The New Creation . . .

THE NEW COMMANDMENT

I give you a new commandment love one another; as I have loved you, so you are to love one another. If there is this love among you, then all will know that you are my disciples.—John 13:34-35

The abundant life that Jesus makes possible for mankind implies a newness and freshness that the world never knew before. Jesus came to make all things new. His work in men’s hearts makes for a new creation. As the apostle puts it: “When anyone is united to Christ, there is a new world; the old order has gone, and a new order has already begun” (2 Cor. 5:17). At the heart of the new order is the new commandment that Jesus gave his disciples.

The commandment is not new in the sense that there were no previous instructions about love, for we know that the Old Covenant scriptures are replete with such information. It is a new kind of love that he is talking about, a love that could be manifested only by the Christ himself. The Greek word kainos suggests newness in the sense of a more recent and fresh context for an old idea. It is like “new world” in the passage above, implying that once a man’s life is hid with Christ in God that the old world in which he has been living takes on an entirely new look. His job may be the same job, his family may be the same family, and his bank account the same bank account; but his personality has undergone such a transformation that his job, family, and money take on a freshness of meaning that he never before experienced.

This is what Jesus does to everything he touches. The commandment to love is not so much a command as it is his own example. It was new because by his life he gave it a freshness and meaning that it could never have had without him. It was certainly no legal command after the order of Moses. It takes its newness from Jesus’ statement “As I have loved you, so you are to love one another.” They needed no command as such, but only his majestic demonstration. Paul is talking in similar terms when he says: “About love for our brotherhood you need no words of mine, for you are yourselves taught by God to love one another” (1 Thess. 4:9). He is saying that learning Christian love is not a matter of words or commands, but by demonstration. God has manifested his love by the cross. Paul is pointing to the cross and saying “God loves like that!”

Jesus brought a new love into the world, qualitatively new. Not only was it faultless and perfect, but it reached out to man with the intention of making him whole, even when he himself is most unloving and undeserving. This is the light of the new world that Jesus illuminates and without that light it is as dark and hopeless as the old world.

Some commentators suggest that the new commandment that Jesus gives was intended only for his disciples, that there is no way for the rest of us to appreciate what Jesus is saying. This viewpoint is a reasonable one, for only the disciples were with Jesus personally, living with him daily and witnessing first hand the force of those words “As I have loved you...” We have all dreamed of being with Jesus in the same way Peter, James, and John were, to walk and talk with him, and to look into his face when he taught. It must have been a breathtaking experience to have been with the Master as he responded to the Pharisees, healed the sick, and fished with the disciples. To have been able to have said as you watched him, “I am in the presence of the Son of God himself,” would have been an unbearable thrill to the soul. We could not all be called to be apostles, and it is proper that their names should be inscribed upon the walls of the eternal city. And it just may be that the new commandment was for them in a way that it could never be for us. There was an aura about Jesus’ presence that profoundly effected people. Think what it must have been like to have lived with him! Surely his apostles knew his love in a way that reaches beyond the rest of us.

But we must not forget that in departing from this world he promised that we would not be left as orphans, but that the Holy Spirit would come to be with us and in us. Our bodies are the shrine for his indwelling. And the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Christ, which means that Jesus can be as real to us as he has ever been to anyone. The first gift of the Spirit is the gift of love, so the new commandment that Jesus gave to his apostles is for us also.

John himself was later writing to those, like ourselves, who had never known Jesus in the flesh, and he spoke to them of the new commandment: “It is a new command I am giving you—new in the sense that the darkness is passing and the real light already shines. Christ has made this true, and it is true in your own experience” (1 John 2:8).

It is true in your own experience, he says. This is when the new commandment has meaning, when the Master’s love flows through us into the lives of others. The darkness of hate, distrust, fear, and envy fades, and “the real light” of love takes over. Love is thus the answer to our fractured and divided brotherhood. We do indeed need an arbiter to preside over our efforts to unite, and that arbiter must be the new commandment to love one another as Jesus loves us. This is what Paul is saying in Col. 3:14-15: “To crown all, there must be love, to bind all together and complete the whole. Let Christ’s peace be arbiter in your hearts; to this peace you were called as members of a single body.”

Some are complaining that there must be a recognized authority to settle the matters upon which we are divided. This is of course the Bible, we are told, which for all practical purposes comes to mean each one’s own interpretation of the Bible. It is the Bible itself that tells us what the recognized authority should be. An arbiter is one “having absolute power of judging and determining,” to quote Webster. And Paul makes it clear what that arbiter is: “Let Christ’s peace be arbiter in your hearts.”

So divided are we that an observer might suppose that God had commanded us to divide. But we all know that he has rather called us into “a single body,” and in the above passage the apostle observes that God has also called us to peace. These are the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, and peace, and they are God’s way of making the body of Christ whole again.

The new commandment is the way from death to life. As 1 John 3:14 puts it: “We for our part have crossed over from death to life; this we know, because we love our brothers.” John goes on to say that the man that does not love his brother is yet in the realm of darkness. The darkness that knows no love is the darkness that has long kept us a divided people.

As important as anything else about the new commandment is that obedience to it would serve as a testimony to the world that the disciples were truly followers of the Christ. It is as if Jesus were saying that if they loved each other everything else would take care of itself. Their love would be a proclamation to the world that Jesus does indeed abide in his people. Love can do what orthodoxy can never do.

It was so with the primitive Christians. Their love for each other was the badge of their discipleship. There is a mystery to Christian love, a bond that the disciples themselves can understand, but which is incomprehensible to the world. Yet the power of the mystery is evident even to the stranger. The world may not understand the love, but they recognize it when it is manifest in human hearts. Julian, who scoffed at Christianity, once remarked: “Their master has implanted the belief in them that they are all brethren,” and another outsider, Minucius Felix was amazed that “They love each other even without being acquainted with each other.” It was a well-known pagan remark about the Christians in Rome: “These miserable creatures, how they love one another!”

Perhaps we can say that the new commandment is new because it never grows old. It will do for our generation what it has always done when properly honored. We have been guilty of insisting upon law in a loveless manner, while much of the world around us has been insisting upon love in a lawless manner. The new commandment should set us straight.—the Editor