I. It was a test of love for His own that at the last Christ did not forget them in the agitation of His own departure. Would it have been a very strange thing, if alternately engrossed betwixt the solemn novelty of dying experience and the exciting prospect of a return to glory, His last hours had been spent in personal exercises of meditation and solitary prayer? But in efforts to console friends whom pain and fear and mortal wickedness oppressed, He almost forgot His own glorious impending exit out of wickedness and fear and pain. And so have all His scattered sheep been loved. He still stoops in person to feed us with the sacred paschal flesh and to revive our souls by the wine of His consolations.
II. His love for His own was tried at the last by their folly and perversity. The society of the apostles was not quite soothing society for the dying Christ. There is something pathetic in the patient tolerance which, to the last hour, He had to exhibit towards His closest friends. Here was, verily, love of Heaven's own temper love imperial in its freedom, fed from no reservoirs of loveliness in the loved, but springing spontaneous as a fountain within the lover: the perfection of immortal strength wedded to the perfection of gentleness. Having loved them in their sins at first, He loved them unto the end.
III. One more test of Christ's enduring love is put into our hands by this evangelist. Throughout Jesus' public life one can trace a growing consciousness of His Divine dignity. His thoughts came to dwell more on it. His words became fuller of it. It was extremely natural that longer experience of the world should throw Him back for strength on the deep-seated certainty that He was not of this world, but came from above. Now by a law of human spirits all pain smarts more sorely for the recollection of pleasure, and so it is impossible not to feel that for the Son of the Blessed to remember that the Father had given all things into His hands at the very moment when He was called to empty Himself of all things, made the act of grace a more wonderful test of His unfailing love for men. He so realised Himself the associate and substitute of His criminal friends as to be one with them through love. "Having loved His own, He loved them unto the end."
J. Oswald Dykes, Christian World Pulpit,vol. i., p. 40.
References: John 13:1. A. Raleigh, The Way to the City,p. 23; Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times,"vol. vii., pp. 45, 54, 63, 71, 78; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xiv., No. 810; F. D. Maurice, Gospel of St. John,p. 341; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 61; Homiletic Magazine,vol. xiv., p. 170; J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays after Trinity,part ii., p. 451. Joh 13:1-5. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 119. John 13:1-11. A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve,p. 342. Joh 13:1-14. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iii., p. 80.