1 John 3:16 (NIV): “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”

1 John 4:8-11: “Whoever doesn’t love doesn’t know God, because God is love.This is how God showed his love among us: God sent his one, special Son into the world so that we might live through him.In this is love: not that we came to love God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to atone for our sins. My loved ones: since God loved us in this way, we also must love one another”

1 John 4:16: “… God is love, and whoever stays in love stays in God, and God in him:

1 John 4:19: “We love, because he first loved us”

We may be accustomed to such emphatic language of love, which offers an explicit perspective on the implicit depiction of Christ’s sacrificial compassion in the Gospels and God putting up with his people for so long in both the OT and NT.

But it would have struck people as more distinctive in the first century. Granted, people envisioned patron deities, who had their favorite mortals or peoples. But a God who was reaching out to people of all ethnicities, whose love was so great that he sacrificed his Son, was quite different from typical ancient religious imagination.

Even today, a message of a God who loves all people, whoever will enter covenant with him, is unbelievably good news. It was an idea with which I originally struggled as a new convert; because I lacked analogies, it seemed too good to be true. But it is true—and it is good. And it invites us to love in turn others whom God also loves.

This is not simply the idiosyncratic perspective of one disciple. Rather, it reflects the meditation of Jesus’s early followers on who he is and what he has done for is. To give some samples from Paul alone:

Rom 5:5: “God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us”

Rom 8:35, 37, 39: “Who can sever us from Christ’s love? …in all these hardships we utterly prevail through the one who loved us. For nothing … will be able to sever us from God’s love that’s encountered in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

2 Cor 5:14: “For Christ’s love compels us, knowing this, that one died for all …”

Gal 2:20: “God’s Son, who loved me and surrendered himself on my behalf”

Eph 1:4-5: “… In love he set us apart beforehand to adopt us as children for himself through Jesus Christ”

Eph 2:4-5, 7: “Because of his great love by which he loved us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive in Christ … so that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable wealth of his graciousness by his kindness to us in Christ Jesus”

Eph 3:19: “to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowing …”

Eph 5:2: “behave in love, just as Christ loved us and surrendered himself on our behalf …”

Or Rev 1:5: “to the who loved us,” etc.

This is no minor theme, yet sometimes in our commendable focus on details we miss the big picture. God saved us because he loves us. And nothing makes him happier than when we, as agents of his heart, show that same gracious and patient love for one another. Indeed, “behold what sort of love the Father has given us” (1 John 3:1)! As Charles Wesley put it, “Amazing love, how can it be? That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me!”

Whoever has seen Jesus, has seen the Father (John 1:18; 14:7).

Whatever Jesus hears from the Father, he reveals to his own (John 15:15); whatever the Spirit hears, he reveals, revealing Jesus (16:13). One cannot have the Son without the Father or the Father without the Son (1 John 2:23). Through the Spirit, we experience the Father and the Son (John 14:23). Old Testament passages about YHWH (e.g., Isa 25:8; 49:10) are applied to both the Father and the lamb (e.g., Rev 7:16-17).

Rather than picturing this as three persons side by side, to whom we relate in succession, I picture this more like three figures, one in front of the other, but transparent so that seeing one reveals to us the other. Although they are distinct persons, in prayer we relate to them together. As we pray in Jesus’s name, we pray through him to the Father. But we cannot truly invoke any member of the Trinity without implicitly relating to them all.

But sometimes scholars value the historical Jesus that they reconstruct in opposition to, and as more real than, the Christ of faith. Jesus’s early followers would likely have seen this as a problem.

Consider 1 John 4:2-3:

By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world. (NRSV)

Or 2 John 7:

Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist! (NRSV)

According to this apostolic witness, the Jesus who came in history is the Jesus who rose from the dead and now sits exalted at God’s right hand. The Jesus who came in the flesh is not different from our faith; he is the very one who matters for our faith.

The immediate context makes this example clearer. Jesus takes the role of a humble servant by washing his disciples’ feet (13:1-11)—a role normally performed by servants or those adopting their posture. Then Jesus calls on his disciples to imitate his servanthood (13:12-17). In the same context, we understand the degree to which he became a servant for us by noting what he would suffer: Jesus and the narrator keep talking about Jesus’ impending betrayal (13:11, 18-30). Jesus explains that he is being “glorified” (13:31-32), i.e., killed (12:23-24); he is about to leave the disciples (13:33), and Peter is not yet spiritually prepared to follow Jesus in martyrdom (13:36-38).

This is the context of loving one another “as” Jesus loved us. We are called to sacrifice even our lives for one another! As 1 John 3:16 puts it explicitly (my paraphrase), “This is how we recognize love: He laid down his life on our behalf. [In the same way], we also owe it to him to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters in Christ.” The next verse (1 John 3:17) suggests that if we can lay down our lives for one another, certainly we can seek to meet one another’s needs in less demanding ways.

The rest of the Gospel of John illustrates more fully Jesus’ example of love and servanthood, which culminate in the cross.

In many places in the world our brothers and sisters are suffering. Indeed, many even near us may be hurting. What would Jesus do? Now that his Spirit is active within us (John 14:23), what would he have us do?