NOTES for Jo1 3:1

On All Saints' Day, it is no surprise to find the Beatitudes and a passage from Revelation among the readings. But the three verses from the First Letter of John seem surprising, and therefore very important. What do we immediately find, at first glance, in the Sermon on the Mount and the Apocalypse in relation to this feast? Of course, that holiness is the lot of the chosen few and is marked by qualities an ordinary person cannot attain, however hard they try. This is perhaps the one occasion when someone is ready to admit to being ordinary and good for nothing. But then we come upon these words: “everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” That is, to the purity of holiness, as God is holy. And there is a certain hope that can purify anyone to this unimaginable state. This hope—or even knowledge, as the preceding verse says—is that “when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.” On the one hand, it is simply the knowledge that we shall be like Him when we see Him. It is hard to doubt such changes: something is bound to happen when someone sees God as He is. On the other hand, it is very difficult to imagine that someone living by hatred, war, malice, greed, or anything of the kind is acting sensibly in saying, “I know I shall see Him, and everything will be all right.” Something is clearly missing here. Apparently, it is what the Beatitudes say to each of us personally, right now: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Returning to the Christian's spiritual life, John repeats again and again that Christian life and sin are incompatible. He develops an idea already expressed at the very beginning of his letter: the path of righteousness entails renouncing conscious sin, sinful intentions and sinful actions. Only the one who acts righteously, like Christ Himself, is righteous. Yet the apostle emphasises Christ's role in a special way. Indeed, it is only because of Him that we can speak of a final victory over sin. He alone is free from sin, and He alone can carry away our sins as well.

The Saviour is not merely an example of the ‘living Torah’. He is the One who can help anyone become ‘living Torah’ who gives themselves to Him and shares His life, the life of the Kingdom He has brought into the world. This does not, of course, mean that the person seeking the Kingdom and following Christ no longer needs to do anything. The ordinary spiritual work, already known before Christ's coming, of which John reminds the recipients of his letter, remains absolutely necessary.

Everyone who follows Christ must be concerned with purification—complete purification—so as not to differ from their Teacher in this respect. Every sin is lawlessness, a violation of the Torah. And lawlessness must be understood literally here: not as breaking the law, but as its absence. This is roughly the same sense in which another apostle, James, says in his letter that whoever breaks one part of the Torah breaks it all. An odd statement, it would seem: sin is something specific, and so is breaking the law.

But when it comes to the inward Torah, this is exactly how things stand: any sin destroys it, producing lawlessness as the complete absence of the Law—the Torah—from a person's heart and life. John sets the bar as high as it can go, but this is understandable, for it is the Kingdom that is at stake. At the same time, the apostle points to the One who can help us enter that Kingdom if we trust Him and walk with Him rather than alone. Christian life becomes life with Christ in His Kingdom, and its purpose becomes taking root in the Kingdom and becoming, as a Christian, ‘living Torah’, like one's Teacher.

The need for purification when approaching God was recognized before, but here we encounter an entirely new motive for purification: we are called to be like God, and He is pure. We have been granted a great calling, not yet revealed in all its fullness, but even the little that we can already comprehend is enough for us to build our daily life and our relationships with those around us differently. Let no one be troubled that against the background of His absolute purity, our relative purity will inevitably stand out as less than spotless. The Lord has the power to complete the efforts we have begun so that they become “as no launderer on earth can whiten” (Mk 9:3).

Sin is identified by the apostle with lawlessness. For people accustomed to biblical thinking, this idea is familiar and natural, but those who, as is customary in our culture, are used to distinguishing the legal approach from the moral one may object that not all sins violate the laws of the state. That is true, but there are also other laws established by the Creator in the universe and in the human heart. Unlike rules devised by people, violating them leads not to human punishment but to the spiritual self-destruction of the lawless person who turns away from God and His love.

Speaking about the spiritual life of a Christian, John describes it as becoming in Christ and at the same time being established in the Torah (the Law). Jesus is the only one in whom there is no sin (1 John 3:5). In this way He showed the world the only example in history of what in those days was called the living Torah: to become the living Torah meant precisely to be the living embodiment of the ideal that the Torah requires. Accordingly, such a person had to be completely free from every sin, because sin and the Torah, sin and God's commandment, are incompatible things. That is why, before the coming of Christ, the ideal of the living Torah remained only an ideal, one toward which many strove but which no one managed to attain.

Following the Torah cleanses from sin. The inner Torah, as believing Jews of the Gospel era called it, was the spiritual imperative without which the way of righteousness was impossible. The inner Torah was the spiritual core on which the whole life of a person seeking righteousness and striving to become the living Torah was based. Any sin destroyed this core, and that is why the apostle speaks of sin as lawlessness, as a departure from the inner Torah (1 John 3:4).

But for fallen humanity, sin is a sad inevitability, and that is why the ideal of the living Torah remained unattainable. The only hope is in the Savior, who not only showed this ideal to the world but is also ready to help everyone seeking righteousness be freed from the captivity of sin (1 John 3:5). For this only one thing is needed: to give oneself and one's life into His hands, and then He will make it part of the life of the Kingdom that He brought into the world.

There is no place for sin in the Kingdom, and therefore the one who lives one life with Christ does not sin. Sin has a place only in human life separated from the life of Christ and the Kingdom (1 John 3:6). We live in the age of the Kingdom that is coming but has not yet been revealed in all its fullness, and until the end of this age, until the full transformation of humanity and all creation, our Christian life retains the duality of which the apostle speaks.

But at the end of time, after the Savior returns in glory and our human nature is fully transformed, this duality will disappear. Only then will we become what we are meant to be according to God's purpose for us (1 John 3:2). For now we are pure to the extent that we live one life with Jesus, the life of the Kingdom that He brought into the world (1 John 3:3). And not only we Christians: everyone who acts righteously has a relation to Him (1 John 2:29; in the Synodal translation, "does righteousness"). And that is not surprising, because He is the only righteous one in the world without any qualification. He is the only one who has shown the world the pattern of the living Torah.