Brothers and sisters, here is the amazing thing that we have to deal with, that is so hard for us to understand. That is even harder for the world to understand. The thing that trips us up, the thing we cannot catch up with, that we cannot ever grasp is how great, how singular, how unprecedented, how utterly surprising and evernew is the love that God the Father has given to us in Jesus Christ. Through his act of love, uninterrupted, untainted, unqualified love, God has made us, in him, to be God’s own children, God’s own family. Make no mistake about it, brothers and sisters, that is what we are. And we are that, only in, through, and by God’s radical act of love in Jesus Christ, the Nazarene, the one we crucified, the one that the Father raised up, and who came back to us again speaking peace to us. The thing we cannot catch up with, that we can never grasp, never fully understand, is that somehow, through some miracle, God has made us part of God’s own life. We are God’s children! That is what we are!
And that, brothers and sisters, is why the world is confused by us, why they do not understand us when we speak about the Gospel. They don’t recognize us because they did not recognize Jesus, the one who has made us what we now are. Brothers and sisters, this is the miracle, that we are God’s children now. And yet, there is so much about this that eludes us. It is so weighty, so much greater than we can know and comprehend, indeed we cannot understand it. What this all means, what it will be, how it will be revealed, how we will live forever in God, what God’s victory shall look like, and what the world made new will be, brothers and sisters, these things we do not know. We cannot possess them, catch hold of them, grasp them, explain them, and hand them out to others as if they were goods and services. All of this is too wonderful for us.
There is only one thing we can dare to say we know. We know that when Jesus is apocalypsed, when he is revealed, manifested, when his transfiguring kingdom breaks forth in its ultimate fullness, when all this comes to pass we know this: that we will be like him. We will see him as he truly is. We will see, with unveiled faces, the fullness of the singular, radical, uninterrupted, and evernew Love that Jesus is. And then, brothers and sisters, on that day, we will be like that. We will finally shed all that remains of our blindness and our self-deception, and we will see the Love, the so-great Love of God that Father that is Jesus. And when we see it, we will be transformed. We will be like that. We will be loosed from all our hidden shadows and darknesses and be transformed. We will live, without reserve in that one great Love.
This is our hope, brothers and sisters. And every one of us who hope in this find ourselves working. We work, we struggle, we cry out, we yearn together to be made single-mindedly devoted to this Love. We strive to unify our divided hearts so that we might love without interruption, just as Jesus loves without interruption. We work for this, we encourage one another in this, we pray for one another in this, we weep with one another when we fail in this, and we keep on going together in this. We search, we pray, we yearn, we work, we study, we listen—all so that we may grow up into the Love that Jesus is.
And when we sin, when anyone sins, we shy away from this undivided Love. We cease to let it be the one true thing, our one true “law”. We seek to be unmoored from single-minded devotion. We long to divide things up once again into secret spheres where we can rule our own lives. When sin we are guilty of the worst sort of anarchy, an irrational refusal to have our lives transformed in the glory of the single-minded, uninterrupted Love of God that is Jesus. Sin is the refusal of this Love. It is the refusal to make this Love our one and only “law”. Sin is lovelessness.
And you know that this is why Jesus came to us brothers and sisters! This is why Christ apocalyptically came on the scene: To take this lovelessness away! In him there is no hint of lovelessness, but only the Father’s uninterrupted act of Love, the love that brings life out of death, new creation out of the present evil age, hope out of despair, praise out of sorrow, shouts of joy out of cries of grief. This is the Love that Jesus is. There is no lovelessnes in Jesus, no hidden shadow, no dark side. He came for one reason only, to destroy lovelessness wherever it exists in this world.
This is why, brothers and sisters, that no one who has been made part of God’s family through this Love continues to live in lovelessness. Those who keep on embracing power, control, domination, fear, and death, they haven’t understood this Love. They haven’t seen it yet. They haven’t tasted and known it yet. And when you, my brothers and sisters, when we fall back into lovelessness, we forget, we cease to live as what we are: God’s children. We pull ourselves back from the Love that God is and stumble backwards into the darkness that Jesus came to take away. When we are living in the Love that Jesus is, there is no room left for lovelessness.
So brothers and sisters, don’t let anyone make you believe the lie. The lie that one can be righteous, be moral, have integrity, be worthy without living totally by Love. Everyone who lives out this Love is living in righteousness. There is no other ground, there are no other standards. To be righteous is to live the Love that is Jesus. There is no other righteousness, no other virtue, no other integrity, no other morality, no other standard by which we can assess ourselves. The only righteousness that God honors, that God creates, that God shares is the righteousness of self-abandoning Love. The only righteousness is the righteousness of crucifixion and resurrection. This is the only place we can live, this is the only hope we can stand on, this is the only life worth giving ourselves to.
Some truths to embrace:
- The world does not know Jesus. To the extent that they know us, that we make sense to the world, to its way of running, we are not living as what we are, the children of God.
- Our only hope, the only thing we have, is that who Jesus is will be our future. We know nothing else, we must seek for nothing else.
- When we really hope for the Love that is Jesus, we find ourselves working together to love better. When we really hope, we really work, and we can’t imagine not doing it.
- Sin is refusing to allow Love, the Love that is Jesus, to be our one and only law, our one and only rule, our one and only criterion for life and hope.
- It is more important to refuse to be deceived than to figure out everything that we should do, or how to answer every question. The radical “No” of God to all forms of lovelessness must always be before our eyes. Only when we let God’s “No” to lovelessness reign can we hear God’s resounding “Yes” of uninterrupted Love.
- The definition of Love is Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Theological Commentary: 1 John 2:3-6
Now by this we may be sure that we know him, if we obey his commandments. As the Elder makes clear throughout his treatise, one of the main goals of his writing is to give true and reliable modes of discernment to the church as to where they stand in relation to the God of Jesus Christ (cf. 5:13). In a situation similar to that of Paul in Galatians, the Elder is dealing with a new teaching, indeed a new (and thus false) gospel being proclaimed by a faction in the church (cf. 2:19, 22-24). It is precisely in response to the disturbance created by the presence of these teachers that the Elder writes, to instruct those who follow Christ in how to be confident in the reality of the new life that they have been given in the Spirit (cf. 3:24).
However, at this point the Elder does not point to a doctrinal formula or codify a set of dogma from which the church might be assured of its orthodoxy and rightness (though, as we will see, truthful Christological confession is of the utmost importance to him). Rather he moves straight to the issue of obedience to Christ’s commandments. As 1 John takes great pains to lay out repeatedly, “his commandments” always and only means belief and confession of Jesus as the Son of the Father, and loving one another just as Christ has loved us (cf. 3:23).
It is love that is the commandment of Christ. Love one another just as Christ, in his death and resurrection, loved us (cf. John 13:34). For the Elder it is precisely in being given over to love one another with cruciform, self-expending, death-embracing love that we know that we belong to God. It is in the action of loving, of giving yourself away for your sister or brother that we know that we are God’s children. This is the one and only assurance that the Elder offers to the doubting minds of his flock: that in their loving one another, even unto death, they will know that they belong to God.
Whoever says, “I have come to know him,” but does not obey his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist; The Elder now moves on to state the inverse of his previous assertion, in a move directly levied against the teachers he writes against. Any of those who claim knowledge of God but who refuse to give themselves over to Christ’s own mode of love, are liars. Truth and action cannot be separated for the Elder. Regardless of the content of their teachings, for 1 John there simply is no truth in those who place themselves outside of Jesus’s own concrete call to love one another unto death. In such persons there simply is no truth. For, in Johannine perspective, Christ, in all his historical singularity, is the truth (cf. John 14:6). In 1 John the utter and indissoluble unity between truth and action lies at the center. There is, definitively no orthodoxy that is not simultaneously orthopraxis, both of which are utterly defined by the cruciform identity and teaching of Jesus Christ.
but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection. We do well at this point to remember these verse’s proximity to 2:1, which holds the reality and possibility of sin ever before the believing community. By virtue of Christ and the Spirit we indeed “may not sin”, but even in that hopeful statement of the newness that is opened up in Christ we are thrown back upon Christ’s own act on our behalf as that alone on which we can ultimately depend.
Thus, when the Elder speaks of the love of God reaching perfection (or completion) in the act of faithful obedience we must always remember that this is not statement about a level of spiritual achievement or formation into perfection. Rather it is to say that in the very act of obedience to Christ’s way, that is, in the act of self-expending love for the sister or brother, in that moment, we abide fully, truly, and perfectly in the love of the triune God. “Perfection” for the Elder is not a state which we attain or into which we enter in any static sense. Rather it is always and only the event of finding ourselves given over to one another in self-expending love, the love of Jesus himself.
By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever says, “I abide in him,” ought to walk just as he walked. Finally, the Elder moves on to restate again what he first articulated in 2:3, namely how we may know that we truly dwell in God. Again the answer, though worded differently is the same: we must walk as Christ himself walked. For the Elder our confidence in our participation in the life of God is grounded always in living toward one another in cruciformity.
And this encapsulates the unique dynamic in 1 John of tying together inextricably the reality of participation in the triune life of God, and the concrete, fleshly, material, particular history of Jesus of Nazareth. It is precisely by walking in the steps of the Jew from Nazareth that we are caught up into the very life of the trinitarian God. The fullness of our deification, our participation in God’s own life is always and only explicable in terms of being united to Christ’s own particular historical life of self-divesting, kenotic love. Only in him, in his complete and utter singularity of love do we find ourselves caught up in God’s life. Any other articulation of union with God, in Johannine eyes, can only be a lie of the antichrist.