John 13:31-38

Jesus Predicts Peter's Denial

31 When he was gone, Jesus said, "Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him. 32 If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.

33 "My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.

34 "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

36 Simon Peter asked him, "Lord, where are you going?"

Jesus replied, "Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later."

37 Peter asked, "Lord, why can't I follow you now? I will lay down my life for you."

38 Then Jesus answered, "Will you really lay down your life for me? Very truly I tell you, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times!



Dig Deeper

In my home state of Wisconsin, we have a very popular vacation location called the Wisconsin Dells. When I was a kid, the attraction of the Dells had more to do with the beautiful landscape and incredible lakes in the area. Since becoming an adult, thought, it has been built up into a tourist town full of theme parks, cheesy tourist sites, and the largest water park in America. I went there a time or two as a young adult in college and even went once when my wife and I were dating and I found the place to be okay. It was kind of fun but there was nothing particularly special. We didn’t go back for quite a few years until our first son was about five years old. Mind you, I had been to this town many times, but going there with my own child made it a whole new place. Suddenly I was able to see the attractions there through his eyes and enjoy things through his reality. What was just an okay place to go, became one of my favorite places. I had been there so many times and had now discovered that going as a parent made it something different entirely. In fact, I had to go back a few years ago without my children. It was part of a field trip for the school at which I was a teacher and I found the place to be completely boring without my own boys. My own children, I found, opened up what was old into a whole new possibility.

It’s funny how something that you have done over and over again can suddenly take on new meaning and become an entirely new experience. Jesus knows that he is about to leave his disciples and things for them will never be the same. Oh, they will still do many of the things that they have done before and in most respects, the world will still seem like the same old place that they have lived in their entire lives, but something will be different. Beginning in this section, and carrying all the way through Jesus’ incredible prayer to the Father in chapter 17, Jesus is about to prepare the disciples for what lies ahead, showing them how the same world that they have been living in is suddenly going to become a very new experience. It’s going to be the same, yet very different.

There are several spots in Jesus’ life where a specific incident seems to have served as a sign for him or induce him to begin to introduce a new level of teachings to his disciples (cf. Mk. 8:31; Jn. 12:23). Jesus has predicted that Judas would betray him and urged Judas privately to get up and get about his business. As Judas leaves, Jesus knows that the wheels have been set irrevocably in motion. There is no turning back now. With Judas’ departure, though, it almost seems as if Jesus can dispense some final private teaching and instructions to his disciples that he would not in Judas’ presence. We can only speculate at the full extent of the reason, but it seems clear that now that Jesus’ followers are cleansed of the betrayer amongst them, they will be challenged and encouraged in a whole new way. This section that extends all the way to chapter 17 has some of the most intimate and heartfelt, yet also deeply theological material in all of the Gospels. That’s really the way that it should be. Passion and theology should never be separated out from one another, but should always serve to complement and inform one another.

Judas’ departure doesn’t just provide Jesus the opportunity for in-depth teaching, first he points out that his leaving has indeed set things in motion. Things are going headlong now and now is the time when the Son of Man is glorified through his death on the Cross, but even more important in Jesus’ mind is that God is glorified in him and will glorify the Son in himself. Just has Jesus taught all the disciples, even Judas, that his act of servanthood on the Cross as demonstrated through his foot washing was the full extent of his love, so will his sacrifice show the full extent of God’s glory. These are really two ways of saying the same thing. "Glory" is, in essence, the full extent or demonstration of a thing, so if God is love (1 Jn. 4:17), then the full extent of His love on the Cross will be the moment of His complete glory. It is the moment when the complete demonstration of who God is, will be in full view of the world. This all makes perfect sense because the Son of Man, of course, is the figure from Daniel 7 that is surrounded by evil, but then exalted by God and seated in God’s own throne. It will be the Cross and subsequent resurrection and ascension that will show Jesus to be the Son of Man, the glory of God.

What Jesus wants to tell them, in light of his coming glorification, that he will be with them only a little while longer. Where he is going they cannot come. Jesus doesn’t tell them precisely what he means with all this business of leaving and going where they cannot follow but perhaps, as John so often does, he writes these words of Jesus down intending for us to see a double meaning. He will leave them for the Cross and it is not yet their time to follow him there, but after that he will be returning to the presence of the Father, and it’s not the time for them to follow him there either.

Following his departure, though, they will need to become a community, the new family of Jesus built on the foundation of his love. That leaves us with a bit of question. Jesus tells them to Love on another but then says that this is a new command. But Leviticus 19:18 says to "love your neighbor as yourself," and love for others was not only a well established part of Jesus’ teaching (Matt. 5:43; 19:19; 22:39; Mk. 12:31; Lk. 10:27), but was also a highly valued ethic amongst many Jewish groups of Jesus’ day, including the Qumran community. So how can this be new? The answer comes in that Jesus says "as I have loved you." What makes this a new command is not the act of loving others, but the quality, nature and source of that love. Jesus’ self-giving love that finds it’s fullest expression in his laying down of his own life for others will not only demonstrate the type of love that he is calling us to but will also create the very community where that type of love will be possible.

It is this type of love that will not only be the true identifying characteristic of Jesus’ new family but will be the strongest evangelistic component of that very community. This is how others will be able to identify Jesus’ true disciples and distinguish them from other communities of people. It is striking that Jesus says the defining characteristic of his people will not be how much they love God, or how much they serve him, or how much they do in his name, or how much they pray, or how holy they are, but in the servant-like, self-sacrificing love that they have for one another.

That Jesus waited until Judas left to call his disciples to this sort of love for one another is not surprising. This is not the kind of love that can include those outside of the community. Even though Judas had spent three years with Jesus and the other disciples, he had removed himself from that community on the very grounds that he loved himself more than others and valued his own will over God’s. Jesus is talking about loving those within the family, not loving those outside of the family. The kind of love that Jesus is calling them to must emanate from within the community and only then, will it overflow out into the world at large.

Peter, we should notice, almost seems to not have even heard Jesus’ simple, yet incredibly challenge to love as he loves. He immediately returns to Jesus’ thought of only being with them for a little while. He won’t have that kind of talk. Peter boldly declares that he will go wherever Jesus will go because he is his true disciple. He will become like his teacher and do what he does. In fact, says Peter, he will lay down his life for Jesus. Jesus understands the irony of all of this and his reply is in essence, "Oh really, you’re going to lay your life down for me?" Peter had it exactly backwards. It was Jesus who was about to lay his life down for Peter. And all the while he was doing that, Peter would be out denying that he even knew Jesus. Maybe it’s because Peter so readily skipped by Jesus’ call to love one another as he had, that Jesus so firmly calls him to do just that as he restores Peter after denying Jesus three times (Jn. 21:15-17).

Jesus certainly predicted for Peter that he was going to betray his beloved teacher, but Jesus didn’t do it to benefit himself or to try to keep Peter from doing it. Jesus didn’t predict to show that he was really smart or could read the future. Just as he warned them of Israel’s rejection of him and Judas’ betrayal, Jesus predicted Peter’s denials so that it wouldn’t completely destroy his faith or that of the others once it happened. Only later would Peter understand that Jesus knew this was coming and he still loved him. It shows us that Jesus only predicted things for their benefit and what they needed to know to keep them faithful when those things happened.



Devotional Thought

How would you rate if people judged the status of your relationship with God solely based on your love for others? Do you have the genuine type of love for other Christians that demonstrate to the world around you that you are part of Jesus’ family?