"As I Have Loved You"
So here we are in the middle of Easter season—and the lectionary drops us back in the Upper Room, just before the crucifixion. It feels out of order. We’ve already been through Good Friday. We’ve sung our Alleluias. Why go back?
We go back because on Maundy Thursday, Jesus wasn’t just looking at the cross—he was looking through it. He was looking ahead to his Resurrection, his Ascension, the coming of the Spirit, the moment when his disciples would carry on without him physically present. These words aren’t meant to be remembered as last words—they are meant to be lived in the meantime. Jesus is preparing them—and us—for how to live now.
He knows he’s leaving them. He calls them “little children”—tender, intimate, parental. He speaks as someone who loves them down to the bone. And he gives them what he calls a new commandment. It isn’t new in content—they’ve heard “love your neighbor” before—but it’s new in scale, in center, in shape:
“Love one another as I have loved you.”
And that changes everything.
How has he loved them? He’s just washed their feet. Including Judas’s. He’s fed them all, including the ones who will abandon him. Peter will deny him three times before sunrise. The rest will scatter. Jesus knows this—and he loves them still.
That’s how he loves. It’s not conditional. It doesn’t wait for the other to get their act together. It gives itself away. This Lord commissions them to love not after they’ve proved themselves, not once they’ve grown up into good disciples, but right here—while they’re still fragile and unsteady and halfway out the door.
And Jesus says this love will be how the world knows who we are.
Now, does this kind of love work?
Sometimes. In the early church, the Romans noticed how Christians cared for plague victims, how they welcomed strangers as family. “Look how they love one another,” Tertullian wrote.
But not everyone admired them. Some mocked that love as weakness. Some opportunists, as ancient writers noted, even tried to take advantage of it. The love of Christ is often balm to the wounded—but off-putting to those who revel in domination.
Loving like Jesus doesn’t always win friends or convert skeptics. Sometimes it costs everything.
But still Jesus says:
This is the way. This is the witness. This is the good life.
And let’s be honest—this is the hardest thing in the world.
Have you seen that 787 Coffee ad? “It costs $0.00 to be a kind human.” It’s wrong. Loving as Christ loved is not free. It costs a whole lot to be willing to be broken open for people who may never understand what you’re doing—to forgive before you’re asked, to serve when no one notices, to choose mercy when you’ve been hurt, and to keep choosing it again.
And we cannot do it on our own.
We need the Spirit. We need the cross in front of us and the Spirit within us. We need to be filled up—again and again—with the love that still moves toward us, even when we’re walking in the opposite direction.
That’s why we come to church. That’s why we keep taking the sacrament. That’s why we need the gospel—not once, but always. Not to be scolded into doing better, but to be reminded that, despite everything, we are so loved—a love that stays, even when we run, and heals, even when we hide.
And it’s only that love, that unmerited gift, that will fill us to the brim and overflow.
This life of love is what Jesus calls us into: not a life of striving, but of receiving and returning. Not a perfect love, but a persistent one. A love that does not disqualify, even when we’ve failed. A love that feeds us, washes us, and sends us out again.
That’s resurrection life.
That’s the love that tells the world who we belong to.
These midweek reflections are a preview of Sunday’s sermon—but not the sermon itself.
You can find the full sermon here after it’s preached.