FRIDAY 10th
1 John 2:7-8
‘Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard. At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining.’
Although these verses start a new section in the chapter, they are still a continuation of what has already been written before, John says that he isn’t writing a new commandment, but echoing an old commandment, yet he then says ‘at the same time, it is a new commandment . . .’ What is going on, at first to use a modern phrase we may think that John was losing his marbles, getting confused, but he continues to say and I will put it this way, ‘the old commandment becomes fresh, new for it is true in him (that is in Christ) and in you (that is us as believers)’.
What was the old commandment? Well to answer we go back to the Old Testament and Leviticus 19:18 ‘You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the LORD.’ John’s readers would have understood this commandment to love, in particular as the passage reads ‘your neighbour’ but when we come to the New Testament we read in Matthew 5:44 that Jesus taught that we should not only love our neighbour, but that we should also ‘love your enemies’, so when he gave the new commandment in John 13:34 ‘A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another’ we should consider it in the context of both what was an old commandment and in the new context in which Jesus has said it we should also love our enemies.
In Luke 10 we have the parable that Jesus gave which we call the parable of the good Samaritan. Jesus tells this story about a lawyer who wanted to know what he should do to inherit eternal life. Jesus tests him by asking him as a lawyer ‘What is written in the law? How do you read it?’ The lawyer responds with ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbour as yourself’.
After he had answered Jesus said ‘Do this and you will live’, but the lawyer then asks an important question even though it may have been for selfish reasons, hoping who he should love would be limited to a few, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ We know the story, at the end Jesus asks the lawyer, ‘Which of these three, do you think proved to be a neighbour . . .’ The lawyer responds ‘The one who showed mercy’.
The one who proved to be a neighbour was the one who was actually the enemy of the one who was beaten up, thus Jesus through this parable is echoing or giving the new commandment that we should not only love our neighbour, that is the ones we naturally like but also the ones we would consider as enemies, the ones we naturally would not be drawn to.
I hope in some way I have helped us understand what John meant when he said it was an old commandment but at the same time it was a new commandment.
Jesus has shown us by his universal love that we too should love in the same way in which he loves. There is no room for discrimination on any grounds whatsoever, yes, we do not love the sin but we love the sinner, we may not like everything about an individual, but we learn to love them in the same way that Christ has loved us and given himself for us.