Reflection by Deacon Tony Aspinall, The setting of today’s Gospel is the ‘Upper Room’, the Cenacle. Jesus is speaking after he has completed the dramatic washing of the disciples’ feet during the last supper. Jesus’ actions had shocked the disciples, and he shocks them again by warning them of Judas’ role in what is to come. After Judas has left, Jesus addresses the remaining eleven though they do not grasp fully what Jesus is saying.
There is an ending at hand but also a beginning. Their present friendship is about to be transformed forever into a new community, bound together by the same love that binds Father to Son. Jesus gives them a “New Commandment” of love. What is new is the model Jesus leaves them of selfless, sacrificial, forgiving love. A new standard of love that transcends legalisms and measurements.
This “New Commandment” calls for us to move on from our entrenched views and values. It is a call to pilgrimage which calls us to the holiness which is only available when we allow ourselves to take up the gift of becoming ever new.
Suffering with us God continues to empower our vision. We begin to see that God does make all things new, including us. To say yes to Jesus’ call to newness of life may make things harder for us rather than easier, our long established views and values may be strongly challenged. We need to look at who and how we are in a new light.
To say yes to Jesus “New Commandment” is to point your feet in a certain direction, toward full communion with God and neighbour. In following this path we arrive at a destination where we find a new family, a family of the baptised, the greater part of which has gone before us. These are the saints who are dedicated to helping us to get to where we are meant to go and who are dedicated to helping us make that pilgrimage.
To love is to be vulnerable. “Love one another” Jesus said, “Just as I have loved you”. Loving in this way is without agenda. It makes us vulnerable. And it also leads us to love people who are not like us. Jesus loved people who were not like him. He loved people who disagreed with him. He loved people who looked at the world very differently from him. There is no one that Jesus did not love. It is the one thing that Jesus was incapable of. He could not help but love everyone.
It doesn’t mean that he didn’t challenge them, or get frustrated with them, or even occasionally rebuke them. It doesn’t mean that. It simply means that he loved them, no matter what, and teaches us to do the same. That is his “New Commandment” to “Love one another just as I have loved You”.
