Vers 13, Jesus says, ‘Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.’ You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing, but I have called you friends. For all that I have heard from my father, I have made known to you. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, you’ve shown us what the greatest love is. You command us to love. We pray that you fill us with your spirit, that you give us the strength to love and the courage to love in the greatest ways that you call us to and that you give us opportunity for. We pray this in Jesus’s name. Amen.
Now, previously I said that the best and most loving thing someone can do for or do towards another person, the goodest good work possible, is to share Jesus with them and offer them the hope of the gospel, which is the good news of our redemption from sin and judgment by God’s grace through personal faith and trust in Jesus Christ, the son of God alone. And I continue to stand by that assertion even as we read Jesus authoritatively declaring here, ‘Greater love has no one than this, that someone laid down his life for his friend.’
I stand by what I said because sharing Jesus with someone, sharing and testifying to the one who laid down his life for us and for them truly is the greatest, best, and most loving thing we can do because we could not and cannot do what Jesus did for us. So sharing Christ with others so that they may hear and believe, so that they may know about the great salvation of God for them, offering them the hope of forgiveness and life really is the best thing that we can do for them because it remains to the Holy Spirit to help them to believe by giving them faith, by regenerating their hearts, and then imputing and applying Christ’s sacrifice to them.
So really sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ is the greatest act of love that we may do. Usually, we may do this by just simply talking about Jesus, and other times we may do this through our actions and activities by showing and sharing Jesus’s love in tangible ways, including ways that are limited, or self-sacrificial, and costly. Most rarely, at most once in a lifetime, a needful opportunity will arise where a person may or must echo the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus by sacrificing their life for the life of someone else.
In such occasions, they become beautiful moments of testimony, visibly demonstrating a person’s faith in Jesus. Such occasions become moments for mourning and rejoicing, where one life is lost while many other lives may be saved. Such occasions tend to become memorialized and widely publicized, so much so that their frequency appears to be more common and more often than they actually are. They get a sense of positive preference for such occasions, which may seem more positive and more great than it really is.
And while such occasions, whenever human lives are saved at some great or terrible cost, may become sensationalized, we alternatively become quick to minimize or ignore what’s really the greater import and impact of Jesus’s sacrifice to save the souls of sinners. I mean, we honor the soldier who covers a grenade with his body to save his compatriots. And we honor the person who gets hit by a car because they just pushed a child out of the way.
We honor the bodyguard who takes a bullet from the person they’re protecting. Countless TV shows and movies use such events as plot points, but they’re rarely used as an example of Christian love. Instead, or rather, western society and culture have, through a lot of our past influence of Christianity, adopted this idea that self-sacrifice is a social and civic virtue. But such examples are not necessarily or not always examples of Christian love.
Self-sacrifice is a uniquely Christian virtue because of who we know love to be—the Lord Jesus Christ—and because of what we know love to be, agape. Because Jesus showed us how to love. Anyone who’s been a Christian for a lengthy period or anyone who has been around Christians knows and understands this about love: that the love described by and commanded throughout scripture is agape, selfless, and self-sacrificing. Agape does not require a reciprocal return or even any return at all.
Agape is the kind of love that God has loved us with, giving and sacrificing his only begotten son Jesus for us. Agape is the kind of love that Jesus loved those around him with by compassionately healing the sick and injured, raising the dead, and freeing the demonically possessed. Agape is the kind of love that we should love the Lord with, loving him with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, loving him with our whole being, and loving him more than we love ourselves.
Agape is the kind of love that we should love one another with, how we’re supposed to love our neighbors. Knowing this, we must then inherently recognize that there is a natural hierarchy of loves even within agape. I mean, sharing an extra tunic, giving something to someone sacrificially, that’s one tier of agape. Whereas getting up early, picking somebody up, and then driving them across town, perhaps through a snowstorm or other form of severe weather, just so that they can get to work on time, that’s another different tier of agape.
Meanwhile, Jesus here declares that the highest tier of agape. He declares the highest example before doing it, performing it himself when he tells his disciples that greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. Explaining that making the ultimate self-sacrifice, sacrificing one’s own life, is the greatest expression of agape for another person. That there is no greater expression than giving up your everything for the preservation, defense, rescue, or survival of someone else.
But there is an important distinction that is often overlooked here. Jesus qualifies for whom this great act of sacrificial love might be made—for one’s friends. This greatest act of exemplary love is not made for one’s enemies, nor for one’s servants or slaves or employees, nor is it made for a stranger, but for one’s own friends.
Think about that for a moment and then consider the fullness of its implication because Jesus is a friend to us even when we do not act like friends to him. We sing, ‘Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God. He to rescue me from danger interposed his precious blood,’ singing that Jesus sought us when he was a stranger to us. But we were not strangers to him because he had already decided that we are his friends even when we did not want to be, because the father had already given us to him and because we were already being grafted into his vine.
Jesus explained to them that no longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing, but I have called you friends; for all that I have heard from my father I’ve made known to you. He explained that they—and we—are elevated to a status, to a different status in his estimation and his consideration. That we’re elevated to a position of effective social equivalence as Jesus’s friends rather than his subordinates.
So then here Jesus adds another layer onto our obligation of obedience, adding a layer of friendship, telling them, telling us that you are my friends if you do what I command you. Our obedience to Christ’s commandments is obligatory by natural right because he is the sovereign Lord. Our obedience to Christ’s commandments is our loving response to the mercy and grace of God that we’ve already received.
And our obedience to Christ’s commandments is the sign of our friendship with Jesus, our friendship with God, our reciprocation of Christ’s friendship towards us. Now think about the people that you consider as friends. Would you intentionally act against their interest? Would you intentionally act to hurt or harm them? Would you intentionally act to oppose or thwart their goals, their desires, or their happiness?
Could you intentionally do any such thing and honestly call yourself their friend or expect them to still consider you their friend? Could you intentionally walk all over them, treating them like a doormat, treating them as being beneath your notice, and still expect the mutuality and communion of friendship with them? Of course not. But how often? How often do we treat those that we claim to care about that way?
And sadly, that’s also how we often treat Jesus. We take him, his love, and his forgiveness for granted. But when we belong to Christ, when we’re united to Jesus Christ, he nevertheless remains our friend—a friend that we happen to treat terribly—a friend whom we frequently sin against. So, do we really, truly, honestly agape Jesus as he agapeed us?
Now, since Jesus has declared and has authoritatively defined what the greatest work of love is, and since we recognize the presence of a natural hierarchy of love, and since this idea has been relatively recently brought to the forefront of public awareness by one of our civil leaders mentioning something called the Ordo Amoris in an interview, we should really consider what Jesus actually said about this issue and how Roman Catholics and how we reformed Protestants have interpreted and applied this doctrine, this idea of ordering loves to our lives.
When Jesus commanded us to love, he first off was affirming the core Old Testament teaching that we must love the Lord our God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, and with all of our mind. And that we shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of our own people, but we shall love our neighbor as ourselves—two teachings that plainly carry a natural sense of hierarchy or priority.
Even the prompting question which the Pharisee had asked Jesus, ‘Teacher, what is the great commandment in the law,’ implies the assumption that some commandments must be greater or more important than others. And since they agreed on this answer, they also agreed that there must be an ordered priority to love, which Jesus declared to be God first, our neighbors second, and ourselves probably in a pretty close, almost second place, but not quite third.
And Jesus declared that greater love has no one than this, that someone laid down his life for his friends. In relation to that, we need to decide whether his example of love on the cross is greater than a person’s love for God or if it’s an equal expression of that same love for God somehow because initially it does sound like a type of loving our neighbor or whether it is intended in the unique specific case of Jesus and his work to really be the ultimate expression of both love for God and love for neighbor.
I’m inclined to believe that’s the third option which is most correct. And I think that the system of covenant theology helps support this answer because before we’ve spoken at length about the system of covenant theology, focusing on two main biblical covenants: the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. But we did not examine a third observable and interpretable covenant, the covenant of redemption.
Now, the covenant of redemption, we believe, precedes both the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, being made before the foundation of the world when the elect were chosen by God the Father and given to God the Son. And we believe that in this before-creation period, the three persons of the Trinity entered into a covenant with one another where the father covenanted with the son out of love to give him a people to redeem from sin.
The son covenanted with the father to redeem the people that the father would give him out of love, that he would redeem them by offering himself as the only all-sufficient and perfect sacrifice. The Holy Spirit covenanted with both the father and the son out of love to apply this purchased redemption to the chosen and given people.
Now, holding to this understanding, we may then interpret Jesus’s sacrifice of laying down his life for his friends as both an act of love for God the Father as an act of perfect obedience and an act of love for neighbor by him substituting himself in place of his friends. And so this unique event, Jesus’s crucifixion, is truly the greatest act and expression of love for God and for neighbor.
So all other loves, all other expressions of human love for either God or neighbor must be lesser because this act of love is utterly unique, utterly greater, and utterly unrepeatable. So from Jesus’s teaching, we can logically interpret the following hierarchy of loves: God’s love for the elect, the elect person’s love for God, the elect person’s love for their neighbors, and then the elect person’s love for themselves.
Once we grant that our love for God should and must always be our first priority, with ourselves as the last, it remains for us to prioritize in order the different degrees of our neighborly love. Thomas Aquinas, who was considered to be the greatest theologian thinker of the Roman Catholic Church, outlined in his *Summa Theologica*, using scripture, the apocrypha, and Aristotelian philosophy, the order of loves, which was referenced last year by Vice President Vance back in February.
Aquinas rightly deduced that God should be the highest object of our love. He deduced that our love for kindred, love for our family, is the highest type of neighborly love. Within our love for family, he deduced that a person’s love for their children should be greater than their love for their parents and that love for our spouse should also be greater than our love for our parents but less than our love for our children.
He deduced that our love for our fellow citizens should be greater than our love for foreigners or resident aliens. Within our love for fellow citizens, he deduced that the love we feel towards our beneficiaries, those we help, is greater than the love we feel towards our benefactors, those who help us. Because a benefactor incites the recipient to love him, whereas the benefactor loves the recipient not through being incited by him, but through being moved of his own accord.
Lastly, he says that love for our fellow comrades in arms, our compatriots, or our allies should be greater than our love for an opponent or an enemy. While one might disagree with some of Aquinas’s rationalizing or perhaps even disagree with his whole scheme of prioritization, it is difficult to disagree with the specific conclusions he makes on each paired priority.
Like Aquinas, Herman Bavinck, who is an early 20th-century Dutch Reformed theologian, had a priority of neighborly loves. Building his list from the reformed view of the fifth commandment of honoring your father and mother, he prioritized loves from the lesser to the greater. He begins with love towards those who’ve died. Then love towards sinners. Then love towards enemies, love towards those in distress, love towards brothers and sisters in Christ, love towards angels, considering that a civic duty, and then lastly, love towards animals and nature in general.
Each of these types of love, these things and persons and types of people to be loved, may be identified as being commanded or commended in scripture. It is more difficult to argue with the whole of Bavinck’s order than with Aquinas’s. But that may be because Aquinas parsed closer, narrower relationships between persons, while Bavinck remained in a more general realm.
It is difficult to say whether either ranking is wrong or if one is substantially more right than the other because each list does describe different spheres of life from the other. We may be better served by considering the two lists together in concert rather than in opposition as we move towards applying similar degrees of priority to our own good works and spiritual fruits of love.
Knowing that agape love is self-sacrificial, we also understand that Jesus’s command for us to agape one another as he has agapeed us does not command us to prioritize sacrificing our life for another. Christians do not aspire to echo or emulate the sacrificial death of Jesus. Unlike Islam, dying for our faith is not the greatest act a Christian can do. It is not to die in service to Christ. Instead, the greatest thing we may do is to live for our faith, to live for Christ and for the glory of God, because our savior lives.
He is working through us, working through our union with him, helping us to rightly love others in his name and for his sake. Because of Jesus’s example of self-sacrifice, we do need to be willing to agape in the extreme. We should be willing to do anything for agape, especially when it is something costly or expensive for us to do because we agape God by agapeing our neighbors in all their different degrees.
While we are commanded to love our neighbor, and because it’s evident that not all neighbors are equal, we must prioritize our love for them. The highest tier of loving our neighbor includes prioritizing loving the physical world around us. Because by agapeing animals and nature, by working and keeping creation as our fulfillment of the covenant of works, we are likewise showing agape to all of our family, to all of our friends, to all of our neighbors, our nation, and fellow citizens because we are working and helping to preserve what God has created and declared to be good for all of their present and future enjoyment and benefit.
We ought to also prioritize loving our fellow Christians over non-believers. Hearing that, I’m sure hearing that verbalized sounds jarring and feels unloving. But prioritizing agape for people within the church over those outside of it conforms to both the letter and the spirit of what Jesus taught.
Remember, Jesus commanded the disciples specifically, ‘A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you.’ He told them to practice agape between themselves and so also between believers within the church. During the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus’s use of the priest, the Levite, and Samaritan as examples was not meant to imply that the priest and the Levite were not neighbors, just that they weren’t being very neighborly.
This parable also highlighted the expectation that we ought to first be loving those who share our faith. And again, Jesus also asked, ‘For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?’ He tells us to love those who do not love us, to love those who are unrelated to us, to love the outsider and outcast and foreigner because everybody loves those who loves them.
Jesus was promoting here the inclusion of outsiders into the order of love, but not necessarily at the same degree. When it comes to our good works of charity and love, Christians should be taking care of Christians first before we take care of others in the world. The same principle is demonstrated in the Book of Acts, where the office of deacon was established to take care of the Gentile Christian widows who were being neglected and overlooked from receiving charitable support.
Gentile Christian widows were being added to the distribution of agape alongside Jewish Christian widows. See, the original deacons were charged to care for widows within the church, not those who are outside of the faith. Furthermore, it is right that we should take care of our own before we take care of others. What kind of Christian witness is it to neglect their own and leave them to suffer while helping those who are further away from Christ in other spheres of life outside of the church?
It’s reasonable for us to prioritize agapeing those who are in distress or who have more severe needs over those with lesser needs or those who are not in distress because that’s an exercise of wisdom and prudence, agapeing to create the greatest and widest benefit, loving the most neighbors best.
It’s also not unreasonable for us to prioritize a family member in distress over a church member in distress over a stranger in distress because we have a higher obligation to love those who are closest to us first. This probably sounds counterintuitive, to prioritize agapeing our enemies over agapeing sinners. But this order of priority becomes easier to understand when we know the definitions that were being used.
Bavinck used the term sinners to describe unrepentant and recalcitrant persons—people who stubbornly refuse to accept the free offer of Christ’s grace. Such persons may reasonably be considered to be further away from the Lord generally than persons who we might consider as our enemies. While our latent sin nature within us recoils against agaping either category, being that is the hardest type of love for Christians to faithfully practice, prioritizing our enemies over such sinners is better stewardship and a better application of our resources because we can expect a better response from an enemy.
We have a better hope or a better expectation to see an enemy won to Christ than someone who keeps refusing him. That’s not to cut out the one, but it is an order of priority. And so, Bavinck’s rationalization to prioritize enemies over sinners becomes even more reasonable when we factor his last neighbor category: the deceased.
We agape the deceased out of honor and respect for their base humanity, for the image of God that they bear, and the inherent dignity which God’s image imparts to them. But the agape that’s shown to the deceased is unknowable to them because they are beyond any possible impact of our love because they are no longer able to respond to our Christian witness with repentance or by turning to Jesus in faith.
So also, by showing agape to the dead, we are witnessing to those who still live because while life remains, hope remains for their redemption. In relation to enemies and sinners, agape for the deceased would appear to be the least efficient use of our resources and spiritual stewardship, but it’s still a faithful use.
So these orders of love, as suggested by Aquinas or Bavinck, were based on their interpretation of scripture and their attempt to faithfully apply it to life according to the principles of good and necessary consequence. But when it comes to each of us and to our own lives, their orders are simply helpful suggestions that we may choose to similarly follow or not.
Each of us is responsible to allow scripture to inform and instruct our conscience. And then we’re responsible to allow our conscience to guide our lived practice. Apart from establishing the Lord as our highest priority to love, followed by neighbor and ourselves, scripture does not provide us any firmer or more detailed order, leaving everything else really as a matter of interpretation.
While there is no one single correct way for us to prioritize our neighborly love, being subject to conscience, we may be sure that there are wrong ways to order them and right ways. So it’s on us. It’s our responsibility to study and pray and trust the Holy Spirit and scripture to guide our consciences.
And remember that Jesus said, ‘Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.’ And Jesus declared us to be his friends, and so we need to obey him.
So know and believe that Jesus loves you so much that he laid down his life for you, that he laid down his life to pay the just penalty for your sins. Know and believe that Jesus loved you so much that he also took up his life again, rising from the grave to life eternal, so that you and I and all who are united to him as his branches in his true vine will likewise receive and enjoy life eternal in heaven with him.
Know and believe that Jesus loves you so much that he has ascended into heaven, where he presently reigns over both heaven and earth and where he is presently interceding for you and for me and for all who are united to him before God our father. Know and believe that Jesus loves you so much that he has asked the father to send the Holy Spirit to dwell within you and me and all who are united to him to sanctify us, encourage us in faith, and to help us to produce good spiritual fruit for him, for his glory. Amen.