Main news for 20 December 2025

King James Version (en)

2 John, Chapter 1, verse 6

¹ He exhorteth a certain honourable matron and her children, to persevere in Christian love and belief

⁶And this is love, that we walk after his commandments. This is the commandment, That, as ye have heard from the beginning, ye should walk in it.

NOTES

It would seem that nothing is more opposite than love and law, love and dry religious prescriptions. Yet John sees the keeping of the commandments precisely as a manifestation of love...

It would seem that nothing is more opposite than love and law, love and dry religious prescriptions. Yet John sees the keeping of the commandments precisely as a manifestation of love. How can that be?

The answer may lie in the fact that the commandments given by God, and above all the Decalogue, form the foundation of the Torah. Yet the Torah is not reducible to legislation alone. In the time of the apostle, both in the Synagogue and in the Church, there were widespread ideas of the Torah as the inner spiritual core on which all human life was founded, both spiritual life and life in general. This spiritual core was called the inner Torah, and at its heart were relationships of love that bound a person both to neighbors and to God. But it was impossible to cultivate the inner Torah in oneself without relationships with God and with one's neighbors, and those relationships were regulated by the commandments. In this way, keeping the commandments became the expression and embodiment of love, including love of neighbor.

But in the light of Christian revelation, new shades of meaning were added to these traditional ideas. First of all, of course, this concerns the love of which the Savior Himself spoke as a "new commandment." Such love is no longer simply a relationship, as it had been before, at least as most biblical authors understand love: for them it is primarily an attitude toward another person, aimed first of all at that person's good. It also becomes the spiritual environment without which there is no Kingdom. Love becomes a kind of nature of the Kingdom, its spiritual substance, just as the natural elements become the natural substance of the untransformed world. And the form that gives this substance its quality is the relationships of love that bind all its inhabitants both to one another and to Christ. In such a situation, the inner Torah is no longer simply a person's spiritual core, but also that person's form, defining his own spiritual quality and the quality of his spiritual life in the Kingdom.

Then the apostle's words take on a new meaning: indeed, for love to become the environment of life, fully natural for a person, the inner Torah, unthinkable without the keeping of the commandments, must become his only form. Here one inevitably recalls the Savior's words that He came not to destroy the Torah but to bring it to fullness. To the fullness fit for the Kingdom.

Today two texts are read which, at first glance, are striking because their thoughts do not coincide. The Second Epistle of John can be called...

Addressing an unnamed “elect lady”, John speaks of confessing Christ as a necessary condition of Christian life. The apostle goes even further, asserting that whoever does not confess Jesus as the Messiah “does not have God”. Such a claim may seem debatable: hardly anyone would seriously venture to assert that no one in the world except Christians has any experience of communion with God. But the apostle's words become clearer in the context of his references to “deceivers” who “do not confess the Lord Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh”. These “deceivers” are not named, but it is not difficult to imagine whom he means.

The precise date of the letter is, of course, unknown, but it may have appeared after the catastrophe of AD 70, after the Romans' destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple following the anti-Roman revolt launched by the Zealots. This destruction had a profound effect on people's minds, and whereas before AD 70 Jewish messianism had been predominantly political, after AD 70 it began quite rapidly to turn into mystical messianism. The Messiah came to be seen no longer as an earthly king, but as a supernatural figure more like an angel than a human being. It is quite understandable that this mystical “messiah” bore very little resemblance to the real Messiah, Jesus.

Apparently, among such mystically minded “Christians”, certain myths even began to circulate: that the Messiah's human nature was a mere appearance, that He had never in fact been human, and other notions of this kind. Much later, these led to the emergence within the Church of Monophysitism, against which the Church had to wage a long and determined struggle. Such “mystical Christianity” was in no way compatible with Christian spiritual life, or indeed with normal spiritual life of any kind.

Of course, since Christ's coming, no communion with God is in fact possible without His participation. But His involvement in people's lives is by no means always apparent. Christ does not impose Himself on people, just as His heavenly Father does not impose Himself on them. Nevertheless, every instance of communion with God, if it is genuine, now involves Him, even if the person seeking God does not see Him. This statement, however, holds only for genuine communion with God.

If, instead of communion with God and Christ, a person begins to pursue “mystical” phantoms, mirages produced by their own fevered imagination, there can be no question of communion with God. The genuine, living Christ leads a person to God; images of Christ produced by human imagination lead them away from God. This is precisely what the apostle means when he speaks of confessing “Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh”. Otherwise, with an illusory Messiah, the Kingdom too will prove to be an illusion rather than a reality for the seeker.

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