We're Either Waiting for Nothingness or We're Waiting for Jesus

Love is concentrated vision

Exactly because the gospel reports a story (“The crucified one lives!”) abstractions (e.g., love) are anathema to it.

The lectionary Gospel passage assigned for the Fifth Sunday of Easter is John 13.31-35.

The context is the foot-washing on the evening before Good Friday when, in John’s Gospel, dies on the Passover. In verse 34, Jesus commands his disciples:

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

This exhortation is often taken to represent the distillation of the Christian faith. Jesus even appears so to summarize discipleship, commenting in the following verse, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." However, while love is undeniably a chief mark of the Christian life and a defining attribute of Christ’s body, the absence of which is a sign of faith’s impoverishment and the Spirit’s neglect, love it is not the totality of the gospel about Christ.