loved you.' Now He says, 'Love one another as I have loved you.'
There stand the three, as it were, the Father, the Son, the disciple.
The Son in the midst receives and transmits the Father's love to the
disciple, and the disciple is to love his fellows, in some deep and
august sense, as the Father loved the Son. The divinest thing in God,
and that in which men can be like God, is love. In all our other
attitudes to Him we rather correspond than copy. His fullness is met
by our emptiness, His giving by our recipiency, His faithfulness by
our faith, His command by our obedience, His light by our eye. But
here it is not a case of correspondence only, but of similarity. My
faith _answers_ God's gift to me, but my love is _like_ God's love.
'Be ye, therefore, imitators of God as beloved children'; and having
received that love into your hearts, ray it out, 'and walk in love as
God also hath loved us.'

But then our Lord here, in a very wonderful manner, sets forth the
very central point of His work, even His death upon the Cross for us,
as being the pattern to which our poor affection ought to aspire, and
after which it must tend to be conformed. I need not remind you, I
suppose, that our Lord here is not speaking of the propitiatory
character of His death, nor of the issues which depend upon it, and
upon it alone, viz., the redemption and salvation of the world. He is
not speaking, either, of the peculiar and unique sense in which He
lays down His life for us, His friends and brethren, as none other
can do. He is speaking about it simply in its aspect of being a
voluntary surrender, at the bidding of love, for the good of those
whom He loved, and that, He tells us--that, and nothing else--is the
true pattern and model towards which all our love is bound to tend
and to aspire. That is to say, the heart of the love which He
commands is self-sacrifice, reaching to death if death be needful.