Is the New Commandment a dead letter?


The key to Christian unity, the very thing we need to do to make unity happen, has been staring out of the Bible at us the whole time. We do not have the courage to do what it says. It endangers too many deeply held assumptions about what a church denomination is and why mine is better than the other fellow's. We have not to taken up the challenge of Jesus' New Commandment, that we fully love one another. He says that doing it will result in the visible unity he is after.
 
A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35)

That is setting the bar rather high for us: to love one another as Christ loves us. It goes a step beyond loving our neighbors as ourselves. For those of the fellowship, it's to be more than that. Instead of self-equal love it is self-giving, even self-sacrificing love. That is a tall order.
 
It seems that we are, most of us at least, falling short today. Notice, though, what is attached to obedience: "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples." Someone who is after Christian unity can hardly give this enough importance. It is, indeed, what we lack.
 
Compare what Christ says further, a few chapters on:

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:20-23)
 
The meaning of the two passages is parallel, for both speak of what the world sees when it looks at the church. Taken together they show us that unity based on love is what will produce the sign to the world of a church that is visibly one. Arguing over the filioque clause or the Lambeth Quadrilateral or Vatican Two isn't getting it done. This will, but we are not doing it.
 
The New Testament epistles have references to this other-worldly love we are to have for one another. The most striking is Paul's paean to love as superior to all other spiritual gifts, in 1 Corinthians 13. 1 John, 2 John and 1 Peter further mention loving the brethren. Clearly the matter of loving one another is a part of the faith once for all given, but it is seldom promoted as a practical measure for pulling the church together; if it is discussed at all, in our day, it is portrayed as a lofty ideal.
 
 

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