The Mandate

Next week is Holy Week in the Western church tradition. Since I teach a course on the Gospel of John during Thursday evenings, we agreed to cancel class next week—which is known as “Maundy Thursday”—as many of the course participants are clergy, seminarians, or church members. During Holy Week, it’s all hands on deck!

Maundy Thursday takes its name from the Latin mandatum, and yes—it’s where we get the word “mandate.” Maundy Thursday is literally Mandate Thursday. And it has a very unique relationship to the New Testament. Jesus’s mandate to his disciples is only recorded in John’s gospel: “This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you” (15:12).

Here’s a few reasons why this passage is so interesting. First, while this is Jesus’s last meal with his disciples, there is no language of communion or “last supper” like we find in the synoptic gospels. Instead, Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet (also only found in John’s narrative).

Second, Jesus’s mandate made the stipulation for belonging in his group of friends simple and clear—you must love each other. Earlier in this chapters-long farewell speech, Jesus stated the mandate this way: “By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (13:35).

In other words, if you want to be in Jesus’s tribe, you must be defined by your love for others. This may not seem strange or extreme at first blush, but if we pause for just one brief moment, it becomes clear just how different Jesus’s commandment calls his disciples to be. In our particular moment in history, social commentators note how our society has become “tribalized,” meaning that we tend to group ourselves into camps that see others as enemies or at best, antagonistic. The tribe then becomes the filter through which we pass through everything requiring judgment: issues, people, opinions, etc.

The interesting thing about tribalism is how by its nature (us vs. them), it identifies the group most commonly by what it opposes…or hates. And in Jesus’s farewell speech in the Fourth Gospel, he addresses this as the tendency of the world in darkness: it hates. In John’s gospel, Jesus uses the word hate ten times, and all the uses are the world hating Jesus, hating his disciples, hating God, or hating light. The word hate, however, is never used to describe the activity of Jesus, his disciples, or God. Why? Because they are defined by love.

In simple terms, to become part of Jesus’s tribe, we must forsake the other ones—the ones formed and sustained by opposition, ridicule, antagonism, and hatred. This is the tribe that Revelation describes as represented by every tribe and people.In this tribe, the only required and oddly the strongest identity marker is love. And love, the Apostle Paul writes, does not delight in the wrongdoing or wrongheadedness of others, does not insist on always being right, and does not wish harm or destruction on others. Love believes the best, gives the benefit of the doubt, and actively seeks the beautiful and truthful in others—even, and especially, those from other tribes.

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