John 13:31-35

“Joy” may be too big a word. Joy tends to put pressure on us. Consider what happens to many people at Christmas.

Perhaps “delight” would be better. Delight can be momentary. It can coexist with sadness and disappointment. Delight is an appreciation of beauty in the midst of ugliness. A wildflower, say, in a junk yard.

Think of delight as the near edge of resurrection. In delight the joy of God breaks through the gloom. As Chesterton has it in his Orthodoxy, the capacity for delight is the singular property of children and God. Or as Alice Walker has it in The Color Purple, the failure to take delight in a patch of purple in our mad rush is to miss not only the flower but God. 

It’s delight that we easily miss in today’s gospel reading. Jesus says, “As I have loved you, love one another” (13:34). But like joy, we load up love with pressure. “Love one another” is easy to say but hard to do when we are often nearly unlovable. But perhaps Jesus does not mean to make of love anything quite so daunting as what we have made of Christian love. Perhaps what Jesus has in mind is something closer to delight—delight in each other. Consider the context here.

Chapter 13 begins with the evangelist declaring that at this point the narrative will shift. If the first book (through chapter 12) is the Book of Signs, this now is the Book of Glory. The stakes are elevated: “The hour has come for Jesus to pass from this world into the Father’s presence” (13:1). But then Jesus does something so entirely surprising that it takes his disciples aback. He washes their feet. Imagine their embarrassment, discomfort, and laughter. They are thinking, if not saying, “Jesus, what are you doing?” Imagine the mood in the room.

And then the mood shifts. In the midst of the delight comes the strange story of Judas’s departure from the feast. Jesus says, “One of you will betray me” (13:21). But who? Peter wants to know. He elbows “the disciple Jesus loved,” reclining on Jesus’s breast, to ask him. There follows a sort of reverse eucharist in which Judas receives a piece of bread from the hand of Jesus identifying him as the one. Go, says Jesus. Do what you have to do (13:27), and Judas slips into the night.

It’s at that point that Jesus speaks of his coming glory, the subsequent confusion the disciples, and then of love—the new commandment. First glory. Jesus frames the events that are about to take place in terms of glory. Glory here has two senses: the glory of the cross: “Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified by him.” And the glory of resurrection: “And if God is glorified by him, God will also glorify him in God’s own self, and will glorify him immediately” (13:31-32). A short course in John’s theology.

But these events will put stress on the community of faith: “Children,” Jesus warns, “I am with you only a little while longer. You will look for me, but . . . where I am going, you are not able to go . . . , for now” (13:33). 

All of this—the departure of Judas, the prospect of the cross, the confusion of the community in the wake of the cross—frames the command of Jesus to love each other.

As Frederick Dale Bruner suggests in his commentary on John (2012), tenses are important here. What Jesus is commanding is not that they start loving each other but that they keep on loving each other. As I imagine it, Jesus looks over the room and sees how the departure of Judas and his own words have cast a pall on the company. What he is saying to them is that in all that is about to happen, in the cross and the confusion and the fear, don’t lose what you have. Don’t lose the delight that you already have in each other.

We often lose the delight. It’s just this that my old denomination seems to have lost. The congregations I’ve served over the years have often been exemplary in their love for each other, their slightly bemused delight in each other despite or perhaps because of their differences. In these congregations, they’ve often extended that delight to me. When I said something from the pulpit that they found preposterous, they would say to each other and sometimes to me: “That’s just Clay.” And they would smile.

But now the denomination is intent on enforcing agreement on controversial issues, hammering this agreement home by forcing those serving in office to sign and sign again their pledge to uphold the decisions of the synod, robbing congregations of the ability to delight in their differences—taking away the delight they had.

In doing so, they are losing the near edge of Easter, which is the appearance of God’s love in the world and in the community of faith. To lose our love for each other is to lose not only our friends and neighbors—those we have learned to love—but the gospel itself.

Header photo by Kolby Milton on Unsplash