When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
John 13:31-35
Love propelled Jesus through his mission because love is at the very core of God’s being. And because love materially informed every component of his mission, from teaching, to healing, to bearing the sins of the world and accomplishing redemption, love would materially inform the life and practices of those who would join themselves to him as disciples.
Jesus regularly taught the importance of love but it was at the climax of his mission that he unveiled the counterintuitive nature of the love he embodied and commanded. In John 13:31-35 he issues a new commandment: his disciples are to love each other. On its face this doesn’t seem novel. By itself it might not strike one as very profound, either, as we fully anticipate affection and belonging with those who are of our party. But the true character of such a love is revealed when someone moves even minutely out of alignment with our desires and our ambitions.
Our associations and other relationships, ones we would characterize as founded by love, are routinely ruptured by the narcissism of small differences. So much of our love is tainted by inordinate self-regard and we are too self-deceived to recognize our contributions to the problem. And friendships, movements, churches, and more break apart when we do not find a flattering reflection of ourselves in others and with it an affirmation of our uniqueness and greatness.
But love means something more to Jesus when he speaks and acts and so it means something more when he issues this commandment. This is why he doesn’t simply say, “Love one another.” He clarifies exactly what he means by saying, “Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” The way exemplified by Jesus Christ is the measure of what love is.
And this is what is so shocking about his command. This chapter of John’s Gospel begins with Jesus gathering his disciples for a Passover feast unlike any they have ever participated in. To ensure this event is understood rightly, John writes that Jesus “having loved his own who were in the world…loved them to the end” (13:1). Jesus is aware that his hour had come, the time at which he would accomplish his Father’s will and be glorified by him. Knowing this, he prepares them for the imminent event, loving them to the utmost by abasing himself to wash their feet.
This perplexed his disciples’ sensibilities because it didn’t befit Jesus’ role as their teacher and master. Foot washing communicated an inferiority that was contemptible even to servants. It was unthinkable that a social superior would do such a thing, even for one of his equals. But Jesus accepted the symbolic weight of this act precisely because it is in such disregard for self-serving mores that love shows and gives itself. One cannot love and be preoccupied with self or the station or privileges they enjoy. The love that Jesus’ disciples experienced was another instance of Jesus denying himself the prerogatives that were rightly his to serve the unpromising and undeserving.
This anchored them steadfastly in the reality of Jesus’ love for the distress to come in the following days and in their apostolic mission afterwards. But furthermore, in stark contrast to Caesar, Jesus here demonstrated that truly substantive authority and power served others in a manner that disregarded conventions and conferred dignity on those who would not otherwise receive it from rulers.
Is love, then, a political concept?
If we would answer no, then we should reconsider. Political theology, if it is to be true to its object, mustn’t simply accept the norms and bounds of contemporary political theory. These wineskins must be burst by the mystery of God’s assumption of human nature to rescue and restore ruined creatures. So while we must be fluent in the language of political theory we must also be prepared for the event of incarnation and resurrection to commandeer that language. For if we submit theological speech to the limits of theory then we consign ourselves to impossibility. But if we offer theory’s concepts for rupturing, forcrucifixion, for washing with the love of God who precedes us in all good endeavors, then impossible possibilities can arise at the sites of impasses to which we are accustomed, opening new courses God would call us to take.
Classically, love did have a political valence. Phileo, specifically, sought and nurtured bonds of friendship and fraternal loyalty. Aristotle recognized this as a resource for the political life of a community and accordingly commended philia as a blessing to the state. Justice and friendship were cooperative, mutually reinforcing virtues, encouraging unity and a commitment to what was good and right and best. This was not without problems, however, as the most substantive form of friendship was only possible between equals and friendship of utility could disintegrate if mutual benefit was no longer likely.
Friendship informs contemporary political discourse insofar as many Americans seem to have silently adopted Carl Schmitt’s view that the distinction between friend and enemy is the essence of politics. The friend is an ally to whom we are bound by affection and shared vision—at least until those bounds are tested and the category of enemy enlarges to include the former friend.
Additionally, that category has hypertrophied, such that those with whom they disagree are not only opponents but enemies. Acrimony and abhorrence have grown exponentially over the last decade such that a startling number of people believe the world would be a better place if their political opponents were dead. Something like one-fifth of Americans wish President Donald Trump had been killed in the assassination attempt upon him in the summer of 2024. Partisan identity and exaggerated senses of moral uprightness seem to fuel and solidify one another.
Hatred can be an effective political tool. History demonstrates this time and time again. But what are the ends of such action? They cannot rise above the vacuousness of vanity and fallen ambition. The glory humanity seeks in the world and through its means are premised on ruin and misery and their accomplishments are only ever temporary. They cannot secure a lasting glory of any real value in God’s economy which is premised on a glory we tend to dismiss or disparage, that of self-emptying love.
Such a political program, in fact, encountered another, wholly different vision in the event of the incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit. The brutal machinery of the Roman Empire was the means by which God’s Son was offered for the life of the world. Its drive for mastery was the occasion for the paradigm-shattering disruption of God’s love clothed in the flesh of Jesus Christ.
Caesar didn’t intend this, of course, but this is what God does: bring good out of evil through the graced subversion of its schemes. God does not wait for ideal conditions to act. God calls forth unforeseeable possibilities out of the nothingness of our vain strivings and assertions of self-importance. This is the pattern of God’s activity. God insinuates light, life, and love into the darkness, death, and hatred of creaturely givens, generating ways and means that exceed their potential.
These effects are actualized in the world of creatures due to the character of God, a character Christian theology brings to speech as attributes or perfections. But a theology that is true to its object recognizes the material significance of the apostle’s assertion that God is love (1 John 4:16). All that is true of God is best understood as instantiations of the love that God is.
God’s interventions into our world, in creation, in the assignment of vocation, in judgment, and in reconciliation, are acts born out of that love. And that love reaches out to disappointing human subjects such as you and me, alienated from ourselves, from our fellows, from nature, and principally, originally, from God. It is this fundamental rupture from God that contains and makes possible every other rupture that harms us. This rupture shapes our perspective upon ourselves and our fellows and as such it informs our drive for political life even as it distorts that drive. It is this rupture into which God enters in Jesus Christ for healing through the embodiment of that love.
Love doesn’t withhold itself until conditions are better or until there are worthy recipients. This simply reflects our sinfully inflated views of our dignity and worth: why would we waste kindness and affection upon those who are beneath us? Upon those who are not as upright or as wise as we are? Again, this is how “love” often operates in our world. But the love commended in this passage is more than an affection and is not motivated by self-service or self-assertion.
Love of the sort that Jesus himself is and commands is less an affect or mood and more a verb, an act of sacrificial, ennobling service. This means it can be done to those we wouldn’t normally say that we love. And yet, in practicing such love, one may, shockingly, come to find affection growing for the ones they have loved in this way. Love of this sort doesn’t find suitable beneficiaries. It only ever comes to those who have not merited it. It dignifies its objects, creating the possibility of their becoming congruent with the love that was gifted to them. Love activates what can be best and truest of us in a way that self-concern and so-called autonomy cannot.
But can you love your enemies? Naturally, no: there is no such faculty in human beings in and of themselves. The alienation and rupture within us precludes this. And yet, miraculously, it happens and can happen again where it ostensibly should not as God supplies the ability we lack. Its impossibility is negated by the command of Jesus Christ that creates the possibility. The words he speaks are not mere rhetoric; they are Spirit and life (John 6:63), engendering prospects and capabilities consistent with their speaker, conferring ability in their reception. Loving enemies is the way of Jesus Christ and so is the way to which he calls all who would forsake the way of the world and join themselves to him.
Jesus is frequently invoked instrumentally as a means for recruiting people to a cause that is incidental or even antithetical to his. But how often is this command of his enjoined upon those who style themselves disciples for its own sake? Not as a means to another end, but in obedience to the One who loved to the utmost? For he does insist upon this, and it is in such radical love being actualized in our polarized, death-choked world that others see and know who are his disciples. It won’t draw attention to itself: this is self-importance, eager to commend itself to the world, desperate to find validation of its greatness. The love Jesus commands is often quiet, often obtrusive only to the extent that a line is crossed that the recipient does not anticipate. Questions, consideration, sharing space, even a hand on a shoulder or a cup of cold water, however small and seemingly insignificant, can become an irruption of love and truth, testifying to something beyond the certainties we take for granted in the despair of our egotism and polarization. And in this, in witnessing such impossible possibilities, some corner of the world witnesses the power and rule of the God who has assigned these disciples a new vocation, one unbound by the world’s priorities or conceits.
Love disrupts both the ruin and misery we inflict upon others as well as our preoccupation with ourselves, for these are interdependent, synergistically working together for the degradation of all. Love is a death to self, funded by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a death in which we discover at last selves worth being and others who can become worthy of that love. Our good is bound up with the love that God is and that God calls us to bestow upon others, even our enemies. And such a love can foster a fellowship that is precluded by partisanship and the politics of the friend-enemy distinction, for the good of all who receive it and pass it on.
