- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
The New Commandment.
By Alexander Maclaren.
“My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15 v12-13).
Four headings are suggested to me by our text:
The Obligation.
The two ideas of commandment and love do not go well together. You cannot pump up love to order, and if you try you generally produce sentimental hypocrisy, hollow and unreal. But whilst that is true, and whilst it seems strange to say that we are commanded to love, still we can do a great deal, directly and indirectly, for the cultivation and strengthening of any emotion. Our feelings towards other Christians are largely under our own control and therefore are fitting subjects for commandment.
Our Lord lays down the obligation upon all Christians of cherishing a kind and loving regard to all who find their place within the circle of His Church. It is an obligation because He commands it. He puts Himself here in the position of the absolute Lawgiver, who has the right of entire control over our affections and hearts. And it is further obligatory because such an attitude is the only fitting expression of the mutual relationship of Christians through their common relationship to Him.
Is the present condition of Christendom, our attitudes to one another in the various churches and communions of our own and other lands, the sort of thing that Jesus Christ meant? We are bound, by His command, to love every one that loves Jesus. It does not matter that they may not hold to your theology, never mind if they are ignorant and narrow compared to you, never mind that your outlook may be entirely unlike theirs. Never mind that you are rich and they are poor, or you poor and they rich. Let all these grounds of union or separation be relinquished and let us recognise this, that the children of the Father are brethren.
The Sufficiency.
Our Lord had been speaking in previous verses about keeping His commands. Now He gathers them all up into one. “My command is this: Love each other.” All duties to our fellows, and to our brethren, are summed up in this one word “love”.
Where the heart is right the conduct will be right. Love will soften the tones, will instinctively teach what we ought to be and do, will take the bitterness from opposition and diversity, will make even rebuke gentle. If the heart be right all else will be right and if love is lacking, nothing will be right. You cannot help anybody if you do not love. You cannot do any good in the world unless you have love in your heart. Without love your behaviour and teaching will be profitless. The one thing that is required to bind Christians together is love.
As Jesus left His little flock of followers, He gave them no further instruction. He did not talk to them about institutions and organizations, about orders of the ministry and sacraments, of Church policy and the like. He knew that all that would come. His one commandment was, “Love each other”, that will make you wise. The one thing needful was that they should be knit together as true imitators of His life. Love was sufficient as their law and as their guide.
The Pattern.
“As I have loved you. Greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Christ sets Himself forward, as He does in all aspects of human conduct and character, as being the ideal for them all. He says, in effect, ‘I am the embodiment of all that love ought to be. You cannot get beyond Me, nor have anything more pure, more deep, more self-sacrificing, more perfect, than the love which I have for you’.
But the pattern He commands for us is even greater than appears at first sight. A verse or two before our Lord had said, “As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you”. Now He says, “Love each other as I have loved you”. There stand the three, the Father, the Son and the disciple. The Son in the midst receives and transmits the Father’s love to the disciple, and the disciple is to love his fellows, in the same deep way that the Father loved the Son. God is love, and the way in which we can be like God is to love. In all our other attitudes to Him we depend rather than copy. His fulness is met by our emptiness, His giving by our receiving, His faithfulness by our faith, His command by our obedience. But here it is not a case of dependence but of similarity. My faith answers God’s gift to me, but my love is to be like God’s love, “Be imitators of God as beloved children”, and having received that love into your hearts send it out, “live in love as God has loved us”.
But then our Lord, in a very wonderful way, sets out the very central point of His work, even His death upon the Cross for us, as being the pattern to which our poor affection ought to aspire, and to which it must be conformed. Our Lord is not speaking here of His death for us, nor of the issues which depend upon it, and upon it alone, the redemption and salvation of the world. He is not speaking either, of the unique sense in which He lays down His life for us, His friends and brethren, as none other can do. He is speaking about it in its aspect of being a voluntary surrender for the good of those whom He loved, and that, He tells us, that and nothing else, is the true pattern and model, towards which all our love is to aspire. The heart of love that He commands is self-sacrifice, reaching to death if death be needful.
No one loves as Christ would have them love who does not bear in their heart love which has so conquered selfishness that they are ready to die for Him. The expression of Christian life is not to be found in honeyed words but in self-sacrifice, modelled on that of Christ’s sacrificial death. Christ’s death is the pattern for our lives as well as the hope of our hearts.
The Motive.
That too, is contained in the words, “As I have loved you”. Christ’s commandment of love is a new commandment, not so much because it is a revelation of a new duty but because it is the communication of a power to fulfil it. The novelty of Christian morality lies here, that in its law there is a self-fulfilling force. We have not to look to one place for the knowledge of our duty, and somewhere else for the strength to do it, but both are given to us in the one thing, the gift of the dying Christ and His immortal love.
That love, received into our hearts, will conquer our selfishness. That love, received into our hearts, will mould them into its own likeness. That love received into our hearts, will knit all those who participate in it into a common bond, deep, sacred, and all victorious. And so, if we want to know the blessedness and the sweetness of victory over these miserable selfish hearts of ours, and to walk in the liberty of love, we can only get it by keeping close to Jesus Christ. If we have the life of Christ we shall be able to reach out to all who love the Lord Jesus Christ and feel with thankfulness that we are one in Him.
From ‘The Holy of Holies’
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