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Our psalm this morning says "sing to the Lord a new song." That appears to be the theme this morning, that we will sing something new. In Acts, it is the new song of accepting even Gentiles into the fold of Jesus' followers, and in the Gospel, it is through the new commandment that Jesus gives to the disciples.
And yet, neither of these things is new. We see this first in Acts. We can compare the talk of the Gentiles there to Luke, where we hear the words of the Song of Simeon, familiar to those who love both Evening Prayer and Compline. There, Simeon says Jesus has come to be "a light to enlighten the Gentiles", sometimes translated "Nations", for that is what the Gentiles are, the all nations outside of Israel. So for the Gentiles to be brought into the Way, those who follow Christ Jesus, is not unexpected. Jesus came to bring them, rather us, to Him.
And Simeon is not even the first to say this. Isaiah 42:6 says that The Lord gave the commandments to Israel to be a light to the Gentiles. Israel's role as a whole has always been to make God known throughout the world. Though this may seem new, it is in fact not.
What Jesus says in the Gospel isn't new either. The command to love one another comes from the Summery of the Law, The Two Great Commandments, which we say almost every Sunday. The Two Great Commandments, to love God and love our neighbor, isn't just something Jesus came up with, but it is right there in Torah, in the Law. 1 John seems to agree with that in saying loving God is keeping His commandments.
What we hear in the Gospel isn't even new to us! We heard Jesus talk about this new Commandment two chapters before back on Maundy Thursday. Today we just hear more about what that means, specifically more on how we are called to lay down our life for one another.
So what is new is not new, and we now have to try and figure out what that means.
What it means is that God is not working something new or changing His plan, but that God is working something new in each and every one of our hearts. God has to do that radically in order to get us to sit up and listen.
Before our reading in Acts, God has shown Peter a vision of all the animals in the world, saying "kill and eat". Now many of these animals were unclean under Torah, and Peter points out that nothing unclean has ever touched his lips. God tells Peter that "nothing God has made is unclean."
Soon after, Peter is called for by a centurion, a Roman, who wishes to know more about Jesus. It is in talking with him and other Gentiles present with him that the Holy Spirit descends upon them. This normally did not happen until after Baptism. This is God trying to tell the early followers of Jesus in a radical and undeniable way what they should already have known: Gentiles too were being called to get baptized and follow Jesus.
And no, what Jesus is telling His disciples in the Gospel is not really new. But in a sense, it is new for His disciples, and it is certainly a new take on the old. What Jesus is doing is trying to prepare His disciples for His own death. He is trying to prepare the disciples for the new leadership they will soon have to take on. Jesus is trying to wake them up to follow Him in a more profound way.
Jesus shook the whole world up by following His own teaching to the letter and loving the whole world to the point of death. It was the wake up call we all needed. We needed to see a man die to save the world. We needed to see God die in order to try and bring us all back to be with Him.
And now it's our turn. What new thing is God putting in to our lives so that we will listen? In what way is God trying to wake each and everyone of us up so that we will listen to what He has really been saying to us all along?
God is always talking to us. His message has always been the same, that He is trying to pave the way for us to come back in relationship with Him. But to hear what God is saying, we have to be actively listening. Sometimes, that means God has to shake us up so that we can hear Him.