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.

Phil has posted a good quote from Brevard Childs on what makes for a good commentary:

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. In one of many statements that the Elder makes as to his reason for writing, he claims that one of his purposes is sanctifactory. He writes to aid the congregation to refrain from sin. The liberating implication of this is clearly that sin can, in fact, be avoided. It is possible to walk in the light and not in the darkness. Liberation is a reality that can be experienced and practiced. As the rest of the treatise goes on to make clear, what is central in the Elder’s definition of sin is a failure to love one another and make truthful confession regarding Christ. Thus, one of the key purposes of the treatise is to drive its readers into a life fully suffused by the Love that flows from the triune God. Indeed, despite its heavy concentration of “sin” language, there is nothing whatsoever that is moralistic about 1 John. For the Elder sin is the refusal of love. In the thought of the Elder all moralizations of sin are undone. There are simply two options: to refuse participation in the Love that God is, or to accept it with joy and thanksgiving.

And this all coalesces in one overriding theological point: not sinning is not a moral accomplishment. Rather is it simply a life of fullness, a life that participates in the plenitude of God’s Love. As such, it is important to say that on one level, not sinning is easy–to not sin simply names the posture and practice of saying Yes to God’s infinite Love.

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. The Elder is not naive, of course. He knows how deep the human “No” to God runs. Our slavery to sin, our perverse and irrational necrophilia is endemic. Living into Christ’s defeat of death, while liberating, joyful, and infinitely delightful, is difficult for us precisely because it is so utterly and apocalyptically new. The adjustment of our eyes to the fullnes of the God who is light and in whom there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5) is not simplistically achieved. The vestiges of the old age that is passing away still vie for our allegiance. 

But in full knowledge of the reality of the depths of the human “No” to God, the Elder reminds his readers of the infinitely greater depths of God’s “Yes” to us in Christ. Even in the fullness of our rejection of the Love that is God, Love goes further. Christ, the man for others is our advocate with the Father. This should not be understood as Christ interceding with an angry God on our behalf. Christ is not rescuing us from God, but from our own darkness. The emphasis in the Elder’s statement is not the Christ is holding God back from angrily dealing with us, rather the emphasis is that our advocate, the one who stands for us is with the Father. The one who loves us is in the very presence of the fullness of God’s transcendent mystery. His closeness to the Father, to the source and goal of all things is our hope. No other power can be higher than the power that is with the Father. There is no sovereignty that extends beyond or above this. 

And he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. Not only is Jesus our advocate, according the the Elder he is also the sacrifice for out sins. What this means is, of course, a very complex thing to search out, as many have done in different and conflicting ways. Jesus is a hilasmos according to this verse; the meaning of this phrase is not clear. It likely has some connection with the Jewish day of atonement (cf. Heb 2:17; 9:5). The point, however, is that whatever else Jesus is, he is the one who solves the problem of our sin, our refusal of love, or alienation from the Love that is God. Also what is crucial to note about this verse is that it claims that Jesus is the hilasmos for our sins, just as he is the parakletos with the Father. Christ’s sacrifice, however we construe the matter is not something that just happened “then”; it is something that “is.” Christ’s reality towards us as “sacrifice” is a present reality, not simply a past event. Christ is our sacrifice. What might this mean?

In one of his most fruitful suggestions, Colin Gunton argues that we ought to construe God’s own trinitarian life in terms of sacrifice. The triune God embodies an economy of mutual sacrifice in which sacrifice is construed as gift. Here sacrifice is not to be understood as the diminution of one for the sake of the other, at least not as if that dynamic were a zero sum game. Rather the very economy of God’s being is one of total and complete self-giving, a life of absolute, ek-static gift. As such, to say that Christ is our “atoning sacrifice” is to say that in Christ the infinite life of God’s mutual self-gift is opened to us in all its fullness. We are invited into the “sacrificial” economy of God’s own trinitarian life of joy and rejoicing. This is also why the Scriptures speak at length of our call to offer ourselves to God as a living sacrifice of praise (e.g. Rom 12:1-3). Praise, doxology, is the appropriate response to our graced participation in God life of infinite excessive gift. Because Christ is our sacrifice, the sacrifical opening out of the triune God to embrace the world, we are freed into a life of sacrifice–a doxological life centered on loving one another (as the Elder emphasizes) and worshipful confession of the lordship of Jesus.

It is precisely the ek-static trinitarian understanding of sacrifice that lends intelligibility to the Elder’s further statement that Christ is the sacrifice, not for our sins only, but for those of the whole world. The trinitarian life of sacrificial gift is so excessive in its vitality that it cannot be concerned with less than the entire world. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it (John 1:5). Rather the light overcomes all darkness. The excessiveness of light, the superabundance of Love that is the triune God cannot be terminated, even by the human “No” to God’s liberating Word of life. Christ is the sacrifice for the whole world. They excessiveness of God’s trinitarian agape could not allow him to be anything less.

“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” Following the introductory declaration, the elder gets straight to the point of the treatise: God. At the center of everything in First John is the reality of God and who God is. There are two things to note about the elder’s description of God in this verse. First, this message about the identity of God is what “we have heard” from Christ himself. Christ and Christ alone is the soured of the elder’s knowledge about God that he is seeking to impress on the church (cf. John 1:18; 2 John 9). Second, the message about God that we have learned from Christ is that God is light; there is no darkness in God. There is no ambiguity in God according to the elder. God has no inner dark side, no secret agenda; God is simply light, the fullness of purity and goodness.

“If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true;” Herein lies one of the major linchpins of First John, namely that we cannot participate in God’s life while living in sin. The elder is not esoteric; he proclaims no mysticism that could be separated from ethics. Union with God through Christ is ethical through and through. We cannot become a partaker of the divine nature (cf. 2 Pet 1:4) except under the form of discipleship; our participation in God can only take the form of a cruciform life, a life devoted to embodying in our own practices the singular love that God has revealed to us in Christ. For the elder our union with God, our communion with the fullness of divinity is utterly and completely earthly—it is nothing more or less than a call to live in the self-abandoning love of Jesus, walking in that love, and practicing it in all things. Deification means discipleship.

Moreover, what is ultimately at stake in our call to truly have fellowship with God is the issue of truth. Any claim to being union with God while living a life not shaped by Christ’s agape is a life under the bondage of the lie. Truth, for the elder is the reality of God and what God has accomplished. We “do” the truth in being conformed to God’s love. Any claim to union with God outside of this conformity to love is to live in futility and bondage to falsehood.

“but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” Here the elder states the antithesis of the life bound over to falsehood: the life of mutual fellowship among the forgiven. For the elder here, the opposite of lying and failing to “do what is true” is to live a life of fellowship with one another. The opposite of falsehood is the community of the forgiven. Truth is inseparable from our life together as the forgiven ones of Christ.

The life lived in the light is a life to be walked, it is a road, a pilgrimage of discipleship. And the first thing to be said about this path is that to walk it is to be bound up with one another. The elder mentions first that we have fellowship with one another, and only then goes on to mention that the blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin. The experience of forgiveness and sanctification cannot be described except in light of mutual fellowship.

Note also that the passage here does not say that the blood of Christ cleanses us from “our sins”, but from “all sin” (cf. John 1:9). Though this certainly includes any sins we have committed, as verse 9 below makes quite clear, the communal note on which this verse opens seems to be the focus here. We are cleansed, not simply of our own guilt, but of all the ways in which the powers of sin and death have marked and debilitated our lives. The point of the elder is that all the power of sin is broken and that in following after Christ we are freed from the tyranny of its powers. To be sure this includes the erasure of our guilt, but that is but a sliver of the fullness of liberation that the elder is trying to communicate. We are freed from all sin, from the control of all powers, from the debilitation of all ideologies, from the reign of death itself (cf. 1 John 3:14). For the community of the forgiven, the power of sin itself is broken, and this reality of liberation is precisely what grounds the Johannine call to mutual love, the practice of which is the very reality of life itself, life in God.

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” In further elaboration of the nature of salvation, the elder goes on here to make clear that our salvation cannot consist in any sort of self-deceived notion of our own righteousness. The vision of salvation articulated here is centered in truthfulness. The only way for us to have fellowship with God, to participate in the divine life is through the truthful acknowledgment of our condition. The great enemy of salvation is self-deception. Participation in God only comes through the agony of truth; only in facing the reality of our shattered and sinful lives do we find liberation and union with God.

“If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Confession. Confession is the key to life, the key to living within the reality of salvation. The essence of confession of sin is truthfulness. Confession is not public humiliation, or even personal acts of confiding in another. Rather confession is the truthful naming of ourselves and our action. Confession is how we are called to speak ourselves truthfully. It is the supremely painful and horrifyingly personal act of saying our ugliness, of proclaiming our corruption, and doing so without any qualifying remarks. Confession is our practice of truthing ourselves.

The supreme theological point though, is that for the Christian, confession can be borne. The truth can be faced. The truth can be acknowledged without fear. It can be so because the truth is Christ himself (cf. John 14:6). Christ who is at once our judge and our redeemer, from him we can bear the truth about ourselves. The truth about us, and our sinfulness consigns us to death. The reality of our fallenness and our brokenness is beyond fixing. Outside of Christ the truth about ourselves must be avoided at all costs, for the only end of it is death. In Christ however, the fear of death lies broken. In Christ alone full truthfulness is finally possible without despair unto death. Or rather, despair unto death can be borne in light of the resurrection. The one who is faithful and righteous forgives, cleanses, and resurrects us in Christ. And for this reason, and only this reason, we are able to bear the truth, and indeed to find the true and only freedom therein. In Christ, confession is the very life of freedom itself.

“If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” The lie above all lies, that we have not sinned. Indeed, the denial of sin is the very opposite of confession, and it has the opposite effect. Confession breaks through the bonds of slavery and self-deception, freeing us into the life of the community of the forgiven. Denial of sin however boxes us into ourselves and closes us forever off from the Word of life. Denial of sin is the absolute insistence on our own capacity, our own ability, our own integrity. Denial of sin, the declaration of innocence, like the declaration of accomplishment is utter and total slavery. To deny our sin is the see the truth about ourselves and refuse to believe that it can be borne in Christ. It is the only alterative to the freedom of confession; it is the visceral insistence that we cannot be false, therefore everyone else must be. Even God must be made a liar so that we can insist on our own truthfulness. The declaration of innocence is thus the ultimate slavery. The call of the elder is that we abandon such false and contrived innocences and be drawn into the true and only freedom, the life of agonizing, liberating truthfulness. The life of confession and forgiveness, of death and resurrection.

“We declare to you what was from the beginning” The treatise opens by hearkening back to the first proclamations of the Johannine Gospel (cf. John 1:1-4). That which “was from the beginning” echoes the first statement of the Johannine Gospel, that “in the beginning was the Word.” Here, however there is perhaps more of a double entendre at work. Throughout the treatise there is recurring emphasis on the “message” which the recipients of the letter have had “from the beginning” (cf. 1 John 2:7, 24, 3:11; also 2 John 5-6). So, the elder here may be referring, not simply to Jesus, the eternal Word made flesh, but the truthful proclamation regarding the Word that the community has had and received from the beginning of their existence (but, see also 1 John 2:13, 14b). However, it is clear that both ideas are difficult to disentangle in Johnnaine theology. He who is from the beginning is disclosed in and through the true teaching, the tradition that has been handed on to the church from their own beginning. The point, however remains the same regardless. At the outset of the letter, the elder is making a declaration, a theological manifesto that he is presenting to the congregation regarding the truth about the Jesus Christ. What we have in 1 John is an act of proclamation par excellence. At the heart of the treatise is is the centrality of proclaiming the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Word who came in the flesh.

“What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life–this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us” Having introduced his treatise with the declaration of the his intent to proclaim that gospel, the true teaching about Christ, the elder moves on by filling out the nature of Christ’s being-revealed, and the nature of his own witness to Christ’s revelation. What is clear in the description here is the fullness of the reality of Christ’s own self-disclosure. Christ has not just been heard, but seen, looked at, and touched. In short, Christ has a fundamentally historical, or even empirical reality to his person. Moreover, Christ’s concrete, earthly reality is connected here precisely with his role as the giver and possessor of life. It is precisely in and as the historical, tangible, and fleshly person of Jesus that the divine Word of life enters and saves the world. The life of the Father is embodied in the seen, heard, and touched flesh of Jesus the Son. This is the reality that is proclaimed.

This fixation on the fleshly tangibility and historicity of Christ is central throughout Johannine theology, and is the distinctive emphasis of 1 John. Indeed it proves to be one of the two central issues of contention in the rest of the treatise. Above all it is important to the elder that the congregation rightly understand the relationship between Jesus’ fleshly, historical reality and the fullness of salvation and deification. There is no union with God, no transformation other than participation in the singular reality of Christ’s flesh, his history, his worldedness.

“We declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us” Now the elder begins to give the rational for his proclamation of Jesus up to this point. The point of his proclamation of the Gospel of Christ is fellowship, communion. Within this claim lies the corollary that outside of the this proclamation and its acknowledgement there is no fellowship between the elder and the congregation. Their unity, their fraternal bond is to be found nowhere else than in their mutual confession of the truth of the Gospel (cf. 2 John 4).

“And truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” Moreover, the elder is concerned, not simply with communal bonds between himself and the congregation, as if they were ends in themselves or independent goods. Rather, his concern for mutual fellowship is grounded in the fact that he and those who share in the true confession of the Gospel of Christ are united in fellowship with the Father. It is unity in confession of the truth of the Gospel that is the prerequisite and assumption of communion with the triune God. And indeed, as the rest of the treatise will make clear, it is impossible to have communion with the Father outside of the the true confession of Jesus’s lordship, which as we shall see is intimately concerned with the assertion of his historical, tangible humanity.

“We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete” Finally the elder makes clear the ultimate cause of his proclamation: the completion of his joy. True life, communion with the triune God, communal harmony, indeed all good gifts are to be found only in the proclaimed reality of Christ who has come in the flesh. As such, the apostolic heart of the elder is restless until all those whom he knows and loves find rest in Christ. And this is the outcome of all those who strive to proclaim the Gospel: the joy of common participation in the life of the Trinity. The outcome of truthful confession, of exhortation, of intercession for the Gospel is the fullness of joy that is only accomplished through God’s gracious giving of Godself in Jesus, in the Word made flesh. This desire, for the common union of the congregation with God though Christ is the underlying end, the supreme desire and goal of the elder’s heart. All the he writes throughout this letter is animated by this impassioned longing, for communion with the triune God, not without, but only with his brothers and sisters.

1. Theological commentary is a practice of  commenting on Scripture. It is not an attempt to excavate the determinate meaning of the text, or make definitive statements about the text as such.

2. Theological commentary is theological. It is a practice of reading and interacting with Scripture from a distinctly Christian perspective that is fundamentally informed by Christian commitments to the triune God and the centrality of Jesus Christ.

3. Theological commentary is part of the church’s missional task. Commenting on Scripture is a way of holding Scripture “open” before oneself and the church as a whole, calling us into the story told therein. It is a way of situating ourselves within the story of God’s own trinitarian drama of salvation. As such theological commentary is a practice of attempting to find our place within God’s missional calling on his people.

4. Theological commentary is a discipline, the aim of which is to facilitate our own sanctification and transformation. There are many aims and ends of commenting on Scripture, but the immediate aim of theological commentary is to encounter the Word of God in the text of Scripture and in that encounter to be caught up more deeply into the communio that is the triune life of God.

5. Theological commentary is ecclesial in shape and practice. Commenting on Scripture theologically means doing so within the context of the church’s interpretive tradition and history. It likewise means doing so within the immediate communal setting of the local church which serves as the primary locus of testing and exploring claims and questions about Scripture.

6. Theological commentary is an offering to the church for consideration, dissection, correction, and edification. It is to be done in the mode of gifting, not in the mode of confrontation. Unlike the role of the preacher who is called to confront the church with the Word of God, theological commentary is a humble attempt to engage with the Word of God, not knowing how such engagement will turn out. It is prior to and grounds the practice of proclamation.

7. Theological commentary is not done rightly unless done in the context of doxology and prayer. The end of theological commentary is an ever-deepening union with the triune God through Christ. Such communion only occurs through being drawn, by the Spirit of Christ, into God’s life through the posture of worship.

8. Theological commentary is never finished in any sense whatsoever. In that Scripture participates in God’s economy of revelation and reconciliation, there is a plenitude to Scripture that precludes ever having come to the end of meditating on any and all of it. The depth of riches contained in Scripture can never be exhausted thought theological commentary or any other form of exegetical engagement with Scripture. Rather the Scriptures are penultimately inexhaustible, a place of living and dwelling that will never be fully explored prior to the consummation of all things in God.