbor in our trust in God because of Christ. Since we receive all that God has to offer for free, by grace, and accept that grace through faith, we are freed to do everything in love for God who loves us completely. “Therefore, I will give myself as a kind of Christ to my neighbor,” Luther writes, “just as Christ offered himself to me” (page 524).

This is the first of several expressions of “Luther’s Golden Rule.” While the more familiar form of the Golden Rule is something like “do to others as you would have them do to you,” Luther’s expression of the Golden rule is different. For me as a disciple, what I would wish done to me is not the standard for measuring and assessing my behavior. God’s grace makes it possible for me to de-center myself and put Jesus in the center of the frame as the standard of loving service.

Luther reminds his readers that “just as our neighbor has needs and lacks what we have in abundance, so also we had need before God and lacked God’s mercy. For this reason,” he continues, “our heavenly Father supported us freely in Christ, so also we ought to freely support our neighbor with our body and its actions, and each person ought to become to the other a kind of Christ, so that we may be Christs to one another and be the same Christ in all, that is, truly Christians” (page 525).

“Just as I have loved you,” Jesus tells the disciples in John 13:34b (NRSV), “you also should love one another.” The standard for the disciple life in the Johannine account is the active and embodied love that Jesus extends first to us as disciples. “We continue to love,” the writer of the First Letter of John says, “because he loved us first” (1 John 4:19, my translation). That love is to the end, the completion, the uttermost. It is both the means of and the model for our love for one another.

It is not that Luther diminishes the importance of what most people would consider to be “the Golden Rule.” Luther puts his esteem for that rule like this. “Look here!” he proclaims, “This should be the rule: that the good things we have from God may flow from one person to the other and become common property. In this way,” he continues, “each person may ‘put on’ his [or her] neighbor and conduct oneself toward him [or her] as if in the neighbor’s place” (page 530). That’s a pretty strong endorsement of “the Golden Rule” (and a nod toward Luther’s socialist tendencies, at least within the Christian community).

The rationale for this rule, however, (according to Luther) is not because it’s a wonderful general principle for human conduct – although it is certainly that. Instead, love for neighbor is rooted in Christ’s love for us. “Just as my faith and righteousness ought to be placed before God to cover and intercede for the neighbor’s sins, which I take upon myself,” Luther writes, “so also I labor under and am subject to them as if they were my very own. For this,” Luther concludes, “is what Christ did for us. For this is true love and the genuine rule of Christian life” (page 530).

Perhaps we are reminded at this point of Paul’s encouragement to the Galatian Christians. “Bear the burdens of one another, and this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2, my translation). Luther brings the final section of is tract to an end in this way. “Therefore we conclude that the Christian individuals do not live in themselves but in Christ and their neighbor, or else they are not Christian. They live in Christ through faith,” Luther writes, “and in the neighbor through love” (page 530). This is, according to Luther, the definition of the “freedom of a Christian.”

Here and elsewhere in his work, Luther is clear that this rule of love is not something we disciples carry out on our own or to our credit. Instead, he argues, in the words of Tuomo Mannermaa, that Christ is present in each of us and all of us through faith. In Johannine terms, the disciples receive the model of this love in John 13, the foot-washing. But it is not until John 20 that they receive the means of this love, when Jesus breathes into them his Holy Spirit.

“Christ is, thus, the true agent of good works in the Christian,” Tuomo Mannermaa writes in Christ Present in Faith (Kindle Location 682). This loving presence of Christ in the disciple makes it possible for the disciple to fulfill the “law of Christ,” what in the Johannine account is now called a “new commandment.” Mannermaa quotes Luther, who puts it this way: “Thus he is a true doer of the Law who receives the Holy Spirit through faith in Christ and then begins to love God and to do good to his neighbor” (Kindle Location 712).

I think the context of our reading has a profound impact on how we understand and then embody this love for one another. As we have noted previously, the new commandment is sandwiched in between references to the betrayal by Judas and the denial by Peter. It is precisely these failed disciples that Jesus loves to the uttermost. Jesus does not love either Judas or Peter because they achieve some required behavioral standard. Jesus does not mandate that they conform to some model of being or behavior. As the First Letter of John reminds us, Christ loves us first.

This is the part that I can write but struggle to accept. Each of us has a story about the formative role of conditional love in our lives. I don’t consider myself exceptional in that regard. Nonetheless, my story is indeed my story. I was trained, as were those who came before me, to believe that loving care was always a reward for performance. That performance might be taking care of the needs of another, having the right answer to a question, or just getting out of the way and trying not to be a bother. In any event, loving care did not come first, but rather second.

And that loving care was conditioned upon my being assimilated to the needs and standards of another or of others. I didn’t suffer nearly as much trauma as many people, so I’m not making a case for some special victimhood here. Instead, I think I’m quite typical and ordinary of our human experience – systems that require us to become something we’re not in order to be embraced and included, at least for the present moment.

Temporary and conditional loving care is not the love that Jesus gives to his disciples (and God to the world). Jesus loves us first, as we are, where we are. We are not called to change in order to be loved. We are loved into the beautiful creations we were always meant by God to be. That is the love present in us by faith in Christ – who gives himself to us to the uttermost and without condition. And this is the love we are empowered to emulate as Jesus’ disciples.

Love one another as Christ loves you. It sounds so simple. But it has revolutionary implications. For example, in our anti-racism book study, we (White participants) continue to reflect on and wrestle with our individual and systemic behaviors that center our Whiteness in our awareness, our actions, and our worldview. That White-centering makes it impossible to love BIPOC folks for themselves. White supremacy means that BIPOC folks are objects to be appropriated into the White story of the world and of individual life. That’s the opposite of loving one another as Christ loves us.

If I am to bear another’s burdens and thus fulfill the Law of Christ, then I must become intimately familiar with those burdens before picking them up. That’s why it is so important to do the work of learning as much as we White people can about the experiences of our BIPOC sisters and brothers in our White-centric culture and churches. This learning requires humility, listening, self-awareness, self-reflection, and repentance. Until we’ve done that work – coming to terms with our White identity – we won’t be either safe or competent in bearing the burdens of others in this culture.

In another line of thought, my enemies are not God’s enemies – or at least are not punished for being anyone’s enemies. I’m leading a brief study on the Book of Jonah both online and in our local congregation. And this is one of the lessons of that little book. Loving as Jesus loves means that my enemies are still objects of God’s love. A preacher might point to the reading from the Book of Acts for Sunday to find additional support for this assertion.

So, my agenda in scapegoating and punishing others does not fit with God’s agenda of giving abundant life to all. If I have higher standards than God in this realm, I should probably re-examine my standards and adjust my thinking. Just as Christ has loved me (and loves me to the end), so I am called daily to love others.

And that’s the Good News…

References and Resources

Evangelical Lutheran Worship. Augsburg Fortress, 2006.

Lewis, Karoline M. John (Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

Malina, Bruce, and Rohrbaugh, Richard. Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John. Fortress Press, 1998.

Tuomo Mannermaa; Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna. Christ Present In Faith: Luther’s View Of Justification. Kindle Edition.

MOLONEY, FRANCIS J. “A Sacramental Reading of John 13:1-38.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 53, no. 2 (1991): 237–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43719525.

van der Merwe, Dirk G.. (2022). The concept and activity of ‘obedience’ in the Gospel of John. Verbum et Ecclesia, 43(1), 1-9. https://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ve.v43i1.2367.

Wengert, Timothy J. The Freedom of a Christian 1520 (The Annotated Luther Study Edition). Fortress Press, 2016.

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate Donate monthly Donate yearly

Text Study for John 13:31-35 (Part Three)

What does Jesus, as portrayed by the Johannine author, mean in our text by the word “commandment”? We who live with a post-Reformation Protestant mindset in the West jump immediately to the idea of a “law” to be obeyed. We tend to think of the Ten Commandments, for example, as laws God’s people must keep in order to demonstrate their worthiness for a relationship with God. We tend to think, then, that such “laws” are bad since they are the scaffolding upon which we seek to build our works-righteousness.

That’s not a helpful or accurate understanding of the nature of the Ten Commandments. Nor is it a faithful exegesis of Paul’s arguments about the righteousness of God in Romans, Galatians, and elsewhere in the Pauline corpus. Mostly, this understanding of the nature of a “commandment” is yet another way to make Christians look good by making Jews look bad. That’s a post-Reformation Protestant sin for which we in that camp need to offer ongoing repentance and repair.

Thus, that’s not what “commandment” means here in John 13 and elsewhere in the Johannine account. But what, then, is the meaning of the term? Let’s look at the narrative logic of our text for some help in answering that question.

The disciple community is cracking under the strain of events and the threat of destruction. Judas has left to put in motion the end game which will bring the movement to a head or put it out of its misery for good. Jesus declares that this action has launched the “glorification of the Son of Man” and the “glorification” of God through the Son. In John, this glorification is the whole complex of Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. This glorification means that Jesus is leaving the disciples to go where they cannot come.

Since Jesus is leaving to accomplish his glorification, he leaves the disciples with a “new commandment” to guide and form them in his absence. This is the commandment for the disciples to love one another just as Jesus has loved them. This isn’t a way to demonstrate their perfection or worthiness. Instead, I would suggest that Jesus leaves the disciples with a “community rule” to form them as a fellowship and to guide them in their ongoing life together in and for the world.

Dirk van der Merwe tracks the vocabulary of obedience in his recent paper. He writes that in the Johannine account, the disciples (and we who benefit from the testimony of the disciples) learn the meaning of “obedience” through the example of Jesus. Jesus tells them this explicitly in John 13:15. Anyone who wants to know God, van der Merwe continues, must obey God. In the Johannine account, he argues, the essence of that obedience is to love like Jesus loves.

The typical words for “obey” and “obedience” in New Testament Greek show up only rarely in the Johannine account. Instead, the word most often translated with some form of obey is the verb tereo. This verb to keep or observe as well as secondarily to obey. It has more the sense of maintaining a practice than obeying a law. If the new commandment in John 13 is really a community rule, then this vocabulary makes eminent sense. As Jesus goes to be with the Father, he leaves a rule to form and maintain the disciple community.

Van der Merwe writes that “in the Gospel of John, love is primarily understood as a bond of commitment.” It is more than a feeling, instead this love is actions based on that bond of commitment. “Because of his commitment to the world,” van der Merwe continues, “God has sent the Son, whom [God] loves, to communicate [God’s] love to a world, alienated from its Creator.” This reminds me that any message about God’s love based on the Johannine account must always be anchored, in one way or another, to the fundamental description of that love in John 3:16.

It’s important to remember at this point the proper translation and understanding of John 3:16. That passage is not about the amount or degree of God’s love for the cosmos. Rather, that verse offers a description of the method or means of God’s love for the cosmos. If love is an action in response to a bond of commitment, then God sends the Son into the world as that action – not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through the Son.

This new commandment of love for the brother or sister is discussed in 1 John 2:7-17. Scholars debate the relationship between the Gospel of John and this first letter, arguing over which document came “first.” It makes some sense to me that the letter precedes the gospel chronologically and gives us some framework for understanding that’s at stake in the gospel. At least some in the Johannine community seem to be separating their love for the Father from their love (or the lack thereof) for the members of the disciple community.

The discussion continues in 1 John 3. “For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning,” the writer declares, “that we should love one another” (1 John 3:11, NRSV). The counter-example of this love is the hatred that Cain has for Abel, enacted in fratricide. “We know that we have passed from death to life,” the writer continues, because we love one another” (1 John 3:14a, NRSV). But some in the community are not living out that new commandment, since they refuse to help other community members by sharing their resources with those in need (see 1 John 3:17).

“Love from the Father is fundamental for God’s children,” van der Merwe notes, “because they are requested to share their love with others…After communicating to his followers, the Father’s love,” van der Merwe continues, “Jesus called them to love one another.” The shape of the community between the Father and Jesus will also be the shape of the community between the disciples. “Little children,” the writer of First John urges, “let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action” (1 John 3:18).

Loving one another will be the rule that forms the disciples as community and the behavior that identifies them to the world. This behavior is most clearly modeled in the foot washing, the “example” that Jesus gives for how this community rule is to be implemented and imitated over and over in the life of the disciple community.

The word for “example” really translates best as a “type” or “pattern” or “model.” I think that the Johannine author sees this example as a kind of recursive model that produces deeper intimacy with the Father through Jesus and deeper intimacy within the disciple community. I don’t think that Jesus means we should spend all of our time washing one another’s feet, although that might be a good start. Instead, the community will be formed and deepened each time disciples act according to this pattern of behavior.

For the Johannine author and community, the recurrent application of this rule for life together will deepen and expand the community and each disciple’s relationship with Jesus and with one another. In a real sense, doing will lead to believing rather than the other way around. That’s contrary to modern ways of imaging the relationship between belief and action. We’d like to belief ourselves into acting, rather than acting ourselves into believing. But that’s not the rule described here in the Johannine account.

Van der Merwe outlines the “rewards of being obedient” as described in the Johannine account. I would use the word “result,” perhaps, rather than “reward,” since the latter term always has something of the sense of merit associated with it. Instead, the Johannine author expects that keeping the community rule will have certain desirable outcomes for the disciples. Those outcomes would include experiencing the presence of Jesus and God in the lives of believers, becoming friends of Jesus, being honored and glorified by God, and honoring and glorifying God in return.

These outcomes of living the community rule are listed as well in 1 John 3. Even when we disciples are convicted by our own conscience that we have not loved as we ought, God is greater than our own self-condemnation. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, the writer told us in the first chapter of the letter. But if we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. “Because if our hearts do not condemn us,” we read in 1 John 3:21-22 (NRSV), “we have boldness before God; and we receive from [God] whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.”

The fourth chapter of First John expands further on the meaning and outcomes of this community rule. Everyone who loves (according to this rule) is born of God and knows God. God’s love is the root of our love, and we love in response to that gracious gift. Loving one another as God loves us is the way to see God in our lives and our communities, and to have that love made complete in us. This is the work of the Spirit who testifies to God’s love and causes us to abide in God.

The bottom line in chapter four takes us back to the importance of this community rule. “The commandment we have from [God] is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also” (1 John 4:21, NRSV). This is the “one simple rule” for life with God in Christ, embodied in life with the community of faith.

References and Resources

Evangelical Lutheran Worship. Augsburg Fortress, 2006.

Lewis, Karoline M. John (Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

Malina, Bruce, and Rohrbaugh, Richard. Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John. Fortress Press, 1998.

MOLONEY, FRANCIS J. “A Sacramental Reading of John 13:1-38.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 53, no. 2 (1991): 237–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43719525. van der Merwe, Dirk G.. (2022). The concept and activity of ‘obedience’ in the Gospel of John. Verbum et Ecclesia, 43(1), 1-9. https://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ve.v43i1.2367.

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate Donate monthly Donate yearly

Text Study for John 13:31-35 (Part Two)

“A new creation comes to life and grows,” John Geyer wrote in verse four of the hymn “We Know That Christ Is Raised.” Geyer continues, “as Christ’s new body takes on flesh and blood. The universe restored and whole will sing: Hallelujah!” (Evangelical Lutheran Worship, #449). Geyer’s words are set to Charles Stanford’s tune, “Engelberg.” It’s a great hymn for the Easter season and moves us from Jesus’ resurrection as an historical event to Jesus’ resurrection as a cosmic reality.

The same tune serves as the setting for words by Delores Dufner. “To be your presence is our mission here,” Dufner writes. She goes on to declare that this presence means to be Christ’s heart of mercy, hands of justice, voice of hope, and love expressed. She summarizes the call in the fourth verse: “We are your heart, O Christ, your hands and voice, to serve your people is our call and choice, and in this mission we, the church rejoice, alleluia!” (Evangelical Lutheran Worship, #546).

Studies of Hands and Feet by Franu00e7ois Le Moyne is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

It is not unusual for different hymn texts to be set to the same tune. As a general practice, I don’t use such hymnic twins in the same worship service for the sake of melodic variety. But I might make an exception in worship this coming Sunday if I were doing the worship planning. If one reads the texts of the hymns, the flow from Geyer’s poetry into Dufner’s proclamation is clear and seamless. Using the same melody might help worshipers to experience that connection and progression in a more visceral way.

I begin with this liturgical commentary because I think this is one of the possible emphases in preaching on John 13:31-35. In the Farewell Discourse, the Johannine Jesus is preparing the disciples for his departure and absence. Where he is going, they cannot come. In chapter fourteen he will remind them that they already know and have seen the Way to the Father in him. A major part of the preparation in the Farewell Discourse is, I think, preparing the disciples not only to witness to Jesus’ presence among them even when he appears to be absent but, more importantly, to be that presence for one another and for the cosmos.

Conversation about the “presence” of the risen Christ to, in, and/or through the community of disciples leads me to thinking about a sacramental understanding of that presence. That is certainly not a required or universal direction for the text. It also requires a subtle examination of the Johannine account since the possible presence of a sacramental sensibility is a matter for both scholarly and confessional debate and disagreement.

That being said, it seems to me that one of the arcs of John 13 is this preparation of the disciples to be the ongoing presence of Jesus to and for one another. Frances Moloney discusses the sacramental sensibilities in the Johannine account in his article. I want to spend some time reviewing and reflecting on that article here.

Moloney notes that the Eucharistic themes of the Johannine account are mostly absent from chapter 13. These themes show up most clearly in the Bread of Life discourse in John 6. They also show up, Moloney suggests, in John 19. This is the moment when the soldiers pierce Jesus’ side and blood and water flow out (see John 19:34). “The community is linked with Calvary,” Moloney writes, “through the presence of the pierced one in their eucharistic celebrations” (page 238).

Moloney argues that these eucharistic anchor points in the Johannine account develop a sacramental understanding of the eucharist as “presence.” It’s clear that the Johannine community addressed by the gospel account is struggling with an experience of the “absence” of the risen Christ. This sense of absence is perhaps increasing as they become more distant in time from Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension. And, I would add, that sense of distance is also perhaps increasing as the community experiences conflict with and then rejection by the synagogue communities in which these Jewish Christians have lived since the Ascension.

Moloney suggests that the Johannine author wants to assure the believing community that they can find the presence of the “absent” Jesus in their sacramental life – in Baptism and the Eucharist. “This message was addressed to a community wondering,” Moloney writes, “at the end of the first century – where they might encounter Christ, the Son of God, so that they might come to a deeper faith in him (20:31)” (page 239). The Johannine author is pointing to the ongoing “presence of the absent one.”

You might recall that many of the Johannine verbs related to believing are in the present or imperfect tense. These tenses have to do with either continuing action in the present or action that began in the past but continues into the present. In the Johannine purpose statement, we know that we can readily translate John 20:30-31 as encouraging us to continue to put our trust in the fact that the Messiah, the Son of God, is Jesus.

Do the sign, dialogue, and discourse in John 13 support this proposed emphasis on sacramental presence in the Johannine account? Moloney argues in favor of that notion. There is the possible connection between the foot-washing and the Johannine understanding and practice of Baptism. In addition, Moloney makes a strong exegetical argument for a Eucharistic connection in the scene when Jesus gives a chunk of bread to Judas. There are strong verbal connections between John 13 and the Bread of Life discourse in John 6.

“The whole of [John] 13:1-38 indicates that Jesus shows the quality of his love,” Moloney writes, “a love which makes God known – by choosing, forming, sending out, and nourishing his disciples of all times, catching them up in the rhythm of his own self-giving life and death” (page 254). The disciples who are “caught up” in the rhythm in the Johannine account show ignorance, fail Jesus, deny him, and even betray him. After all, in John 13, Judas is the one who receives the bread from Jesus’ hand and then goes out to hand Jesus over.

“It is in Jesus’ never-failing love for such disciples, a love which even reached out to the archetype of the evil disciple,” Moloney argues, “that he shows that he is the unique revelation of God among us. The text calls,” Moloney continues, “for the reader’s response to this God through a commitment to a similar quality of love (vv. 15-17, 34-35)” (page 254). Washing feet and feeding even the worst betrayer are practices that embody Jesus’ presence in, to, and through the disciple community. These practices of mutual love will demonstrate Jesus’ presence to the world, as we read in John 13:35.

“It is critical for the interpretation of this commandment to recognize that it follows Jesus’ very direct statement about his departure,” Karoline Lewis writes. “To love one another is for the sake of remembering the feeling of how Jesus loved them,” she continues. “Love is a mark of discipleship, for the outside world to see, but it is also necessary for them to show each other” (page 184). This ministry of disciples washing and feeding one another is Jesus’ response to the community’s anxiety about his apparent absence.

I have been physically absent from the worshiping community for most of the last two years. As I return to a much more physical presence, I find this text (when taken in the whole sweep of John 13) to be challenging and invigorating. I know that even when most of us were physically present at worship in “the before times,” we didn’t really show up as who we truly were. We put on our church personas and were always “just fine” or “blessed” or “grateful,” when asked how we were. We brought our bodies to church and checked our lives at the door.

That’s not being present to one another or to Jesus. I find it so easy to slip right back into that way of appearing in my body without being present to the Body. I may arrive ignorant, failed, cowardly, and self-serving. But I certainly don’t wish for anyone else to see what is so painfully obvious to me. Part of the challenge of coming back, for me, is to be present as I am and to trust that we as the Body can be present to one another in ways that give life.

Perhaps this is a bit of what it means to move from the “Age of Association” to the “Age of Authenticity.” Dwight Zscheile offers a quick summary of those ideas in his recent Living Lutheran article. Checking my real life at the door and assimilating to the expectations of the social club is a hallmark of behavior in the Age of Association. But we live in a different culture now.

Zscheile describes what he calls the opportunities of the Age of Authenticity. “This age is full of yearning for deeper connections than those facilitated by social media, for more adequate stories than those provided by consumerism, and for more just and sustainable ways of patterning human life than people see around and within themselves. There is isolation, despair and division,” he continues, “What an opportune moment for the promises of God in Jesus to be made known!”

While Zscheile doesn’t offer much in the way of paths into this age, he does talk a bit about presence. He encourages us to take a shot at “faithful innovation…investing presence and relationship in community spaces where people already spend time (both virtually and physically) so that we might listen to their stories and learn how to connect the gospel with their longings and losses.”

So, we wash feet, share bread, and tell true stories. We live John 13 lives, perhaps…

References and Resources

Evangelical Lutheran Worship. Augsburg Fortress, 2006.

Lewis, Karoline M. John (Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

Malina, Bruce, and Rohrbaugh, Richard. Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John. Fortress Press, 1998.

MOLONEY, FRANCIS J. “A Sacramental Reading of John 13:1-38.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 53, no. 2 (1991): 237–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43719525.

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate Donate monthly Donate yearly

Text Study for John 13:31-35 (Part One)

5 Easter C 2022

Difficult times can drive us apart or bind us together.

We have passed the midpoint of the Easter seasonal journey and are beginning the move toward Ascension Day and Pentecost. In the Johannine account, this means that along with the disciples, we are reflecting on what it means for Jesus to “leave” us and return to the Father. That reflection is the basis for the Farewell Discourse in John 13-17. In our text this week, we have the words that introduce the Farewell Discourse proper.

Karoline Lewis suggests that the sign, dialogue, and discourse that make up the narration of the Foot Washing (John 13:1-30) “should function as the prologue to the Farewell Discourse, that is, an introduction to the tone and themes that will unfold in the following chapters” (pages 177-178). While I don’t recommend that we read those verses aloud in addition to the appointed text, if we’re preaching on the gospel text, then we should take this narrative context into account.

In John 13:1b, we get the superscription that describes the love Jesus has for the disciples. Jesus loves his disciples “into the end,” that is, both through the fulfillment of events and to the uttermost. In verse 2, we get the certain signal that Judas will hand Jesus over – although we know from John 10 that this is according to Jesus’ intention and plan, because only he can lay down his life and take it up again.

I think we need to tell our listeners that the immediate framing of our text is Judas’ journey into the darkness of betrayal on the one side (John 13:21-30) and the prediction of Peter’s craven denial on the other side (John 13:36-38). In the center of this frame is the command to the disciples to love one another just as Jesus has loved them. This is not the sweet script for a cross-stitch project. This is a description of the only ethic by which the disciple community under existential threat can survive.

In John 13:30 we read that Judas, perhaps still chewing on a chunk of bread from Jesus’ hand, “went out immediately.” We get three more chilling Greek words to follow – “but it was night.” Lewis notes that these two details ring down the curtain on Judas as disciple and introduce him as an agent of the Evil One. “Judas has left the fold,” Lewis writes. “Judas has entered the darkness,” she continues, “He has gone to the dark side” (page 183).

This is the scene that leads us into our text for Sunday. If I were performing this chapter of the Johannine account, I think that I would leave some silence between John 13:30 and 13:31. The language of the Johannine narrator encourages this move to shocked silence. “When, therefore, [Judas] went out, Jesus says…” (John 13:31a, my translation). The narrator draws a deep and pained breath as those words are uttered. There are too many emotions wrapped in too few words to skip forward blithely.

I think it would be appropriate to leave enough silence for the crowd to grow restless and uncomfortable. In the narrative itself, I imagine this was the situation. While the Johannine account moves on to Jesus’ words, Judas’ abrupt departure was a troubling and destabilizing event. And yet, Jesus’ next words are perhaps even more troubling and destabilizing.

“Now the Son of Man shall be glorified,” Jesus tells the remaining disciples, and God shall be glorified in him” (John 13:31b, my translation). We know from the words in John 12 that when the Son of Man is “glorified,” a grain of wheat must fall into the earth and die. Those who serve Jesus must follow him into that death and will be honored by the Father for that service.

Jesus recognized at the beginning of chapter 13 that the hour of his glorification had arrived. Judas may have left the building and entered the darkness. But now it was time for Jesus to leave the disciples and return to the Light. What precedes the commandment to love one another is this clear statement about Jesus’ departure.

“As a result,” Lewis writes, “this is not a general, generic claim to love one another; it is rather, an essential injunction to know and feel Jesus’ presence when he is gone” (page 184). Difficult times can drive us apart or bind us together. This new situation, when the disciples must continue their life together in Jesus’ absence, calls forth a “new commandment,” to love one another. “What is new about the commandment,” Malina and Rohrbaugh write, “is that it directs disciples toward one another; up until now,” they continue, it was mutual love between Jesus and the disciples that was underscored” (page 226).

“In the Mediterranean world,” Malina and Rohrbaugh note, “love always had the underlying meaning of attachment to some group,” including a fictive kinship group such as that of Jesus and the disciples. “Since in first-century Mediterranean society there was no term for an internal state that did not entail a corresponding external action, love always meant doing something that revealed one’s attachment,” they continue, “that is, actions supporting the well-being of the persons to whom one was attached” (page 228).

This is a demanding text to preach in our time of radical individualism, toxic partisanship, and deep divisions – in the larger society, in the American church, and in particular congregations. The love to which Jesus points, according to Malina and Rohrbaugh “is reliability in interpersonal relations; it takes on the value of enduring personal loyalty, of personal faithfulness. The phrase ‘love one another,’” they suggest, “presumes the social glue that binds one person to another” (page 228).

“A new commandment I am giving you, in order that you may love one another,” Jesus says, “just as I have loved you, in order that you also may love one another” (John 13:34, my translation). It should be clear from a reading of John 13 that this “love” is most clearly demonstrated in the foot washing. Jesus says he has given an “example” – a type, model, or pattern for what it looks like to love one another. I don’t think we can preach on this love without helping our listeners remember the model.

It is a model of humble and self-giving proximity – literally getting in touch with the one whom I am called to love. Personally, I’m not comfortable with any of this. I know lots of people have been damaged and devastated by the lack of interpersonal contact and connection during the pandemic lockdowns. I’m wired in such a way emotionally and was situated in such a way relationally that I wasn’t the least bit troubled by this separation. The hard part for me comes now – when we start to get back together.

What I know is that the lack of proximity, as necessary as it has been and perhaps continues to be, is damaging to my capacity to love others. There is just no substitute for being together in one fashion or another as the community of disciples. I’m starting to participate again in face-to-face worship. We’ve been involved in the restart of adult education activities in our home congregation. We’ve gone to meetings in person and not just on Zoom. We’ve even been to a congregational potluck (and I enjoyed it!).

I’m not a complete misanthrope (no matter what some people might say). I’m just an introvert, and increasingly so as I get older. But without proximity, contact, conversation, ministry together – I cannot find myself in the place to love others as I am loved. So, loving in the way Jesus loves the disciples means, at the very least, being “in touch” with one another (whatever the safety precautions and vaccination doses might be necessary to make such proximity possible).

Of course, being in the same space with others means that I cannot avoid my differences with and dislikes of some of my colleague disciples. Nor can they avoid my objectionable and off-putting characteristics. I know that I have gotten out of practice in applying the skills of interpersonal tolerance of irritating differences (and the habits of keeping my most unnecessary and offensive thoughts and behaviors to myself). I assume that many others are as out of practice in dealing with me. Difficult times can drive us apart or bind us together. We disciples are called to respond to the difficulties by going toward one another rather than away from one another.

I know from our text that going away from one another means going “into the darkness.” And it is certainly possible to enter that darkness even with a mouth still full of bread from Jesus’ hand. For me, it’s the easiest thing in the world to whip up a self-righteous snit and storm out a door, certain that I’m right and the rest of those idiots can just go to hell (my interior ruminations are often not a pretty item upon which to report). The result of that going out, of course, is increased isolation – the opposite of the abundant life which Jesus promises.

Our text is an invitation, a command, and a plea to draw near to one another in love – particularly in the most challenging of times. If the church and individual disciples could do that in such a time as this, perhaps we would do something really countercultural and world-changing.

References and Resources

Lewis, Karoline M. John (Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

Malina, Bruce, and Rohrbaugh, Richard. Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John. Fortress Press, 1998.

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate Donate monthly Donate yearly