Fifth Sunday of Easter – May 18, 2025
“This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:35).
At the beginning of this chapter from John’s Gospel, Jesus showed his disciples what love for one another looks like:
If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.
Jn 13:14–15
Love that requires sacrifice on our part, that bids us to stoop down and wash the feet of those who would cause us many hardships—that is the kind of love that creates a new world and establishes a different kind of order, logic, and reason.
Soon after modeling this kind of love, Jesus revealed that one of his own would betray him. Imagine! Jesus had knowingly washed his betrayer’s feet, choosing to love him even still. This, too, was an example for his disciples. All this would lead to Jesus’s greatest example of love beyond reason, the cross.
To love those we like and get along with is easy and not an example of anything new. But love that requires sacrifice on our part, that bids us to stoop down and wash the feet of those who would cause us many hardships—that is the kind of love that creates a new world and establishes a different kind of order, logic, and reason. Not by skill or intelligence, status or piety will we be known as followers of Christ but by the love we show one another without condition.
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