Pershore Times - 16 May 2025

In St John’s Gospel there is a short Sunday reading coming up at John Chapter 13verses 31-33a and 34-35. It may be short but it packs a punch. It has really important teaching for all time but must have been very strange to hear by the original listeners.

The context is that Jesus has just washed his disciples’ feet, shocking in itself his doing what a slave would customarily do. Judas has just left the gathering to go betray Jesus.

And it is at this point Jesus, who was a Jew for all his life, steeped in the Jewish scriptures (our Old Testament) and disputatious with the Jewish religious authorities but never rejecting of his heritage, Jesus does something revolutionary. Jews were distinctive from Gentiles, others, by their circumcision of males, worship in the Temple and following the Scriptures, particularly the Torah, the first 5 books of our Bibles, revering Abraham, Isaac and Moses. Moses had brought down God’s Commandments form Mount Sinai in the desert after the deliverance from slavery in Egypt.

Yet Jesus gives his disciples, and us for all time, a NEW COMMANDMENT. How shocking! The man they had travelled with round Galilee and all over the Roman occupied land. And what a Commandment!

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; just as I have loved you, you are to love one another.

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

That’s it. Love another. It’s that simple, and so very hard…….

Sue Oliver, Holy Redeemer