New Command: Why NEW?
The Following is the Script for this Video:
The words of Jesus’s can puzzle us. Sometimes we have to wrestle with his meaning. For example, in John 13:34, he issues a command that calls NEW: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
Right away two questions rush to mind. First, what makes this command “new”? The love-your-neighbor command was 15 centuries old. Jesus himself had called it the second-greatest commandment. So isn’t this “new” one more like a recycled command? Second question: “What makes this new command important?” What gives it its “weight”?
To get started, let’s explore that first question: What makes this command “new”? Our first clue: the word “new” itself. There’s “new” and then there’s “new.” Suppose I tell you, “We just signed the papers for our new house.” Am I saying we bought a brand-new house? Or is it a lived-in house that’s new to us? In English, we can use our word “new” to cover each idea.
Not so in biblical Greek. If the builders had just finished the house, you could say, “We just signed the papers for our NEOS (nay-ose_house.” We are the first to live in it. But if the house was built a hundred years ago, you’d likely say, “We just signed the papers for our KAINOS (kai-nos) house.” The house itself is not new. The newness is in the ownership.
NEOS and KAINOS (kai-nos) can overlap. But NEOS generally describes something new in time; it has just appeared on the scene. KAINOS, on the other hand, refers to a newness in arrangement, nature or quality—such as new ownership of that old house. Jesus’s new command is KAINOS—new in the sense that it calls for an arrangement not seen in the existing love command. To identify that arrangement, let’s compare the love command of Leviticus with new command of Jesus.
First, Leviticus 19:18—“Love your neighbor as yourself.” And beside it, John 13:34—“Love one another. Just as I have loved you." For our comparison, let’s ask “Love Who?” Leviticus names neighbors as the objects of our love. By contrast, over in Jesus’s KAINOS command, we are to love “one another.”
The command to love neighbor covers everyone. It includes those who turn toward Jesus and those who turn away from him. All human beings are made in God’s image, and we are to love them as we love ourselves. Atheists, Christians, pleasant people, unpleasant people—the whole lot of us. This command still holds.
By contrast, the command to love one another includes a much smaller group—just those in God’s family through faith in Jesus. The new command embraces Christians outside our own denominations, political parties, or societal classes. In short, everyone in the body of Christ.
To continue our comparison, we’ll ask: “Love How?” In Leviticus, the standard for the love is “as yourself.” But in John, the standard for love is “as Jesus loves us.” How, then, do we love ourselves? We look out for our own welfare. We aim to provide for and protect ourselves.
By contrast, the standard for loving one another is far more costly: to love as Jesus has loved us. How does he love us? By serving us in self-emptying ways. By sacrificing himself for us on the cross. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”
Jesus’s command, then, is KAINOS new in two ways: it names new recipients of the love and it lays down a new standard for the loving.
But now for our second question: Why does all this matter? What makes this new command important?
We’ll begin at the very center with the Trinity. Let these arrows picture how God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit relate to each other. They have always lived in perfect, out-reaching, self-giving love. All members of the Trinity pour themselves out for and into each other.
Amazingly, this divine Trinity chooses to create something outside themselves—a physical creation. Into it, they can pour this beautiful, endlessly generous love. God intends that human beings made in his image will carry his self-giving love into every square inch of our planet.
But instead, we turn inward. Rather than being others-centered, we become self-centered. Our sin suddenly turns planet earth dark with sin and death. The situation looks hopeless. And yet, God—with his outgoing, self-giving nature—remains unchanged So in an act of great sacrifice, he sends his Son into the darkened world. Jesus empties himself to come and live in a human body in which he dies to remove our sin and reunite us with our Creator.
God still wants his self-emptying love to fill the rest of his Creation. To accomplish that, he plants little colonies of his renewed image-bearers throughout the darkened earth. They carry within them God’s own outgoing, self-sacrificing life. And they are to show and tell the Good News that God has sent his Son, Jesus, into the world to rescue us from sin and ruin.
Even as they model self-giving love with one another, these colonies radiate neighbor-love out into the world. “Every time we get the chance, let us work for the benefit of all, starting with the people closest to us in the community of faith.”
But in world so full of lies and false teachers, what will it take to make this gospel message believable? How can skeptical people weigh whether we really represent Jesus? By watching us. Do we really love each other as Jesus loves us.
Jesus explains the importance of his new command in the verse that follows it: “By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” With these words, Jesus handed the world and its skeptics the tools they need—in effect, the measuring tape, the microscope, the balance scales—to evaluate whether we are his authentic witnesses.
In the end, our witnessing stands or falls on the integrity of this foundation. Measured by this love-one-another-as-Jesus-loves-us standard, how are we measuring up? Is our one-anothering love visible enough, genuine enough, to convince skeptics that we really are following Jesus? Does what we are doing authenticate what we are saying?
Ch. 7 Community: Finding and Serving Fellow Believers
“As you face on-the-job pressures, you and other Christians there need more than a smile and nod on the weekend from believers you hardly know. If possible, you need to find and network with each other at work. Daniel did.”
