John 13:34-35 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Is “love one another” really such a new command? “Love your neighbor as yourself” wasn’t a new idea Jesus first spoke during his earthly ministry. Moses had been teaching it since Israel camped at Mount Sinai 1400 years earlier. In his first letter, John, who wrote this gospel, calls this an old command, “which you have had from the beginning.”

The word used for “new” does not have to emphasize that something is new in time, though it can mean that, too. It can refer to the quality of “new,” something that is superior. We might think of how Paul elevates love above all, even faith and hope, in 1 Corinthians 13: “The greatest of these is love.”

But if there is something new-in-time about Jesus’ command this night, it is this: “as I have loved you, so you must love one another.” We have this outstanding life of love and sacrifice to look at. Is that intimidating? We see Jesus love people we would find irritating or obnoxious, like the self-absorbed rich man who came to Jesus and asked him what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. “Jesus looked at him and loved him,” Mark’s gospel tells us.

We see Jesus love people we might find disgusting and repulsive, the prostitutes, the five-times-married Samaritan woman who was shacking up with her boyfriend. We see Jesus embracing people with dangerous, communicable diseases like the leper he reaches out to touch before he heals him. We compare how we treat people, and perhaps our faces flush with shame.

Listen closer: “as I have loved you.” “I have loved you.” This isn’t a confrontation. It’s certainly not a contest. It’s his claim, on you. We, you and I, are the self-absorbed, the repulsive, the dangerous-to-be-near people he has loved, and still does. He loved the others for us, and he suffered to save us, because he loves and embraces us.

So we love one another. We are his. “My children” he called these men a moment before. It wasn’t a criticism, an accusation of immaturity. It was a term of endearment: “My dear children, my precious ones.” Children imitate their parents, don’t they? So much of play is doing what mom and dad do.

Except it isn’t play when we love as Jesus loved us. We are living as his children, who know what it is to be loved. Love like that, and others will know we are his.