A New Commandment, and a New Community
Easter 5, Year C 2025; John 13:31-35
In this fourth Gospel we often hear Jesus speak in terms that seem to transcend the immediate circumstances of the story. At times his words seem not to require the immediate context, or else assume the outcome of a story that has not yet taken place, or is not yet complete. The lectionary this week embraces such a different sense of time as we go back to events that precede the passion, to think further about Easter.
This reading comes from John’s version of the last supper. The foot-washing has taken place, and the passage begins with the departure of Judas to undertake his fateful work. Jesus now begins a long discourse that will extend through 17:26. Jesus begins and responds to Judas’ departure with the remarkable words “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him” (13:31b).
The term “Son of Man” is not used in John nearly as often as in the Synoptics; in the earlier Gospels it is associated with the glorious messianic figure of Jesus’ return, whereas here in John it is particularly associated with the glory of Jesus’ being lifted up on the cross. The emphasis on Jesus’ humanity bound up in the phrase is connected with the Gospel’s early claim that “the Word became flesh” which, as John Behr points out, means not just the incarnation narrowly conceived as conception and birth, but as the whole of Jesus’ human existence including mortality. (Behr: 5)
“The Son of Man has been glorified.” The past tense of this “glory” is unmistakeable; something has already been accomplished. Yet we know that in the narrative it has not; there, we are still waiting for the events that fulfill Jesus’ glory, even if it seems that the glory is already somehow the case. And the references to being glorified continue; there are five, both past and future, in this one sentence. Jesus has been glorified, and God has been glorified, and will glorify Jesus, and do so at once. It is as though what is already true will shortly be made more concrete and more evident. Yet the before and after aspects matter far less.
These words of Jesus are very similar to another apparently premature declaration just a chapter earlier, when he had arrived in Jerusalem and learned that some Greeks had come to see him: “‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’” (12:23). There Jesus pronounces that “hour” as the time of glory, apparently meaning the whole of his Jerusalem sojourn; here, Judas’ departure is the point at which all that must still happen has been shown already to be true.
So John makes explicit and even celebrates the fact that this story about Jesus’ coming passion is being told with the knowledge of cross and resurrection as things whose significance already matters before they take place, not just as interesting or dramatic plot twists still to be revealed.
This is not a collapse of time, or a lack of interest in history as such, but an acknowledgement that the story cannot really be told by suspending knowledge of what was to come. The reader approaches these events knowing the end of the story, but knowing it through what comes after the end, the events that create a new community of believers in Jesus. C. K. Barrett even suggests “the true setting of these chapters is the Christian life of the end of the first century” (Barrett: 375). It is almost as though the Jesus of this Gospel turns to the viewer, who necessarily understands the end of the story, to pronounce the claim of glory.
This fact, not just what will happen to Jesus but what will happen to them, becomes the theme in the following verses. The passage contains the famous “new commandment,” which is familiar but also puzzling. It is not, after all, very “new.” The command to love neighbor is already found in Leviticus (19:18), and this version cannot be taken as a more universal and inclusive command to love (read that twice), since Jesus very explicitly presents this love as a sign that characterizes his followers, and will be seen as that by others (v. 35). The novelty then is not that of a moral principle, but of a distinctive community. The followers of Jesus, a group not previously in existence, are here called into being and thus into a particular way of being.
We should note that “as I have loved you” does constitute something new and different, however. While we do not have enough context in the verses being read, the foot-washing story immediately prior is being referred to here. There Jesus had said, in very similar terms, “For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (v. 15). So the new command is not “love one another” but “love one another this way.” This is also of course something that Mary had anticipated in her evocative action a chapter earlier, as Ingrid Kitzberger points out (Kitzberger: 194-5).
The glory which envelops and interprets these events—events which, to the eyes of others, were not especially glorious at all—includes not just the paradoxical victory of Jesus over evil on the cross, but the creation of a new form of human community that imitates him as servant, and also constitutes and guarantees his continuing presence.
While Easter is the story of Jesus’ glorification, it is necessarily also the story of his followers and their life in him. It would be trite to imagine (and awful to practice) the notion that their new love for one another simply constitutes a kind of close-knit community—as, to be frank, seems too often to be the case. Shrinking churches are especially good at this (and shrink further as a result). Raymond Brown even suggested this was the ultimate fate of the Johannine community, given the evidence of the Letters of John, although this is to speculate and is made less likely by our knowledge of this literature. The commandment, in any case is not just to become close, or even loving, but to love in the way the foot-washing story embodies.
And although this is not about that imagined Jesus who is the teacher of a general ethic of universal love, this form of love has implications that go beyond those immediately called to it; it is not (only) about us. To live in a way that recognizes Jesus in one another, and to be one in him, will change those who love and live this way. If and when this happens, the new community will be visible to all.
References and further reading:
Barrett, C. K. The Gospel According to St. John; an Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text. London, SPCK, 1955.
Behr, John. John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Brown, Raymond E. The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times. Revised. New York: Paulist Press, 1978.
Kitzberger, Ingrid R. “Love and Footwashing: John 13:1-20 and Luke 7:36-50 Read Intertextually.” Biblical Interpretation 2, no. 2 (July 1994): 190–206.