34 "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
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Jesus said, "A new command I give you: Love one another." Jesus spoke this new commandment at the Last Supper when he was with his disciples. He speaks it to us, too. Jesus wants us, as a Christian community, to love one another. Jesus is not asking you here to love your enemy or to be a neighbor to some stranger, but asking you to love the people whom you know and really do love in your hearts anyway. It sounds so obvious. I love you, then you love me and I love you in return. And so it grows and grows. It is not duty or obligation; we do not keep score and wonder whose turn it is to love the other next. It might come easy or sometimes it might be hard or inconvenient. It may be spontaneous, or it might take a lot of planning. It may be a joy, or it might be a chore or something we really do not want to do, but we do it because of love.
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What does it mean to "love one another"? We start by being nice to each other, being kind, being respectful, being helpful. Of course. But Jesus had a different measure for this love. It was not "Love your neighbor as yourself," but rather, "You must love one another as I have loved you." We do not measure this love according to our weak love and our sinful self-love, but rather we measure it according to the love of Jesus. Jesus said, "as I have loved you." How did Jesus love us? First, he taught people about the Kingdom of God. When we tell other people about Jesus, it shows that we love them so much that we want them to have eternal life. Second, Jesus loved people so much that he healed people and raised the dead. We show that love when we help people who are suffering, and if we do not have the power to raise the dead, we do have limited resources to help people have a better life, for example, gifts to charity and the like. And third, Jesus loved us when he died on the cross to forgive our sins. So, we love others the same way that Jesus did when, [A] we forgive other people from our hearts, and [B] when we die for other people.
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That is the ultimate love. Later that same evening during the Last Supper, Jesus repeated this new command and said, "12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." (John 15: 12-13). This is the ultimate mutual love: that we die for each other. We give our lives to each other. We die that the other person might live. We live that the other person might live. And it is this dying and living for the other person that makes us really alive because the other person at the same time is dying and living for us. They give us new life. It is mutual. Why? Because that is the way Jesus loves us, he lived and died and rose again for us so that we might have abundant life. As Jesus said, "I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly" ["to the full" NIV] (John 10:10).
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Does this new command to love one another become just another impossible law for us to try to keep? Let us face it: we don't always love God with all our hearts, we do not always love our neighbor as ourselves, and we seldom love our enemies. So, can we really love one another even though we try to be nice to each other in our church? Where is the power to love? The power is in Jesus. In our Gospel lesson, we read these words, "As I have loved you, so you must love one another." But it can also be translated this way, "I have loved you in order that you also love one another." "I have loved you so as you love one another." The love of God gives us the power to love. And so this is not just another love commandment that is impossible to keep. It is power so that we can love. Jesus loved us in order that we might love.
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Jesus said, "35 By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." Love is the mark of a Christian, because love is the mark of Jesus. I do not need to go into detail now in the sermon about how we as Okinawa Lutheran Church should love one another. We will pray about it, we will discuss it in the Church council meeting; we will chat about it and live it out in our fellowship time. We will celebrate it in the Lord's Supper.
Amen.