Brent Pollard
Why Jesus Commanding Love Strikes Us as Odd
There is something that stops us cold when we first read John 15.17. Jesus commands us to love. We instinctively resist this. Love, we have been told since childhood, is something that happens to us—a feeling that comes unbidden or not at all. And yet there it stands in the plain Greek of the New Testament: a command. An imperative. Not a suggestion, not an aspiration—a command.
The love Jesus commands does not bubble up from the wellspring of natural affection. It does not depend on the worthiness of its object. It is a love that originates not in the heart but in the will. This is what makes it unnatural—not aberrant or disordered, but swimming against the powerful current of a fallen nature that has always reserved its warmth for those who return it.
What Made Jesus’ New Commandment Truly New
The Jews of Jesus’ day already had a command to love their neighbors (Leviticus 19.18). But centuries of theological trimming had quietly reduced the definition of “neighbor” to a comfortable radius of like-minded, like-blooded individuals. This is precisely why Jesus told the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10.25–37)—a story so deliberately unsettling that it practically demanded a verdict.
Then, in the upper room on the night of His betrayal, Jesus issued a new commandment: “Love one another, even as I have loved you” (John 13.34, NASB95). The newness lay in its standard and scope. The measure of this love was no longer the mirror of self—it was the cross. And the cross looks like a man hanging between criminals, praying, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 22.34, NASB95). That is the standard.
Agapē Love: What the Greek New Testament Reveals About Loving Like Christ
Koine Greek—the common tongue of the first-century world—distinguished at least four varieties of what we flatten into one English word. Phileō was friendly affection. Storgē was a family bond. Erōs was romantic desire. And rising above them all stood agapē—sacrificial, unconditional, self-emptying love. Kindness is extended when kindness is not deserved. Forgiveness is given when the wound is still fresh. Service rendered without expectation of return.
You do not feel your way into agapē. You choose your way into it. The natural loves are genuine goods, gifts from God’s hand—but left unchecked, they curl inward. The love of family becomes contempt for the stranger. The tribe’s love becomes hatred of the outsider. Agapē redeems and elevates these natural loves, rightly orienting them. It is not human morality at its finest—it is participation in the divine nature, the love of God shed abroad in human hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5.5). You cannot manufacture it. You receive it, and then choose to deploy it.
Agapē, in its fullest sense, is the deliberate choice—empowered by God—to seek another’s genuine good at personal cost, because that is precisely how God in Christ has loved us.
“Othering” in Modern Culture and the Ancient Problem It Represents
Hal David, moved by the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, wrote words that Jackie DeShannon made famous: “What the world needs now is love, sweet love.” Were David writing today, surveying our present moment, the pen would move with the same urgency.
We live in a time of othering—the process by which human beings made in God’s image are reduced to caricatures and assigned to an outgroup whose humanity can be safely disregarded. The Nazis did not begin with gas chambers. They began with names, with the slow rhetorical work of placing people outside the boundaries of moral concern. Today, the preferred weapons are different—”Nazi,” “fascist,” “bootlicker,” “communist”—but the intent is identical: to frame opponents as a them against whom any response is justified. The summer of 2020 saw politically motivated murders amid the George Floyd protests. January 2026 has already recorded two deaths connected to ICE enforcement protests. Solomon was right—there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1.9). Human fallenness finds new costumes for old sins.
How the Cross Teaches Christians to Love Their Enemies
The command of Jesus is not an antiquarian curiosity. It is addressed to this fractured, furious moment. The temptation—and we should name it honestly as a temptation—is to reserve our warmth for the in-group and feel entirely justified in our contempt for ideological enemies. But the One commanding our love is the same One who prayed forgiveness over the men who drove the nails.
The decision to love precedes the feeling of love. We choose to pray for those who despise us. We choose to speak with dignity about those whose politics make our blood simmer. And grace, practiced in genuine submission to God’s Spirit, reshapes not just our behavior but our hearts.
Jesus said the watching world would know His disciples not by their doctrinal precision or political affiliations, but by their love for one another (John 13.35). The church, in an age of othering and outrage, is called to be a visible demonstration that another way is possible—that the love of God in Christ is not a theological abstraction but a living reality.
The command is given.
The standard is the cross.
The power is the Spirit.
And the world is watching.
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