On his last night before his arrest, Jesus got up from supper, tied a towel around his waist, poured water into a basin and began washing the dusty feet of his twelve closest friends, including the one who was about to betray him (John 13:1). Peter protested; that was a servant's job. Jesus did it anyway and told them to do the same for one another.

That scene says a lot about how Jesus understood love. Almost everyone knows he talked about it. What surprises people is how concrete and demanding his version is. It is less a feeling than a way of treating people, including the ones who are hard to like.

The two greatest commands

A legal expert once asked Jesus which commandment in the law mattered most. Jesus answered with two, both from the books of Moses: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength (Deuteronomy 6:4), and love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). Everything in the law and the prophets, he said, hangs on these two (Matthew 22:34, Mark 12:28).

He was not inventing something new. In Luke's account it is the legal expert himself who puts the two commands together, and Jesus agrees with him (Luke 10:25), which suggests some Jewish teachers already read them as a pair. What Jesus did was put them at the very center and refuse to let them come apart. A faith that claims to adore God while ignoring the person in front of you has missed the point.

Who is my neighbor?

The same expert, wanting to justify himself, pressed further: who exactly counts as my neighbor? Jesus answered with a story. A traveler on the road down to Jericho is beaten and left half dead. A priest and a Levite, both men who served at the temple, see him and pass by on the other side. Then a Samaritan stops, bandages his wounds, takes him to an inn and pays for his care (Luke 10:29).

To Jesus' audience that hero was a jolt. Jews and Samaritans had centuries of bad blood between them, including a dispute over where God should be worshiped (John 4:9, John 4:20). Only a chapter earlier, a Samaritan village had refused to welcome Jesus (Luke 9:51).

Then comes the twist. Jesus never answers the question of who deserves my help. He asks instead which of the three acted like a neighbor. Love, in his telling, does not begin by drawing a line around the people I owe something to. It begins by seeing someone in need and moving toward them. That is already there in the old law, which told Israel to love the foreigner living among them as themselves (Leviticus 19:33).

Love your enemies

Perhaps the hardest thing Jesus said about love is this: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:43). He quoted a saying his hearers knew, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. The first half comes from Leviticus; the second is not a command found anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, but it describes how people naturally tend to read the first. Jesus pointed to God, who sends sun and rain on the good and the bad alike. Loving only those who love you back, he said, is what everyone already does.

Luke's version adds specifics: do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, lend without counting on repayment, and be merciful as your Father is merciful (Luke 6:27). This is not a call to pretend that wrong is not wrong, or to stay in danger. Christians have long understood that loving an enemy can include protecting yourself and seeking justice. What it rules out is hatred, revenge and writing someone off as beyond God's concern.

A note on the Greek word agape

You may hear that the New Testament uses a special word, agape, for a higher, divine, unconditional kind of love, different from ordinary affection. There is something to this: the Gospels usually use the verb agapao for the love Jesus commands. But the word alone does not carry that weight. The same verb describes people who loved the darkness (John 3:19) and a companion of Paul who deserted him because he loved this present world (2 Timothy 4:10). John can say the Father loves the Son with agapao in one place and with phileo in another (John 3:35, John 5:20). What gives Christian love its shape is not a vocabulary word but the example of Jesus.

Love you can see

Jesus acted out what he taught. He touched a man with a skin disease whom the law kept at a distance (Mark 1:40). He ate with tax collectors and people with bad reputations, and answered his critics that doctors come for the sick (Mark 2:15). He pointed out a poor widow dropping two tiny coins into the temple treasury and said she had given more than all the rich (Mark 12:41).

After washing his friends' feet, he gave what he called a new command: love one another the way I have loved you, and that love will show everyone you are my disciples (John 13:34).

The greatest love

Jesus also said that no one has greater love than the person who lays down his life for his friends (John 15:12). Christians believe he did exactly that on the cross. Perhaps the most famous verse in the Bible ties his whole story to love: God so loved the world that he gave his Son (John 3:16). A letter traditionally attributed to John, one of his closest followers, sums it up in three words, God is love, and adds that we love because he loved us first (1 John 4:7, 1 John 4:19).

That order matters. In Christian teaching, loving others is not a way to earn God's approval. It is the response of someone who already knows they are loved.

What this love looks like on a Tuesday

Most of it is ordinary:

  • Paying attention. The coworker who eats lunch alone, the neighbor who has gone quiet.
  • Forgiving. Jesus tied receiving God's forgiveness to forgiving others (Matthew 6:14).
  • Giving without an audience. Doing good quietly, not for applause (Matthew 6:1).
  • Telling the truth. Jesus could be blunt, especially with the powerful and the self-righteous, yet he was gentle with people who knew they had failed.

Christians admit, honestly, that they fall short of this. The church's history holds moments of stunning love and moments of shameful failure. Jesus' teaching remains the measure for his followers and for anyone curious about him.

A place to start

To go further, read the teaching Jesus gave on a hillside in Galilee, known as the Sermon on the Mount. It begins at Matthew 5:1 and runs through chapter 7, and the reading plan below walks through it slowly. You do not have to agree with all of it to begin. Many people find that simply reading what Jesus said about love is the first step toward meeting him.