A New Mandate

A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love another. John 13:35

I have had problems with this verse. The commandment to love one another was well-known. It was written centuries before Christ and recorded in the Old Testament in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

And when the rich young ruler came to Christ, loving your neighbor as yourself was one of the commandments Christ mentioned to him and he was already familiar with.

And when the Pharisees tested Christ by asking which are the greatest commandments, Christ answered them:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and the greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.

All the Jews knew about those commandments. So why did Christ refer to a "new commandment"? This has bothered me for a while.

James Montgomery Boice, in his commentary on John tells us this:

The "New mandate" Christ spoke of raised the older commandments to an extraordinary new level and gave them an entirely new significance.

1. In the first place, the command to love had a new object. The command in Leviticus declares that Jews are to love their neighbors, who would be Jewish neighbors. In Christ's command the relationship is spiritual, for the neighbor in any believer in Jesus. (Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan?)

This also makes it unlimited. Jesus tells the disciples that evidence of this great love would be a witness to the unbelieving world.

And, as Jesus showed us, it was not to be withheld from non-believers. The Jews had no problem knowing who their neighbors were. Jews were to be loved and Gentiles were not to be loved. That was an easy distinction.

But when Christ made it a spiritual issue it became much wider.
Christ's death opened the way for everyone -- no matter what nation, what language, what race -- to receive the gospel message. So we are to love everyone, with that new kind of love -- because the door is open for all to enter into God's family.

2. Not only is the "new Mandate" showing a new object, it is to be exercised according to a new measure.

What did love mean to the Jews? A feeling of good will? A need to protect and watch out for your neighbor? Yes, and much more, but not anything like the degree to which Christ raised it. God's measure of love was that the Creator God, Sovereign of the Universe, would take a lowly human form, be humiliated and suffer and die a gruesome, horrible death -- for the ungodly, for those who humiliated and tortured Him!

"This is love," John wrote later, "not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be an atoning sacrifice for our sin."

The Jews, when they loved their neighbors, were loved in return. That's not the measure for the Christian. We are to love as Christ loved us -- whether or not we are loved in return.

3. The third difference in this "new mandate," was that, even though it would be impossible to love everyone as we should, we have access to a new power. Though we know we cannot ever love God and our neighbors as we ought, we can rely on the new power of the Holy Spirit to love God and our neighbors by pouring God's love into our hearts and directing it outwards
into the world.

Jesus is our prime example of this. He had just washed His disciples feet. He had been a picture of perfect humility.

So in these ways, Christ's 'new mandate' took the old law and raised
it to a higher level.

And the level He took it to was so much higher that it was, in reality, a New Mandate.