John 13:33-35

“ My little children, yet a little while I am with you; you will seek me, and, as I said to the Jews: Whither I go, you cannot come, so now I say to you. 34. I give you a new commandment, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. 35. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another. ”

The term of tenderness, τεκνία, my little children, is found nowhere else in our Gospels; it is the soon of John 13:32, implying the near separation, which suggests it to Him. The disciples appear to Him as children whom He is about to leave as orphans on the earth. What a void in their life is that which will result from the disappearance of Jesus! He Himself feels, in all its vividness, what they will experience. “ You will seek me; you will wish to rejoin me.” And for Himself, how desirous He must be to carry them away immediately with Himself into the divine world which He is about to enter again! But what He had declared to the Jews six months before (John 7:34, John 8:21) is still for the moment applicable to the disciples: they are not ready to follow Him. Only there is this difference between them and the Jews, that for them this impossibility is merely temporary: comp. John 14:3: “ I will take you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also,” while Jesus said to the Jews: “You shall die in your sins.” For the Jews the obstacle of the natural condemnation, which faith alone could have removed, will continue for ever by reason of their unbelief. As to the disciples, while waiting till they shall rejoin Him, He leaves to them a duty which will be at the same time their consolation; the one which results from their new situation and which is indicated in John 13:34: the duty of loving one another. It is by loving each other that they will supply the outward absence of Him who has loved them so tenderly.

The expression ἐντολὴ καινή, new commandment, has embarrassed the interpreters, because the Old Testament already commanded that one should love one's neighbor as oneself (Lev 19:18) and because it does not seem possible to love more than this. Or must we say, with Knapp, in his celebrated dissertation on this subject, and, as it seems, also with Reuss and Weiss, that Jesus, by His example and His word, teaches us to love our neighbor more than ourselves? This thought is more specious than just. Or must we give to the word καινή here an extraordinary meaning, such as illustrious (Wolf), ever new (Olshausen), renewed (Calvin), renewing the man (Augustine), unexpected (Semler), the last (Heumann)?

Nothing of all this is necessary. The entirely new character of Christian love results, in the first place, in an outward way from the circle in which it is exercised: one another; this love applies not to all the human family in general, like the law of affection written on the conscience, nor, more specially, to members of the Israelite nation, like the commandment in Leviticus; it embraces all those whom the common faith in Jesus and the love of which they are the object on His part unite. But the term new goes yet far deeper than this: it is a love new in its very nature: it starts from an altogether new centre of life and affection. The love of the Jew for the Jew arose from the fact that Jehovah was the God of both and had chosen them both in Abraham; every Israelite became for every other, through this common blessing, like a second self. Jesus brought into the world and testified to His own a love specifically different from any love which had appeared until then, that which attaches itself to the human personality in order to save it. From this new hearth there springs forth the flame of an affection essentially different from any that the world knew under this name before. In Christ: this is the explanation of the word new. It is a family affection, and the family is born at this hour; comp. 1 John 2:8.

It is impossible for me to regard the words: as I have loved you, as Meyer, Luthardt, Weiss and Keil do, as depending on this first clause: that you love one another. The repetition of these last words at the end of the verse thus becomes useless. Jesus begins by saying: that you love one another; then, taking up this command with a new emphasis, He adds to it, at this time, the characteristic definition: “I mean: that, as I have loved you, you should also love one another.” Comp. in John 17:21 the same construction exactly. Καθώς, as, indicates more than a simple comparison (ὥσπερ); it designates a conformity. The love which unites believers among themselves is of the same nature as that which Jesus testifies to the believer (John 10:15); each one, so to speak, loves his brother with the love with which Jesus loves both him and this brother.

To the obligation resulting from the words: as I have loved you, Jesus adds the loftiest motive, that of His glory. For him who has felt himself beloved by Him, there can be no motive more pressing. ᾿Εμοί has perhaps more force as a dative than as a nominative plural: disciples belonging to me, the new Master. The history of the primitive Church realized this promise of Jesus: “They loved one another, even before knowing one another,” said Minutius Felix of the Christians; and the scoffing Lucian said: “Their Master has made them believe that they are all brethren.”

Here begins a series of questions which were all raised in the hearts of the disciples by the thought of the threatened separation. The first is quite naturally this: Is there no means of avoiding this separation, even though temporary? It is Peter, the boldest of all, who makes himself the organ of this desire, which is incompatible with the words of Jesus (John 13:33).