He Loved Them Unto the End

In a talk many years ago in general conference, Elder Quentin L. Cook spoke about the final days of the Savior before His death. He highlighted the Savior’s focus on love before giving His life for all mankind: “The Savior also emphasized love and unity and declared that we would be known as His disciples if we have love one to another. In the face of the eternity-shaping Atonement He was about to undertake, such a commandment requires our obedience. We manifest our love for God when we keep His commandments and serve His children. We don’t fully comprehend the Atonement, but we can spend our lives trying to be more loving and kind, regardless of the adversity we face.” While we cannot truly understand how the Savior’s suffering paid the price for our sins, we do know that it was out of love that He gave His life for us. And so, as we seek to understand better His sacrifice for each of us, we can strive to be filled with more love for all those around us. Elder Cook continued, “The Savior’s charge to His disciples to love one another—and the dramatic and powerful way He taught this principle at the Last Supper—is one of the most poignant and beautiful episodes from the last days of His mortal life.” Surely part of our fulfillment of the baptismal covenant to always remember Him is to remember to love like He did. The fact that He would focus so much on love in His final words before offering His life underscores the importance for us as His disciples to strive to be filled with love. He put it this way after He washed their feet: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34). He washed even the feet of Judas Iscariot before making that invitation, making His instructions on love even more powerful through His perfect example.

                John gave us the most complete account of what the Savior taught that night before He went to Gethsemane, and we have the Savior’s words in John 13-17. I realized today as I looked at these teachings that in every one of these chapters, He taught about love: 

• Chapter 13: “By this shall all men know that ye a    re my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35).
• Chapter 14: “If ye love me, keep my commandments…. He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him… If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:15, 21, 23).
• Chapter 15: “As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:9-13).
• Chapter 16: “For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God” (John 16:27).
• Chapter 17: “That the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me. Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world… And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26).

Jesus asks us as His disciples to love one another and to love Him by keeping His commandments. He promises us that the Father and He will love us as we strive to be obedient. We can abide in His love. His love was manifest most powerfully when He gave His life for all of us, and just as the Father’s love is in Him, the love of God can be in each of us. For Him to spend so much time teaching about love right before He gave His life in love is a powerful reminder of the importance of love in our efforts to follow Him.

               These teachings at the Last Supper were prefaced with this description of the Savior: “Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end” (John 13:1). He loved perfectly to the very end, and the greatest way that we can honor His infinite atoning sacrifice is to likewise seek to love as He did. We can “spend our lives trying to be more loving and kind,” striving to love unto the end like Him.