Sat, 23 December, 2006: Today’s Bible readings.
1 Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.
John begins to tell us about Jesus washing the disciples feet at the last supper with this interesting statement: he loved them to the end.
What do we learn from this?
Jesus loved the disciples. He cared deeply for them, and was concerned for them as He would be leaving them. But His loving wasn’t just mushy sentimentality. It wasn’t emotion. Jesus’ love for His disciples was action. He loved them by washing their feet. He served them. We willingly took did the menial task for them that they all avoided. He did this to teach them a lesson about love.
Love is an action. Love is how we treat each other. The feeling is beside the point, and hopefully will align with our actions. But true love will always act in service, regardless of whether we have the feeling or not.
This is really important to our commitments to each other. If we think that love is a feeling, then we will end our marriages when the feeling wears off. We will break off relations with family and friends when something happens to change our feelings.
But if we understand that love is an action, not a feeling, then we will stay together through the difficult times. We will be committed to treating each other in a loving way, even if we don’t feel like it. And over time, as we keep acting in a loving way, the feeling will return.
Where is Christ in this passage?
When we think that Jesus loved those who were His own right to the end of His time on earth, we realize that His death on the cross was an act of love. He was serving His people by bearing their sins upon Himself. He was paying a debt He did not owe so that His people could be free from the penalty of sin.
It was His love, displayed as an action of saving His people, that caused Him to go to the cross the very next day.
