The litmus test

 ‘… By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.… (John 10:27)

John 13:31-35 (Year C: Easter+5)

Incriminating evidence

Were you or I to be tried before a court on a charge of being Christian would the prosecution have sufficient evidence to win the case?  In this extract from the gospel of John where Jesus imparts his final and lengthy talk to his disciples over a stretch of no less than five chapters we are struck by one consistent message: love. It is the very essence of God and how this world is brought from and back to God in Jesus.  Three key points stand out in this particular extract:

1. The time left to us is short
2. We are given a ‘new commandment’
3. By this the world will know God (and be saved).

Without love ‘faith’ is useless. It is no faith at all because faith is much more than an intellectual affirmation in one’s head of some doctrine . Rather, ‘faith’ is a covenantal relationship with God and through God with others and through others with God.

The time left to us is short

‘I am with you only a little longer’ (verse 33) clearly warns the disciples that the time is indeed short – within hours according to the narrative of john. For us the time is short as well because we do not know the hour or the day when we make the transition to the next phase of life.  Wasting time over what is not constructive and re-creative and preventing others from being fully alive needs to be weeded out. For sure we only have the ‘Now’. In this ‘Now’ as I write this and you read this (whoever you may be) we are and live and have our being in the one who goes beyond, and yet not far from, our human imaginings and instantaneous cravings and needs.

A new commandment

‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another’ (verse 34)

But what is new about that commandment? After all, the commandment to love and love our neighbour is found in many places across the entire Bible and the lived experience of the Hebrew people (for example in Leviticus 19:18). We could easily miss the point of what is new here. No, it does not mean that all the other religious ‘rules’ are redundant (some were and are because it all depends on how they serve the Law of Love). Neither does it mean that the commandment is new because Jesus or John or his community of disciples said so to annoy the Jewish authorities at the time. Rather, it is new because it is RECIPROCAL. John’s gospel if full of notions of growth, communion and mutuality.  That A loves B is one thing. That A loves B and B loves A is something else. The totality of individual loving acts and dispositions is greater than the sum of each individual part. In plain language, loving one another gives rise to a communion of persons where Christ dwells and a whole new reality is possible because of this. Love is THE sacrament of church (a gathering together) and without it there is no real church.

The litmus test

And so the litmus test to prosecute Christians is more than just a test of their love individual by individual (and this in turn is what matters infinitely more than squabbles over words, furniture and rituals though everything has a place and a season).  The killer punch that the prosecution can use to knock out any defence is that the reality of a community of love is so strong that we are faced with the real thing. No mistaking that! ‘ Writing a century after the gospel of John was written the North African theologian Tertullian (some of the best Christian theology, at that time, was coming out of Africa and Asia) wrote in The Apology (39:7):

See, they say, how they love one another, for themselves [pagans] are animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves will sooner put to death.

And so, in today’s society we need to incarnate social love so that it is embedded in the very norms, institutions and culture of states, organisations and families. It starts in the here and NOW. Christianity is a social religion founded on love because God is a community of love of one in three.