Love One Another

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John 15:1-8 is about the vital relationship that exists between Jesus and his disciples. Verses 9-17 look at this relationship from a different perspective: that of the disciples among themselves IN the Lord.

⁹ ? As the Father hath loved me, I also have loved you. Abide in my love.
¹⁰ If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love: as I also have kept my Father?s commandments and do abide in his love.
¹¹ These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete.
¹² This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you.

The “Love” spoken of here is agape (agape); it is a self-giving, life-giving love. It is the kind of love that God has shown to manking in His Son. The following verse (v. 13) is an illustration of what this love means: Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

¹⁴ You are my friends, if you do the things that I command you.
¹⁵ I will not now call you servants: for the servant knoweth not what his lord doth. But I have called you friends. because all things, whatsoever I have heard of my Father, I have made known to you.

“Friends”. This is the name that the Lord gives His disciples. He calls them friends since he is about to give his life for them. He promotes them from being “servants”. If one reads the synoptic parables about what a disciple should be, one would see that a lot of these draws from the servant-master relationship. In the present discourse the Lord gives us a different perspective. His disciples are now friends because He shares with them the revelations of the Father.

¹⁶ You have not chosen me: but I have chosen you; and have appointed you, that you should go and should bring forth fruit; and your fruit should remain: that whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.
¹⁷ These things I command you, that you love one another.

“I have chosen you…” This is the mystery. Paul writes that “he chose us even before the foundation of the world.” The disciple is the Lord’s friend from all eternity. And the Lord chooses those who are to bear fruit. In the beginning paragraphs of John 15 the Lord has said: “I am the vine, and you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him will bear much fruit.” The Lord chooses but at the same time enables. The fruits that he desires are of course the same fruits that God always looked for in Israel — the “fruits of righteousness”, the proofs that His work has not been in vain. But while in the Old Dispensation — as Paul would observe — righteousness was made to be inseparable from the law, in the New Dispensation, grace is given full sway such that through the operation of faith “active in charity” the disciples are empowered to bear fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:5). When the disciple truly lives out his baptism, he becomes the fertile soil that the Word irrigates and the Creator tends with the Life-Giving Spirit. And all these becomes possible in the life of communion that he has with other disciples with whom he commits himself to a life of self-giving, life-giving, love.