I. Look at the command of brotherly love as it was given in old time. It was contained in the last six of the Ten Commandments; or putting on one side the fifth commandment as being of a peculiar kind, referring to one particular duty and not to our duty to our neighbour in general, we may say that the command to love one another is contained in the last five commandments of the decalogue. All these commandments, you will observe, are employed in telling us what we may notdo, saying nothing of the things which we ought to do. The actual form of the law of loving our neighbours, as given in the Old Testament, was a prohibitory law; not an active law of love depending for its force upon a spring of love within, but a law which, if obeyed according to the letter, would sunder only certain offences, and might be kept thus by a man whose heart was as hard as a flint.
II. If you examine the precepts of loving our neighbours, as given by the Lord Jesus Christ, I think you will perceive that the peculiarity and the strength of them consist in this very thing, that they imply active, self-denying exertions for our brother's good. That love is emphatically Christian which, setting aside all consideration of self-advantage, and running beyond the mere negative duty of doing our neighbour no wrong, goes forth with activity, life, and zeal to show itself in works of mercy and deeds of loving-kindness to our brethren. The commandment was newbecause Christ had only then come to explain it; it was newbecause it could not have been conceived before His life exhibited its meaning; it was new because the love which He showed was something altogether beyond the power of man to have imagined for himself; and, as in science we reckon him to be the discoverer of a new law who rises above the guesses and glimpses of his predecessors, and establishes upon new ground, and in a manner which can never afterwards be questioned, some great principle which had been partly conceived before; so I think we may say that the law of brotherly love, as illustrated by the example of our Lord, the law of self-denying, active efforts for our brother's good, the law which stamps the great principle of selfishness as a vile and execrable principle, might be truly described as a new commandment which Christ gave to His disciples.
Bishop Harvey Goodwin, Parish Sermons,3rd series, p. 258.
References: John 13:34-35. B. Dale, Christian World Pulpit,vol. v., p. 3 3 John 1:13 :35. Homiletic Magazine,vol. xii., p. 18. John 13:36. Ibid.,vol. vii., p. 22. Joh 13:36-38. A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve,p. 392.