Dave's Diary

Daily Reading: John 13:1-17, 34-45

“It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for Him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.” (v.1)

This is the moment everything shifts in John’s Gospel. On multiple occasions throughout the Gospel, Jesus has said, “My time has not yet come”. Now, John wants us to be clear that this is it! This is the moment, this is the hour, this is the time. From this moment onward in John’s Gospel everything that will happen to Jesus, and everything that He will do and say, will be part of the final, ultimate expression of His Love. Here he showed them, and He shows us, the absolutely full extent of His love.

The ultimate expression and manifestation of that love will be when Jesus gives up His life for us, but even now in the upper room, He starts to manifest His love in its fullness.

In the events of John 13-21, Jesus showed us that His love has no end in time and space. In His suffering, crucifixion, death and resurrection, He showed us that His love has no limits in terms of the depth to which it will descend, nor the lengths to which it will go to rescue us. As Paul would later write under the absolute inspiration of the Holy Spirit in Ephesians 3:14-19, we need the power of the Holy Spirit even to begin to grasp the breadth and length and height and depth of the “love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.”

In this beautiful scene from John 13, we witness Jesus expressing the same love that will eventually take Him to the Cross. On the Cross He will show His love through the ultimate sacrifice. Here, He shows His sacrificial love in an act of physical servanthood as He performs the menial duty of washing His disciples filthy feet before supper.

And now, He tasks us, His disciples, to continue manifesting His love to the world around us. This is a moment of commissioning. This is the moment Jesus gives all disciples across all generations a summary of the great mandate of our lives. In the words that follow, Jesus mandates us to continue His mission of manifesting the love of God. He has loved us to the fullest extent, and now we are to manifest His love to others. It’s the heart of who we are and what we are called to do; and may we realise that today our hour has come, as we hear Jesus say:

¹⁵ I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you … ³⁴‘A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. ³⁵ By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.’

John 13:15, 34-35

Lord Jesus, I could never do this in my own strength. As I follow Your journey to the Cross over the next 24 hours, please send Your Holy Spirit to give me new depths of insight into Your love, new inspiration of the practical ways I can manifest that love, a new resolve to do so, and a fresh power to fulfil that resolve. I want to show the world the full extent of Your love. Help me, Jesus! Amen.