What Jesus would say to his disciples the closing evening before he would be arrested and tried is of such importance in our understanding what it means to be Christian. I’m beginning to see that is it not what it means to speak christianly per se, but rather, to be Christians. Jesus said in John 13:34, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” The old commandment was from Leviticus 19, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Now here, Jesus raises the bar and says, the standard of your love for one another will not be your love for yourself; it’ll be my love for you: “As I have loved you, you must love one another.”
If you read John 13 through 17 in one sitting, you will see that the bookend chapters are different in many ways. John 13 is an active parable of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. John 17 is Jesus’s prayer to the Father. Here we are afforded one of the most sacred episodes of eavesdropping as we listen to a conversation within the Trinity. John 14 through 16 is centralized teaching on the work of the Holy Spirit. But the middle chapters can never be detached from John 13 and 17, where the Holy Spirit is not mentioned by name. We begin to see that Jesus is sharing with the disciples something that is part of the being of God. Then in John 15:9, Jesus says again, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.” In other words, the standard of love for us within the body of Christ is the standard by which the Father loves the Son.
As we listen to Jesus speak to his Father in these chapters, we discover the important doctrine of God that is so special to Christians. It is significant to note that the doctrine of the Trinity did not come to us either by philosophical or theological speculation. Rather, it comes to us by three historic encounters: God at the foot of Mt. Sinai, God on the dusty streets of Palestine in Jerusalem, God in the Upper Room. Are there three gods? No. Because if there is more than one God, each of those gods would necessarily be limited. Is it one person playing three roles? After all, we hear one person speaking to another. We hear the Son speaking to the Father, the Father speaking to the Son. We heard the Son referring to the Holy Spirit as another person. But no—not three gods, not one person playing three roles.
Thus the only obvious, inescapable conclusion: here are three persons, who in some amazing, mysterious way constitute one God. And their relationship is going to be the standard by which our love for one another would be measured.
In the country of my birth, India, I have often shared the gospel with Hindus and Muslims. And of course, you need to have an apologetic for them when you ask them to follow Christ because you are calling them out of a community. Hindus and Muslims have very strong communities. I’m now discovering in the Asia Pacific that Buddhism is also an equally strong community. But when you ask them to follow Christ, are you inviting them into a community or are you calling them out of their communities into a vacuum?
The only way people will know that you are my disciples, says Jesus, is to demonstrate it, not individually, but by your relationships—for there can be no real apologetic without a community of love and relationships. “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” After we have given all the arguments, the defenses and the evidences, this indeed is the final apologetic.
(L.T. Jeyachandran is executive director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Singapore.)
