“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
John 13:34-35 (NIV)
As I Have Loved You
A family that eats late has a long table and a rule about phones. The youngest has homework left and mentions it twice. A friend of the older one turned up at seven and got a plate without any discussion. The food is nothing special and there’s plenty of it, and at ten the plates are still on the table because the conversation got good.
A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. Jesus says it on this night, at a table that’s one man short. Judas had taken the bread and gone out, and John writes that it was night. The ones still sitting there have just been told they’ve got their teacher a little longer, and that where he’s going they can’t follow. At that same table Peter promises to lay down his life for him and gets told he’ll disown him three times before the rooster crows.
He gave them a measure along with the command. As I have loved you. The love in that room had stayed at a table with a man who was selling him and a man who would deny him, and the disciples were told to love each other by that measure.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. Outsiders watch how these people treat each other, and they know them by it.
A good table is easy to love at. The work in this command shows up in a house where the meal is silent, or where one chair has been empty since a Christmas that went badly, or where one of them is coming out of duty and the rest can tell. A room like that is where the command was first given.
The family with the long table will have a year when one of them stays away, and the command will be the same command, with the same measure still attached. As I have loved you is a standard nobody at that table could meet, and he gave it to them on the night that table came apart.
A Prayer to Remember
There’s a person I’ve settled for being polite with instead of loving, Lord, and you know exactly which one. Keep me at the table with them. Give them a good week whether or not anybody tells me about it, and when the next chance comes to be the one who calls first, let me take it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
