The Greatest Love

Agape can love the wrong thing, ahav can name Amnon’s love as well as the love of the Shema, and phileo φιλέω fil-eh'-o can be the Father’s love for the Son.

Now the words can be put back together, because Yeshua does exactly that in one of the best-known sentences He ever spoke. It stands in John 15, spoken on the same night as the sayings of John 14, and it begins with Yeshua’s own keeping.

How Yeshua Abides

John 15:10 If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My agape ἀγάπη ag-ah'-pay(love); just as I have kept My Father's commandments and abide in His agape(love).

The second half of the verse describes Yeshua’s own life. He is not only telling His disciples what to do: He has kept His Father’s commandments, and that is how He abides in His Father’s agape. His disciples, He says, will abide in His agape in the same way.

The pattern runs on two levels. The Son keeps the Father’s commandments and abides in the Father’s love. The disciples keep the Son’s commandments and abide in the Son’s love. Keeping is not the opposite of abiding in love. It is the very way Yeshua Himself abides in it.

Earlier that night, at the close of John 14, just before He said “get up, let us go from here,” He had said the same thing about His own love for the Father.

John 14:31 but so that the world may know that I agapao ἀγαπάω ag-ap-ah'-o(love) the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me; get up, let us go from here.

The Son’s love for the Father is shown to the world by doing what the Father commanded. The definition John later wrote, “this is the love of God — that we keep His commandments,” is first of all a description of the Son.

Agape and Philos in One Sentence

Three verses after John 15:10, the two families of words meet.

John 15:13-15 Greater agape(love) has no one than this, that one lay down his psyche ψυχή psoo-khay'(soul) for his philos φίλος fee'-los(friends). You are My philos(friends) if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you philos(friends), for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.

This is the greatest agape. It is not a feeling, however strong, but the laying down of one’s psyche, one’s soul, one’s life. And it is laid down for one’s friends, philoi, the plural of philos, a word from the phileo family. No one lays down his life for an abstract idea of agape; he lays it down for his friends. The highest agape is defined by what it does for friends. If the ladder of love were true, this sentence would be upside down; instead of separating the two words into rungs, Yeshua joins them in a single sacrifice.

Yeshua spoke these words the night before He laid down His own psyche, and He had just said, “This is My commandment, that you agapao(love) one another, just as I have agapao(loved) you” (John 15:12). His love came first. A few verses later He adds, “You did not choose Me but I chose you” (John 15:16). The greatest agape is first of all His.

Yet Yeshua does not leave the word “friends” for us to fill in as we please. In the very next breath He defines it: “You are My philos(friends) if you do what I command you.”

That is what a friend of Yeshua is. It is not someone He happens to know, or someone who admires Him from a distance. It is the one who does what He commands. Friendship with Yeshua is not mere companionship; it is obedience. The verb for command is entellomai, from the same root as entole ἐντολή en-tol-ay', the word for commandment throughout John 15 and in 1 John 5:3.

The Greatest Love, Read in Order

Put the sentences together in the order Yeshua spoke them, and the reasoning is clear. The greatest agape is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. His friends are those who do what He commands. So the greatest agape is laying down one’s life, setting aside even the instinct to save oneself, for friends who keep the commandments. There is no ladder here, only one costly faithfulness.

And agape toward God is keeping His commandments. So the greatest agape is that same keeping, carried all the way to the end. It does not stop when keeping becomes costly, and it does not shrink back even from death.

A lifeguard spends most of his days on small, steady duties: watching the water, keeping the rules of the beach, calling swimmers back from the rocks. On the day someone is pulled under, the same faithfulness is what sends him into the water. The great moment is not a different loyalty from the ordinary days; it is the same loyalty carried as far as it can go. In the same way, the keeping of commandments day by day and the laying down of life for friends are one and the same agape, carried to different lengths.

No Longer Servants

In verse 15 Yeshua says that He no longer calls His disciples servants but friends. Some read that as if Yeshua were moving His disciples out of obedience and into friendship, as though a friend no longer does what he is told. But Yeshua had just defined His friends as those who do what He commands. The difference He names is not between obeying and not obeying but between not knowing and knowing, “for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.” A servant obeys without being told why. A friend has been told everything, and obeys.

Whose Commandments?

That last phrase raises a question: which commandments are these? At the close of His public teaching, a few chapters earlier, Yeshua answered it plainly.

John 12:49-50 For I did not speak on My own initiative, but the Father Himself who sent Me has given Me a commandment as to what to say and what to speak. I know that His commandment is eternal zoe ζωή dzo-ay'(life); therefore the things I speak, I speak just as the Father has told Me."

The commandments Yeshua kept are the Father’s commandments, and the commandments Yeshua gave are what He heard from the Father. There is no second set. When Yeshua says “keep My commandments,” He is not replacing His Father’s commandments with new ones. He is handing on what He received.

This is the circle of John 14 and 15. The Father gives the commandment to the Son, and the Son keeps it and abides in the Father’s love. The Son gives the same commandment to His friends, and they keep it and abide in His love.

The End of the Beginning

So Scripture has no holy word for love: agape, phileo and ahav are all used for good loves and evil ones, and the phil- words are named by what they love. There is no ladder between agape and phileo. God loved first, and the love that answers Him is keeping His commandments, carried, when it must be, to the laying down of one’s soul.

Yet Scripture does not teach love only through definitions. From its first chapters it also teaches it through a union. Before there was a Torah written on stone, God made a man and a woman, blessed them, and told them to be fruitful and fill the earth. The words He used in that first blessing open the next part of the story.