John 13:34-35 "A New Commandment"

Um, if you have a Bible with you, we are continuing our series in John.

We have come to the 13th chapter.

Um, we're gonna be in verses mainly 34 and 35 today, but you'll see we'll be ranging a little bit because I don't know if um if you if you grew up on 80s sitcoms, you know that when you're coming to the end of the series, they start doing flashback episodes.

Remember, remember that?

Like you don't do in season two or three, but at a certain point you're like, oh, they're doing flashback episodes, they're about to wrap this series up.

Well, that's kind of what we're getting to in the book of John.

The public ministry of Jesus is over.

The first three years of his of his uh uh the first three years of his ministry are covered in the first 12 chapters, and really essentially we spend the rest of it in the in the Last Supper and this upper room discourse in the night he was betrayed.

And um, and as he is giving his farewell address, as we're coming to the end, we actually get pointed back, as we're gonna see.

Look with me at at the word of God in John 13, verses 34 and 35.

John 13:34

He says, A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.

You also are to love one another.

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

Please pray with me.

Jesus, I pray that your word would find fertile soil in us, that we would receive this word, that it would grow deeply within us, that it would put down roots and produce fruit.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

There's a quote that I've seen a lot, and it's a quote that comes to us uh from a guy named Ernesto, nicknamed Che Guevara, Guevara Guevara, who uh, if you don't know, he was Argent, an Argentinian guy who got heavily involved with Castro's revolution in Cuba, and uh and then involved in other other revolutions elsewhere.

And this is the quote.

You guys recognize him from the t-shirt that everyone.

Yeah, so I don't know, if you have one of those t-shirts, you may want to rethink it.

He says this he says, he says, that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.

It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

Now, the thing is, is when he talks about the revolutionary being motivated by love, driven by love, what he's talking about is things like all of the hundreds of summary executions that he ordered or carried out.

Love.

No trial.

Because I love.

Love coming from deep in my love.

Or the fact that he established concentration camps for homosexuals and dissidents and priests.

Because of love.

Really?

Guys, is it possible that that is love?

Is it possible that by calling something love, it is love?

Well, I I would hope you would say no, but if not, where do we get our definition of love?

Who gets to define love?

Right?

And if we if we go with our our uh our sort of um our automatic postmodernist instincts, well, everyone gets to define what they think love is, right?

That's what some of us are automatically gonna say.

Well, then Che gets his and Stalin gets his, and and you know, I don't know, Love Island gets theirs, and love, it's a really powerful word for us.

It's a it's something that has the the most positive connotations for us.

And for all of us, we have an understanding that love is somehow central to who we want to be, to how we want to live.

You know, I mean, think about this.

The thing is though, we don't really get a whole ton of details, do we?

What do we mean by it?

What does love mean?

See, love wins against who?

Who did love defeat?

Or or as we talked about last week, love is all you need.

What about toilet paper?

I feel like also really, really important.

Well, I mean, people say, well, God is love, and that truly is in the Bible.

But what does that mean?

What do we mean by him being love?

And somebody said, Well, okay, well, well, love is an emotion, love is a feeling that you have inside.

Well, my question would then be, how can we command, how can we require it if it's an emotion?

You must be sad, you must be happy, you must love.

It doesn't really work.

And also, does the emotion all by itself constitute love?

Right?

So if someone says, Yes, I love this family member, I don't want to be around them, I wouldn't help them if they were drowning, but I love them because I have a feeling inside.

I no, that's not sufficient, is it?

So, so if if it's not an emotion all by itself, it's not what we want it to be, or however we choose to define it to be, you know, well, oh, well, here's one that sounds a little better.

Love, this is gonna sound good, is is non-judgmental positive regard.

If you don't judge people and you just accept everybody without judgment, you got love.

That's loving.

So, you got nothing to say about Andrew Tate or the Confederacy or human traffickers, just love, no judgment.

That doesn't work either, does it?

That doesn't really seem like love.

So, what does it mean to love?

How can we be loving?

Well, lucky for us, Jesus actually definitively answers this crucial question.

Look at what he says in verses 34 and 35.

He says, A new commandment I give to you that you love one another.

Okay, and now he's gonna define it.

Just as I have loved you, you are to love one another.

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

So, how is love defined?

It's through how Jesus has loved us.

Now, a couple things we want to observe right here.

Jesus doesn't say love so that I will love you.

He says love because I have loved you.

Love as I have loved you.

So it's his love, it not only defines love, but it empowers our love, and it's absolutely central to the character of anyone who is a follower of Jesus.

And he he absolutely embodies the specifics of it.

As we're gonna see.

Now, when he says, Love as I have loved you, if you were an ancient hearer, okay, you weren't hearing John two verses at a time like we do.

You were you were you were hearing the book of John like we go see a movie all at once.

No one's, I mean, I guess nowadays we're like, I'll watch four minutes and three minutes, we do that now.

But really, John would have been heard or read in a single sitting.

So when he's saying, Love as I have loved you, what we're invited to do is the flashback episode to go back and see how Jesus has loved.

The first thing I want to point us to is that Jesus is who Jesus loves.

He loves the unlovely.

He loves the unlovely.

In John chapter 4, if you're quick, you could turn there.

John 4 · chapter mention

If not, it's on the screen.

He encounters, while they were passing through a place called Samaria, he encounters a woman who is at the well by herself.

In verses 7 through 9, it says this A woman from Samaria came to draw water.

Jesus said to her, Give me a drink, for his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.

The Samaritan woman said to him, How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?

For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.

So put yourself in the shoes of an ancient Jewish male, ancient Judean male, I should say.

Okay.

You did not speak to women you weren't related to.

Okay, that that's that's one strike against her.

She's a woman.

Second, you did not talk to Samaritans or have any dealings with them, as is said in the text.

Right?

So there's two counts in which she should be unlovely to Jesus, but there's something more that we get to in verse 16.

That's the amen.

Levi really likes this sermon so far.

Jesus said to her, Go call your husband and come here.

The woman answered him, I have no husband.

Jesus said to her, You are right in saying I have no husband, for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.

What you have said is true.

So we get to something deeper with her.

Not only does her gender and demographics, right, her nationality make her unlovely, but her moral record.

She is five times divorced.

I I mean, in our freewheel in society, if someone was five times divorced, it's gonna raise eyebrows at least.

In in ancient, in in the ancient uh uh uh Levant here, it was even more so, and now she's living with someone she's not married to.

So her moral record makes her unlovely.

Let's see how Jesus treats her, though.

In verse 25, uh as kind of the cap of a conversation, the woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming, who he who is called Christ, when he comes, he will tell us all things.

Jesus said to her, I who speak to you am He.

So if you remember this sermon way back when, when I when we went in this text, like, is Jesus ever this open with any of his disciples?

Yes, I'm the Messiah.

It's me.

No, but he is with her.

What's he doing?

He is instructing her as a rabbi instructs a disciple.

And then the conclusion of the story in verse 39, it says, Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony.

He told me all that I ever did.

So the first person to share that to share the Christ in Samaria was her.

Guys, there is still a Samaritan Christian community there now that started with her.

Think of that.

This woman who, in the eyes of everyone in her day, would have been unlovely.

What does Jesus do?

Who does he love?

He loves the unlovely.

This is one of the marks of the Christian.

To love the unlovely.

It's how we've been loved.

Uh there was once a man named Vinicio Riva.

And uh he was um he suffered from a uh a disease that I'm gonna mispronounce now.

It's neurofibromatosis, and it's very rare, but essentially what he had going was he would he had tumors growing on his nerve endings, and it was often painful, and they would often seep blood.

And one day he got on a bus to head to Vatican City, and when he went to sit next to someone, the man sitting who he sat next to said, get out, which was a response that he was very, very accustomed to because he was so disfigured.

People did not want to look at him, people did not want him around.

And he went to Vatican City because Pope Francis was was uh was conducting a mass, and he wanted to go to a mass that that the Pope was conducting, and so he sat down, and Francis, on his way out to conduct mass, stops, looks over at him, walks right over, and embraces him and kisses him.

And for Vinicio, no one treated him like this.

Most people were afraid of catching whatever he they thought he had, right?

He was used to being pushed away, to being looked away from because of his unloveliness.

But when Francis saw him, he went right to him.

This is how Jesus loves.

He loves the unlovely.

Now, I don't want to harsh anyone's mellow, but have you ever reflected on the fact that your moral record, my moral record, as we stand before God, God doesn't love us because we're so good.

He loves us even though we are unlovely.

That is how we are loved.

God looks past our moral record, God looks past our rebellion, God looks past all the brokenness, all of the evil within you and me, and loves us in it.

I don't know about you.

I sometimes struggle to love the loveliest people.

My family members, my friends, right?

And on a day where I'm like, you know, I wasn't a jerk to people who were really kind, um, I feel good about myself.

That is not Christian love.

The way what we are called to, what love looks like, is to love the unlovely.

Someone might be unlovely to you because of how they look physically, or the class markers that they bear, or their demographics, or their their moral record, or their lifestyle, or whatever.

Guess what?

We have been loved though we are unlovely by Jesus, and we are called to love as Jesus has loved us.

We need to love the unlovely.

But what does that love look like?

Because we get mixed up here too.

What we're gonna see over the next two episodes we look at is that Jesus comforts the broken and challenges the comfortable.

He comforts the broken and challenges the comfortable.

First of all, we can look at John chapter 11, starting at, we're just gonna look at verses 32 through 35.

John 11 · chapter mention

This is when he shows up to the time of grieving after the death of Lazarus.

It says, now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled, and he said, Where have you laid him?

They said to him, Lord, come and see.

Jesus wept.

Now, as Jesus shows up, when we looked at this text, we he knew.

He knew what he was doing.

He intentionally let Lazarus die.

Do you remember that bit?

And he also knew that he was going to perform the greatest of his signs.

He was going to raise Lazarus from death, but when he shows up and he sees the people grieving and he sees Mary grieving in particular, what does he do?

He joins in.

He brings comfort to those who are broken.

We could also look at this and you know, other places in John, like the woman caught in adultery or the man born blind, when Jesus encounters the broken, what does he do?

He comforts the broken.

But then we also see that he challenges the comfortable.

This is the flip side of the coin of love.

Look back with me at chapter 3 in John, starting at verse 2.

Says, this man, Nicodemus, came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with them.

Little background.

Nicodemus is the man Judea wants, okay?

Nicodemus is a Pharisee, he is righteous, he is financially comfortable, he is very competent in the scriptures, he is regular in worship, he is the guy who you would want, you'd let him watch your dog or something.

High trust for Nicodemus, alright?

Watch my dog.

Trust him.

Good people.

You want a good person watching your dog.

Okay, so Nicodemus comes to Jesus, and Nicodemus is like a senior rabbi, and Jesus is a newcomer who performs miracles, and he's like, Jesus, heard about you.

Got our eye on you in the good guy club.

We want you to join.

How about that?

Pinch yourself, pal.

It's happening.

It's all happening for you.

We want you in our good rabbi club.

Let's see how Jesus responds to this comfortable dude.

Jesus answered him, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he is old?

Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?

Jesus answered, Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.

Do not marvel that I said to you, You must be born again.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.

So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

Nicodemus said to him, How can these things be?

Jesus answered him, Are you the teacher of Israel?

And yet you do not understand these things?

Truly, truly I say to you, we speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony.

If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

What do you think of that response to Nicodemus being like, hey, let's do lunch?

We'll do the rabbi thing.

Right, so so here's how it worked.

When you would be on friendly terms with a rabbi, you would throw a nice softball question in front of disciples, and you'd say, Tell me what you think about such and such, and that rabbi would let forth with all of their learning.

It's like if you get middle-aged guys playing basketball, no one plays any defense, so everyone can look great, Nick, in a layup, you know?

It's like, oh, that was awesome.

And Jesus is that guy who's just a little too keen on playing defense.

In your jersey, squatting shots, putting guys on the ground, right?

That's how Jesus is showing up to this little rabbi chat.

He is challenging Nicodemus.

Is it because he doesn't like him?

No, remember, Jesus is perfectly loving.

He defines love in a person.

Nicodemus is a desperate sinner just like the woman at the well.

He needs the blood of Christ just as much as anybody else, and he has no clue because he's comfortable.

So Jesus brings comfort to the broken and challenge to the comfortable.

And you might be uncomfortable with the idea that challenge is part of love.

How can you say challenge is love saying things that people don't want to hear?

That doesn't seem loving.

Okay, there was a case in the news several years back.

There was a young man who got in his truck drunk, and he ended up killing four people while he was drunk.

He, of course, went on trial, and his lawyer made an interesting argument.

He claimed that his client suffered from something called affluenza.

That his family was affluent, and they didn't, they didn't uh they didn't give him guidance, and so this guy didn't know any better.

And the judge let him off with parole.

His mother, when asked, you know, what the heck?

I guess that was the question, she said, I just I just loved him so much I couldn't tell him no.

Let me ask you, did she love him well?

Did did her complete lack of accountability or boundaries amount to love?

No.

In fact, it it led to him being in a place where he killed four people.

That's not loving at all.

Let me ask you, is the judge not, is the judge being extremely lenient on him, loving?

No.

I would hope he would say.

Sometimes we need comfort.

When we are broken, we need comfort.

When we are comfortable, we need challenge.

That's what love looks like.

And Jesus gives us both.

We are to love as Jesus has loved.

We are to comfort.

The broken.

Let me tell you, something I've seen again and again is someone will get a dread diagnosis.

Their life will fall apart.

They will be diagnosed with some disease or something terrible happens.

They undergo bereavement or divorce or they or something like that.

And a lot of the time, what happens is they do it alone because people just don't know how to show up a lot of the time.

They say, Well, I know that someone close to them just died.

I feel like they need space right now.

And they end up alone.

This happens a great deal.

Or let's keep it real.

You know that friend whose life fell apart and they it's just not much fun to be around them.

Right?

Comforting the broken means showing up to comfort the broken.

That is part of loving as Jesus loved.

But also it's challenging the comfortable.

A lot of the time we think that challenge and love are opposed somehow.

I have actually heard the argument.

You know, people will, Christians will be looking, you know, see something in the Bible that makes them uncomfortable.

God is angry at sin or something like that, and they'll say, well, here's the thing.

I don't think that he really is angry at sin because God is more loving than me.

I'm not angry at that sin.

Therefore, surely God is less angry at it.

As if the lack of challenge is the mark of love.

As if, you know, giving a pass to the affluenza teen is the loving thing to do.

People need Jesus.

Comfortable people need to be challenged because they need Jesus just as much as the broken.

And Jesus has loved us like that.

He challenges us when we're comfortable, he comforts us when we're challeng when we're broken.

We need to love as Jesus has loved us.

And then another crucial part of what it means to love is the why of love.

Napoleon, uh Napoleon Bonaparte, who I guess we've all at least heard of, you may not know, he launched a uh a pretty gutsy uh campaign into the Holy Land in Egypt, which is really far from France.

That's impressive he got there.

Um and while he was uh going through what's now Israel in the town of Jaffa, a number of his troops contracted the bubonic plague, the big one.

Right?

And so they set up this hospital, and and there was a painting that was made of Napoleon going to this hospital to visit his men and even touching the source of one of his men.

Um he actually never went there and he ordered those troops poisoned.

But killer photo of, right?

Literally killer.

What was he doing?

He wanted to get a reputation as compassionate and loving, and so he commissioned the painting, even though he had these guys poisoned.

You see, he had no real love there.

Even if he had gone, he wanted to be seen doing it.

It was for his own reputation and his own greatness.

If we're honest, when we are conscious of being loving, there's a cost-benefit analysis going on in our heads.

Is this worth it?

Is this worth what it's taking from me?

And can I post it?

Can I post it in a real subtle way, where it doesn't look like I'm trying to bolster my reputation, but I totally want to.

We see Jesus doesn't love like that.

What does he do instead?

When we look at chapter 13, which we we looked at this in more detail last week, we see that Jesus loves us, not his reputation.

Look with me at chapter 13, verses 4 and 5.

It says that he rose, Jesus rose from supper, he laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist, waist.

Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

Now, what's going on here?

They've sat down to a dinner in which Jesus is the guest of honor, right?

It's the last supper, he's the big dog at the table, and what does he do?

He gets off, takes off his clothes, and he performs the lowest ranking job possible.

The washing of feet.

As we talked about last week, many rabbis said, No, no Jewish slave, we'll just wait a second for that, that'll be done.

It happens so often you stop noticing it.

But that that the washing of feet was such a demeaning task that you couldn't ask a Jewish slave do it, it had to be reserved for Gentiles, right?

And what does Jesus do?

He takes this task for himself.

And of course, it's not about washing their feet, it is about what he's gonna do for them on the cross.

Why?

Why does he do it?

It's because he has to, it's because they need it.

What does it cost him?

The answer is it costs him everything.

When you are loving someone without cost-benefit analysis, and no one sees you, and you're gonna lose on the deal, that is what love looks like.

That is how Jesus has loved you and me.

What does Jesus get out of dying for you and for me and everybody else?

I don't think he won on the deal.

You say, well, he got glory.

He was he was existing in heavenly glory before he ever came here.

He gains nothing but us.

That's all.

So that friend who's not doing well.

Yeah.

It's you're you're gonna give up your Thursday evening to go hang with someone who's a bummer.

That's love.

No one knows you did it.

It wasn't that fun.

You wish you had caught up on White Lotus or whatever show you guys watch.

I've never seen White Lotus.

It's really inappropriate, isn't it?

Right?

Who watches it?

There we go.

I haven't seen that one.

That's okay.

No judgment.

Or, you know, for those of you who have ever had a baby, babies don't appreciate anything.

Like you're getting up in the middle of the night and dealing with the stink and the this and the that and you're rocking them.

Have they ever thanked you?

No.

Do they even know you did it later?

They don't.

That's love.

That's love.

Why do you do it?

Because you love them.

Right?

How has Jesus loved us?

He loved us.

He doesn't love his reputation.

Yeah, he gave you another amen right there.

He's like, I don't care.

I'm getting up, I'm doing what I do.

We need to love as Jesus has loved us.

This is what Jesus says, marks out his people when we loved one another as he has loved us.

Now, if you've ever seen um the movie Selma, remember a few years back, or basically any civil rights movie, um, you are gonna there is a ready-made villain who was a real dude, a guy named George Wallace.

And uh George Wallace was the governor of Alabama who's uh who was famous for his campaign slogan, segregation, then, segregation now, segregation forever.

I don't know if that's how he talked, but that's how I imagine him talking.

And in 1972, George Wallace was uh running for president on the Democratic ticket.

It was a different time for the Democratic Party.

And his his platform was blatantly pro-racist, pro-segregation.

He was hoping to win the presidency based on pure racism.

And uh on one of his campaign stops in the city of Baltimore, when he was going up some steps into a building to make an appearance, uh, someone jumped out in front of him and shot him several times, point blank range.

Of course, he was rushed to the hospital and he was in critical condition.

But there was someone else who was on the campaign trail with him.

There was a woman named Shirley Chisholm.

Shirley Chisholm was also running for the Democratic nomination.

She was the first black woman in Congress.

And uh, and she was also the first black woman to run for president on a major party platform.

Um needless to say, they didn't see eye to eye.

But when she heard about what happened to George Wallace, she said, you know, I've got to leave the campaign trail and I've got to go visit George.

And the people around her said, Are you crazy?

Do you know what this will cost you?

There are gonna be financial backers that walk away from you, you're gonna lose supporters, also, you're not gonna show up to some campaign events that we planned.

This is nuts.

For him?

Why would you do that?

So Shirley did not listen to them because she was a devout Christian believer.

And so she flew to Baltimore and she went to the hospital.

There were no reporters present, we don't know what they said, but she, with no cameras present or anything, she walked into his hospital room to visit him.

And George Wallace, you know, probably on some decent painkillers at that point, looked up and he looked across the room and he said, Shirley Chisholm, is that you?

And she said, Yeah, it is, George.

And he said, Why would you visit me?

And we don't know what they said, but she sat and talked with them for a while.

Simply because she didn't think people should be treated like that.

After that, we don't know if it's directly because of Shirley, but it was certainly because, partly because of his brush with death.

But he he actually he never walked again, but he became a devout Christian also and a campaigner for civil rights.

He was completely a transformed man.

She loved him as Jesus had loved her.

She loved him though he was unlovely, she came to comfort the broken, and she did so against her self-interest.

That is how Jesus has loved us.

Please pray with me.

Lord, I pray that we could be empowered by how you have loved us, that we could be transformed by how you have loved us, that we would not just simply parrot vague notions about loving all people, but that it would be action, that we would comfort the broken and challenge the comfortable, that we would love the unlovely, that we would love without self interest, and that your people would be known for our love that looks just like the love of Jesus.

We pray these things from the depths of our heart in Jesus' name.

Amen.