Significance of the Command to love one another for the audience of John's Gospel

Briefly examining the historical circumstance of the Gospel of John leads me to ask two questions: (1) How was the relationship between the Johanine community and the other Christian communities? (2) How was the relationship among the members of the Johanine community?

Regarding (1), there is a question of whether the Johanine community separated itself from the other apostolic churches. According to Powell in Introduction to the New Testament, the Gospel of John exhibits sectarian characteristics. One example is calling believers as children of light, and calling other groups, particularly the Jews, as children of darkness. The significance of this possibly sectarian character of the community is that the command to love one another perhaps was intended as internal command. In other words, love those who are part of the community, but not those who are outside of it. Powell concludes however that because of the inclusion of Samaritans, Greeks, and even “other sheep” (10:16), that the Johanine community was probably not a sect.

Regarding (2), Raymond Brown in his book The Community of the Beloved Disciple explains that the Johanine community went through stages in its development, and this development included the diversification of the groups that composed it. Brown suggests three stages. In the first stage, the community was composed primarily of Jews with a low Christology. In the second stage, a group with a high Christology emerges. There was conflict between the low Christology and the high Christology groups. The third stage was the large increase of gentiles. I believe that it is difficult to speak then of a Johanine community with a single identity, because its composition seemed to change over time. What “love one another” meant for the community at one time, might have been different at a different time in their development. What I can say about the significance of the command to love one another in John's Gospel is that it might have been a response and a challenge to the division that was going on.

Carlos J. Medina, OSA