“As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (John 13:34). This is the clarification Jesus offers after he gives his followers “a new commandment.” He says people will recognize his disciples if they “love one another” as he has loved them (35). In Matthew 5:44, he tells them they shouldn’t stop at loving the members of their own group. They should go so far as to “love [their] enemies” [italics mine].
He models the version of the commandment that we get in Matthew when, from the cross, he asks his heavenly father to forgive those who have tortured, tormented, and abandoned him.
In what other ways does Jesus show love in the Gospels?
He loves the total person.
He tends not only to physical and spiritual needs, but also to intellectual, mental and emotional ones as well. He knows that even though I’m categorizing these needs separately, they’re never really separate. He teaches crowds using stories they can relate to. He doesn’t forget to feed the people will come to him before he sends them home. He meets emotional needs, not only by teaching people to hope for and to work for a just society (Google the Beatitudes), but also in another way.
He erases perceived dividing lines.
Jesus calls God his father and teaches us to do the same. (Actually, I’ve read that the word he uses translates to a more familiar name, one closer to Dad than to Father.) He excludes no one, and instead makes a point of including outcasts who approach him. Scripture tells us that he shared the experiences of both the just and the unjust. He was imprisoned and sentenced to death. He associated with tax collectors and people with traditions and practices different from the ones in which he had been brought up. I’d say there wasn’t anyone he wouldn’t connect with, though not everybody wanted to befriend him.
“As I have loved you, so you also should love one another”
John 13: 34
Marginalized people are not invisible to Jesus. The Bible tells us that in his time on earth, in a very patriarchal culture, he spoke to and touched women, even women with tainted reputations, and at least one woman who had been hemorrhaging for years. It’s my understanding that a woman with such a condition was considered unclean and would have been expected to keep distant from Jesus.
The Scriptures tell us about many more times when Jesus healed people whose health conditions isolated them and obscured their dignity in the eyes of the society in which they lived. As a person with a disability and mental health conditions, I think of these healings as helping to integrate people into their communities, as helping people contribute to their communities. Though it’s absolutely okay to want healing, no one should be sent the message that they have to be healed of what makes them different before they can be whole and be equal to everyone else. Helping someone heal is by far not the only way to help a person contribute to and integrate into a community.
He asks and answers questions.
When I think of Jesus interacting with a person, I think of him asking questions to lead that person to insight. I think of his conversations with Peter and his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. I also think of the times he used people’s questions as teaching opportunities. Some of the people with questions were Jewish and Roman authorities, but not all of questioners are identified in the Bible as holding official leadership positions. I think of the unnamed man who asked Jesus what else he needed to do to inherit eternal life.
He took breaks.
Jesus knew he needed to let God love him so that he could love others. He knew he needed times of withdrawing from crowds and of leaning on Abba. He prayed in deserts and gardens. He slept on a fishing boat in the middle of a storm, and he prayed when his closest friends were sleeping.
Jesus’ ways of loving looked different at different times in his earthly life. The question for us is, what do the ways he loves look like at different moments in our lives? Each of us will have different answers at different times. If two of us were to compare our answers, we would likely find similarities without having exactly the same answers.
Work cited
The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
Sitting with the Sacred 
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