“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Let it be fixed in your mind that the passage above was spoken by Jesus in the same room on the same night as the “foot washing” that we discussed yesterday! This most repeated “one another” in the New Testament was made real. Just below the surface is the word Jesus uses for “love” in this passage. The original word “agape” was not commonly used in Ancient Greek writings. The Jewish translators of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek used this obscure word to represent God’s love exclusively, differentiating it from family, friendship, and sexual types of love. Jesus in His ministry humanized God’s love and made it real to His audience. This is significant on so many levels – for example, when John uses the word “love” in 1 John 4:7-16:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.

Every time John uses the word “love” in this passage, he’s using the word Jesus snatched from obscurity and infused with foot-washing meaning… agape. Nothing could be clearer from Scripture, that the very nature of God is this selfless, others serving, 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 kind of character, mindset, and behavior. 

What is the source of this “agape” in our lives? 

How do we integrate practical agape into our daily lives? 

Why would Jesus call it a “command” in John 13?