Love for each other

Twice in John 15, verses 12 and 17, Jesus says, “This is my command: Love each other,” because, as Jesus goes on to show, the disciples’ love for each other would make the Father’s love known. 

That’s why the Father sent Jesus to gather a group of disciples, because by Jesus loving them with the Father’s love (15:9) and teaching them the Father’s words (17:8) they’d come to know the Father and his love themselves (17:26).

At the end of his human life Jesus could then say to his Father in John 17:22, “I have given (those you gave me out of the world, verse 6) the glory you gave me,” the “glory” being his Father’s love (24). So by loving the disciples like his Father loved him, Jesus had given them a jolly good dose of what the Father’s love was like. 

But why? Why did his disciples need to experience the Father’s love? Because, as Jesus explained in the second part of verse 22, “that they may be one as we are one.” Or, “that they come to love each other as you and me, Father, love each other.” So in Jesus loving his disciples with the same love his Father had for him, they then would love each other with that same love too.  

And what was the purpose of that? Jesus answers that in verse 23: it would “let the world know that you (Father) sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” It would be the love of the disciples for each other that would make it clear to the world why the Father had sent Jesus. 

He was sent by the Father to provide visible evidence of the Father’s love. How? By loving his disciples with the same love his Father had for him. This was the Father’s brilliant way of making his love known – by sending Jesus to love some disciples with his Fatherly love first, so that they would pick up on that love and love each other in the same way. And in so doing they would then provide visible evidence of the Father’s love all through the ages too. 

But how would the disciples pick up on the Father’s love through the ages without Jesus present with them? Jesus answered that in John 14:18 with a promise: “I will come to you”….(next blog)