Love One Another

Judas leaves, and Jesus immediately says, 'Now the Son of Man has been glorified.' The timing is jarring to anyone reading this narrative closely. In our vocabulary, glory means victory, applause, vindication, or success. For Jesus, glory is triggered by an act of profound betrayal.

John uses the word 'glorify' to describe the crucifixion itself. The cross is not a temporary defeat that Jesus must endure before he gets to the glory of the resurrection. For the writer of this Gospel, the cross is the glory. It is the ultimate, undeniable unveiling of exactly who God is.

When Jesus is lifted up on a Roman execution stake, God's character of self-giving, sacrificial love is put on total display to the entire cosmos. That is why Jesus speaks in the past tense here. He uses what scholars call a prophetic past tense. The departure of Judas guarantees the cross, and the cross guarantees the revelation of God's nature. It is as good as done.

Jesus links his glory directly to the Father's glory. If the cross reveals the heart of the Son, it simultaneously reveals the heart of the Father. There is no division in their purpose. The Father will vindicate the Son, not by rescuing him from the pain, but by validating his sacrifice immediately through the events that follow the crucifixion.

Jesus turns his attention to the eleven. He calls them 'little children', a term of intense affection he uses nowhere else in this Gospel. He tells them he is leaving and they cannot follow. Then he drops the mandate that will define them forever: 'A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.'

At face value, this is not a new idea. Leviticus 19 explicitly commanded Israel to 'love your neighbour as yourself.' The concept of love was ancient and deeply embedded in Jewish law. So when Jesus calls this command 'new', the disciples would have paused. The newness does not lie in the concept of love, but in the standard of measurement.

The old standard was your love for yourself. Jesus replaces that metric entirely. The new standard is: 'Just as I have loved you.' Jesus has just taken the role of a slave and washed the grime off their feet. Within hours, he will absorb the wrath of Rome and the religious elite on a cross to secure their salvation.

This love is entirely asymmetric. It does not wait for the other person to be worthy. It serves, bleeds, and dies. That changes the metric for how Christians are supposed to treat each other. It is no longer enough to be fair, decent, or kind. They are commanded to lay down their lives for each other, just as their master did for them.

Peter completely ignores the new commandment. The mandate to love his brothers does not register with him. He is entirely fixated on the fact that Jesus is leaving. He demands to know where Jesus is going and insists he is ready to die for him right now. 'I will lay down my life for you,' he declares.

Peter is not lying. He genuinely believes his own hype. In the garden later that night, he will actually draw a sword against armed men, ready to go down swinging. He has real courage, but his courage relies entirely on his own strength, his own adrenaline, and his own willpower. He thinks discipleship is about what he can do for Jesus.

Jesus punctures this illusion with brutal precision. 'Will you lay down your life for me? Most certainly I tell you, the rooster won’t crow until you have denied me three times.' Jesus knows Peter's breaking point far better than Peter does. He knows that Peter's courage will evaporate the moment he is shivering by a charcoal fire and questioned by a servant girl.

This interaction establishes a harsh truth about following Jesus. Human willpower is entirely insufficient for the kind of loyalty Jesus requires. Peter's failure is necessary to strip away his self-reliance. Only after Peter realises he cannot lay down his life for Jesus will he be able to understand that Jesus must first lay down his life for Peter.