John 21:20, “…the disciple whom Jesus loved…”
John cannot stop writing about love…if you’ve read his gospel or his epistles, you know this. And I think there is reason–John is the only New Testament writer (so far as we know) who stood at the foot of the cross. This disciple’s writings are drenched in love because He stared into the heart of the love that made the universe when He watched Jesus pour out His life before his eyes on the cross.
For John, love is not a sentimental idea of everyone being happy and doing what they want….for John love is his Lord and his God dying in agony under the punishment that he deserved….I belive that he was so staggered, so overwhelmed, so pierced to the core by the love He saw in Christ that almost all he could say for the rest of his life was “God has loved us, let us love one another.”
I think this is also why the only title he gives himself is “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”
Sometimes people think that is sort of a boastful title, as if he’s saying that Jesus loved him and not the others. Not at all. Rather, it seems to me that John’s entire identity was demolished and remade when He looked into the eyes of His dying Lord and knew—“for me…..for me……for me……”
You see, when we learn God’s Name we learn ours as well. To know God apart from the crucified Christ is to know Him as Avenging Judge, as the Consuming Fire, as Destroying Glory, and so to know ourselves as Condemned, Damned, and Destroyed…..but that is not where God himself invites us to know Him! Rather it is to the cross that He calls us, it is to the cross that all scripture points and says, “Behold your God!”
And to know God in Christ at the cross is to know Him as LOVE. And to know God as LOVE is necessarily to know self as BELOVED…..This, is what happened to John. Having see the glory of God in the dying and rising love of Christ, He was never again able—never again wanted—to find his identity in anything other than this: Jesus loves me.
Oh, that we would see by faith what John saw by sight! Oh, that our identities (I’ve done this, I’ve won that, I’ve failed here, I was treated like this, I sunk to this low, I did this to myself, I did this to them, I had this done to me, etc. etc.)–that our identities would be melted down to slag under the fires of Calvary’s love and reforged by pierced hands into this single recognition: My Lord and my God loves me.
And, I might add, by speaking His Name over us as “love” and so naming us “beloved” through the death and resurrection of Christ, God has given us His own name too…..the Son is “Beloved” to the Father….And so, by receiving our identities as those whom God loves in the Son, we are given the same name, as it were, that the Son has eternally had within the fellowship of the Trinity.
By virtue of our union to the Son, we are invited to feast on the same food and drink from the same river that is the eternal gladness of the Triune God Himself–His own love for Himself within Himself.
