John 13:31-35

Hey, everybody.

Thanks for being with us.

Appreciate you joining us on this Wednesday as we continue

here in the Gospel of John, we are in the 13th chapter,

near the end of it and a couple of,

a couple of transition pieces, but really, important,

significant things happen in both of these short passages.

Just read them one at a time.

I'll jump in here at verse 31, and then we'll come back and discuss it.

When he had gone out, when Judas had gone

out, Jesus said,

Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.

If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify Him in himself

and will glorify him at once.

Little children, I'm only with you a little longer.

You will look for me.

And as I said to the Jews, I now say to you,

where I am going, you cannot come.

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another,

just as I have loved you.

You should also love one another.

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.

If you have love for one another.

So. Remember

that yesterday Jesus had identified Judas as the betrayer, at least

to some small subset of the disciples, possibly even just the one.

And, Judas had left.

Now we have Jesus beginning a kind of long discourse with the disciples.

And here these words,

that in John,

John never wants us to miss the point.

So he often,

you know, he often stated over and over again.

But Jesus says.

Yes, the Son of Man has been glorified and been glorified in him and glorified.

And then there's more glory, and he's glorify him again.

The the point is, I think

that,

God is about to be glorified

and God is about to glorify Jesus.

And in John that's always referenced to the cross and the resurrection.

The to be glorified

is to reveal the work of God, what God is doing.

And we now are on the verge of that happening.

And so, then Jesus, a little less

cryptically says, I'm with you only a little longer.

You will look for me.

And as I said, where I'm going, you cannot follow.

You cannot come and,

this does a couple of things, I suppose.

Micah one, it introduces the idea of separation. It

I think literally, literally, it also,

cast Jesus out on an island a little bit,

and we begin to see Jesus

separate himself, not in the sense of relationally,

but in the sense of his mission, his work that only he can accomplish.

And this idea that he's about to undertake this thing on his own.

And the disciples, though they will benefit from it,

they will not be able to take part in it, as he is the only one.

And I mean, that's we've seen that before, but I think maybe

that's part of the function.

And it's also connected to that idea of glory, I think,

because realistically, what Jesus does and therefore represents in John

is someone who comes to do something on

behalf of the disciples that very clearly the disciples could do for themselves.

And I agree with you, Clint,

that there's a way in which we do get tongue tied, reading.

Or maybe I tied reading the the text here in John,

but I think there is something really significant in this idea.

The Son of Man is glorified.

God's glorified in him.

If God's been glorified in him,

then God will also glorify Him in Himself and will glorify him at once.

What I love about John is that John imbues

the text with the mystery that from the very start,

Jesus is is not someone who can easily be compressed down into one thing.

And the language itself keeps us from oversimplifying

who Jesus is into the miracle worker.

Or this the good teacher or the radical.

You know, all of these ways that he's been read historically.

I think John Clint really resists that.

John presents Jesus as someone who, at the very delivery of his teaching,

is impossible to pin down. Exactly.

There's a mystery embedded inside of it.

And yes, all this glorifying, I'll be honest.

Sometimes people, they take it too far.

They read a book like John and they get caught on,

you know, distant sort of rabbit trails, and it takes them far afield

from the point that John's trying to make here.

I think relatively simply, the point is Jesus is saying

that if you see me, you see God glorified.

If you see God glorified, you see God's work in the world.

And that's the revelation that that's the thing that God is doing.

And Jesus is God is making Jesus great.

And Jesus is therefore making God great.

And mysteriously, somehow God and Jesus are connected in this

this amazing, mysterious, incarnational kind of way.

And we're not supposed to be able to pin it down.

I think that's not that

John needs a defense, but I just think we're going to see a lot more of this

to come where John presents the teachings of Jesus

in some very flowery language, with a lot of circling back around.

It's really easy, I think, to get caught up in that

and maybe frustrated by that, but at its best I think we could see in it.

John resisting oversimplification.

This is who Jesus is. It's mysterious.

And that's what the gospel is.

The revelation is mysterious.

And that's not a weakness. That's a strength.

I think you also can read these words relationally, Michael.

I mean, it's

you could

you could make a case and I think a reasonable case

that when it comes to a doctrine like the Trinity, there's not that's not

explicitly stated in the gospel,

but it is inferred from passages like this.

And I think we see evidence here that

what God experiences,

Jesus experiences that there is a,

a symbiosis here.

There's a connection here in which the what,

what is glorifying to one includes the other

that that they are together, that they are related,

connected and.

In that we begin

to lay the groundwork for some of our theological understanding

that comes well after the writing of the gospel

of the mysterious doctrines, in which we could say that

God is three and one, that Jesus is two natures, but one man.

All those things that will be fleshed out later

have their kind of origin story in these kind of cryptic passages,

and I, I think that, you know, that gives these passages

a complexity, but also a deep value, because ultimately

they're going to point us in new ways of understanding the gospel.

And speaking of new, this last part of the passage is probably the best known.

I give you a new commandment that you love one another.

The word commandment in Latin is mandate.

If you've ever wondered about the holiday or the church day Maundy Thursday,

the Thursday before Easter that is taken from this exact phrase,

I give you a new commandment, a new mandate, man.

The mandate in English.

Maundy Thursday, the Thursday of the new command, and it's

I suppose we've heard Jesus say things like this.

So maybe it's less

compelling or novel to us.

But this these are stunning words, and there's a great depth here

that my commandment and it's a new commandment,

that you love one another as I have loved you,

you should love one another.

That call

to the discipline and the character

and the practice of love is a clarion call.

Its signature of Christian faith.

And, I think John does us a wonderful service.

By as complicated as the front part of this passage may be, the back part

is that simple, at least to understand

now, to do incredibly difficult,

but to understand

very easy.

We are called as the people of Christ

to show love, to love one another, to love each other.

And this is the new way of life that Jesus calls his disciples to. And

it's just,

it's just that important that it's, well said.

It's I think this is an incredibly,

incredibly meaningful

text for, for all people who would call themselves Christian.

So it's a foundational text.

I think the temptation is that you read words like this

in verse 34 and 35 and you say, well, there's the teaching.

And you think that 31 through 33 is somehow just disconnected,

like John sort of, you know, got stuck on repeat or something.

And I want to be clear, these are connected,

that the revelation of God, the glory of Jesus

Christ, is connected to the command to love one another.

And I point I want to make there is remember this theme of love.

Clint has been in John this entire time.

John 316 For God, so what he loved the world.

So what?

So how did God love? He sent his only son.

And it goes on to talk about the revelation of that son

and what that means.

I think here, this idea

that God is glorified, that Jesus Christ is the representation

and revelation of God's will and plan for the world, that that is intrinsically,

inseparably connected to this idea of loving one another.

Because the way that Jesus reveals God's love, the way that Jesus has

glorified, is through self-giving on the cross,

is through giving up his through self-emptying.

And so what we discover here

is the center of the Christian faith, because of who Jesus is.

Right? And that's that's unbelievably important.

This is not because it's just a good moral idea.

It's not just simply because Jesus taught us this,

and it's a really good practice that all of us should put as best practice

in our life.

With the case that John is making here, is that the

the revelation of God, the glorification of God that is intrinsically caught up

in this mysterious relationship, therefore leads us as the people of God,

to practice and live out that faith in a way that loves one another.

How will we be known?

We'll be known by our love.

How will we be connected to the one who we follow?

Because we represent his love in the world, right?

And so, once again, a thing

that was relational and mysterious about God's relationships.

I think now we begin to see has impact on our relationships.

And John is going to have an unbelievably

poignant emphasis upon love throughout the rest of this book.

And we get some of that in the the first, second, third John,

Epistle letters as well, this kind of just robust under standing

of what it means when one encounters Jesus, one

by definition is transformed and renewed in love.

That I don't think, Clint, that John could conceive of a world

in which a person encountered the source of love,

and that they did not live out that experience in the world.

I just don't know that someone who

can get caught up in the glory of God, as John describes

here in Jesus's own teaching, could then therefore be

someone who goes out and does damage to their neighbor,

someone who goes out and bites, someone that they are a family member.

I just that it's impossible to be a member of the faith

and to live differently than the source of that faith.

And I think John's making that case compellingly in this section.

So I don't always know what to do with the Gospel of John,

but these are the kind of passages that I just, I love and hold on to

and kind of try to, you know, mine out and understand.

And so here we have this concept of love,

and it is foundational.

I give you a new commandment.

In other words, Jesus, having established his authority in this gospel,

says to the disciples, I'm now going to command you of something.

I'm I'm going to set a law before you

that you love one another.

And then

he goes on to say that that love

should be as he's defined it,

as I have loved you, so you should love one another.

Now, they don't yet know what that means.

They've not witnessed the cross.

They've not witnessed the resurrection and the ascension.

But what that means for us

is that we are not talking as disciples of Jesus about love.

That is just being nice to people, just sort of, you know, warm fuzzies.

This is this is,

a love that is defined by the life of Jesus Christ.

It is a love that we see in the one that we follow.

And because that's true,

we get this last verse, which I, personally is my favorite.

I think I find the most powerful by this.

Everyone will know that you are my disciples

if you have love for one another.

So if Christians are going to be known for a thing,

if Christians are going to be identified as Christians

because of something they do, it should not be

church wearing cross,

boycotting certain products, doing this or not doing that.

All of those things may have their place, but at the at the very core,

the foundational identity we receive

is to be those who love one another,

that this is the defining characteristic

of what it means to follow Jesus, that we are committed

and disciplined and empowered to love one another

and if we are going to be known for something,

it should be how we practice

that, how we love others.

And that again, is just this.

This foundational call to the faith.

And now is that everything it means to be Christian?

No, no, of course not.

But in this gospel, as we approach the pinnacle, the climax of the gospel,

we are going to run into this word more and more.

As Jesus has loved us, we are to love one another.

And not only that, that's how people should know that we love Jesus

in the first place by our disposition toward others.

That's a miracle.

That's about as challenging a call to the faith as I think you could find. The

sort of

horizon that this opens, if you let me say it that way,

I think is really challenging for the church, because

we, for generations upon generations, every generation

waiting for the return of Christ finds

ourselves tempted to define ourself

by by a myriad of things, whether in our culture or in our time.

But when Jesus says this, it's not only in red letters.

It's not only a command which we have elsewhere.

Jesus literally explicitly says A new command that I give

you love one another, and may that love exist in such a way that others

will actually recognize my followers based upon the way that you love one another.

If you let that sink in, it is equally convicting and inspiring.

It's equally demanding, and it is equally gracious

because ultimately, and I think you're going to want to make sure to join us

for our study tomorrow, because this text that's going to come

next may seem disconnected,

but there's a kind of grace in even seeing Peter's denial,

which we're going to find tomorrow, that because Jesus knows

that those who follow him will not be able to give up

like he's giving up with the perfection, with the care, with us.

The other self-giving of Jesus's willingness to die for us.

Jesus knows that we are not going to achieve perfectly,

but yet Jesus wants us to follow the command

that our love is so committed and disciplined and so intentional

that our definition and our identification in the world

will be connected to the perception of how we do that with one another.

And I'll tell you what, Clint.

There's a lot of things that

it means to be Christian, but no one graduates from this school.

No one graduates out from this task.

This is a fundamental core of the faith that we need to return

to every day of our life, because we are always intrinsically tempted

to put ourself in the seat of judgment, whether that's over our self or others.

And the truth is, Jesus's command is to love one another,

and one can only do that when we recognize,

absorb, and seek to live out the kind of self-giving that Jesus demonstrates.

It's his love that we seek to emulate in our lives.

And somehow, mysteriously, Jesus empowers us to do that more and more

the more that we enter into that discipline to habit,

but that this is so important, and yet it's just the tip of an iceberg

in John, of the kind of love that he's portraying Jesus having.

I think that,

you know, one way to to sort of consider this, Michael, is to say

if you asked people of faith

how Christian were you today?

How, how, how would you evaluate your faithfulness today?

It's interesting that Jesus calls this a commandment

because our minds might instinctively go to, yeah, did I swear today?

What did I look at on the computer today?

Was I, was I truthful to people?

Was I kind to people?

Did I keep commandments?

Did I break commandments? How did I spend my money?

We we would probably instantly consider

a list of behaviors and what we did or didn't do.

And yet this commandment is is

single minded, and it's focused to say

that one way a person could and arguably

should answer that question is to say,

did I show others love today

how how Christian I was

is directly related to how loving I was.

Now, could we have lots of conversations trying to spell that out?

Sure, we definitely could.

But at at its heart.

Our answer to the question of how

well we're following Jesus is inseparably tied to how well

we're loving others and I, we don't need to beat that in the ground.

We got a little bit to cover here, but this is

this is at the heart of the gospel and certainly the heart of this gospel.

Undoubtedly.

Because it's the heart of the of the one who this gospel seeking to point us to.

And I think, friends, that's

that's really where we really pause the conversation here today.

I think that I certainly hope if you found this,

conversation helpful, you give it a like

do subscribe though, because I think what

we're going to discover as we make our way forward, this Jesus has.

When Jesus talks about love, he's not talking about

the greeting card kind of love that pervades our society.

Jesus is talking about, a decision that's made and a commitment that is followed.

And what we're going to discover is Jesus is aware of our fallenness

and brokenness and our inability to love in the way that he does.

And I just think, I hope you'll join us as we begin to see how perfect

Jesus is in this work, and how much grace and freedom that has been given to us

as we seek to live it out in the world that we've been called to be witnesses to.

Glad to have you with us. We'll see you all tomorrow. Thanks, everybody.