NOTES for Jo1 2:29-3:6

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.”

The Apostle John draws a very clear analogy with our human infancy. When we are born, we are already “human young,” although we can do almost none of the things a human being can do. Nothing about us is clear yet: who shall we be, what shall we be like? All of this develops and is revealed gradually. Yet it is very important that, as we grow and mature, we meet and communicate with other people, for this is how we learn what it means to be human. If this does not happen, then our “human likeness” is not realized either, as all real rather than fictional stories of “Mowgli children” attest.

It is exactly the same in our Christian life. In Baptism we died and were born anew as children of God, and we are already alive, although we are still infants. We do not yet understand very well what we shall be like when we grow up, but trusting in God’s goodness we want to become like Him. To do so, we meet Him and communicate with Him, for now “through a glass, darkly,” yet we know that a moment will come when we shall meet “face to face.” If we continue steadily toward this meeting, we shall enter “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”

It is astonishing to understand that we are purified from sin and lawlessness by hope in God alone. For it seems that hope is so little, so easy, while to love and to believe are much harder.

Hope is the awareness that God can make the world and ourselves completely new, can transform everything, outside and inside. Hope is the refusal to rely on the experience that something is impossible, that something "does not happen," for with God all things are possible; He is the "Lord of the impossible."

Such hope purifies, because understanding that God will transform us so much that we will "see Him as He is" and "be like Him" leads to the fear of the Lord and to trembling, to the desire to become obedient children of a loving Father, to avoid sin, and to await the Meeting.

It has historically been that the large majority sees Christianity as one of the world religions today. But is it really the case? Certainly, if Jesus had created Himself any new religion, Christianity would have been precisely one of religions, and could be nothing else. But He did nothing similar. He left on earth not a religious community, but a community of people living in the Kingdom.

And the church is this community of people living in the Kingdom. But later around this community and on its base were formed diverse Christian religions: Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism and others, smaller and that is why less known. The life of the Kingdom in itself does not depend on the religiosity of man, and does not define it.

But indeed, we can say the same about righteousness! Righteousness in all periods and in all the biblical books was connected not much with the religious tradition and religious canon, as with the keeping of commandments, which is unconceivable without constant daily opposition to sin penetrating into the fallen world.

And a complete righteousness is possible only in the Kingdom, in the world transformed by the breath of God, where there is no more place for sin. But if it is so, then every righteous man has a more direct and more immediate relation to the Kingdom. And thus, he has a direct and immediate relation with Christ, Who brought this Kingdom into the world.

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.

In our time, once again, as has happened more than once before, many Christians have grown increasingly anxious in their expectation of the Antichrist's coming. We have no grounds for rejecting the prophecies of the coming, at the end of time, of the son of perdition who opposes God, if only because such opposition, now growing stronger, now weaker, has continued throughout history. But fear of the Antichrist must not paralyse us so completely that we forget that Christ is stronger and that, viewed from the end of time, the Antichrist has already been defeated. Yet when we read some popular pamphlets about the imminent end of the world, in which fear of the approaching darkness outweighs hope of salvation, it is hard to escape the impression that the forces of evil are making every effort to persuade Christians that they are invincible. Besides, over the past centuries, who has not been taken for the Antichrist!

Yet although we do not know when the chief, final Antichrist will come, we can recognise the many ‘little antichrists’ in time; and if we cannot recognise them, we certainly will not learn to recognise the chief one. Here John points out their distinguishing marks. Incidentally, we are used to translating the Greek anti as against, but the word has another meaning: in place of. The Antichrist not only opposes Christ but also wants to displace Him from believers' minds and put himself in His place. We could name a great many modern false prophets who claim this role and have succeeded in deceiving, and often destroying, very many people.

The apostle's words that ‘whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either’ echo Christ's words: ‘...no one comes to the Father except through Me’ (Jn 14:6). Even now, many find this hard to accept, and the apostle's words might seem unduly harsh if they did not reflect reality: it is possible to strive towards the Father, and even to have some idea of Him, without knowing the Son, but life in union with God is possible only in Christ.

The words of the apostle John in today's passage from his First Catholic Epistle largely continue the manner of thought and expression of God through the Old Testament prophets. Many of them said that ignorance of God was the principal cause of sin and lawlessness in people—not the absence of information about the requirements of the law, but the absence of knowledge of God. And now, after all the events of Christ's earthly life, death, and resurrection, the apostle says that the truth about God has been revealed to us. This truth is such that it enables us to abide in the Father and the Son. What does this mean? How should we understand these words about abiding in God?

The apostle himself explains this in the famous words: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called and be children of God.” Returning once more to one of the Epistle's principal themes, he speaks of the distinguishing marks of God's children: practicing righteousness and loving one's brothers.

Although in this passage the apostle speaks only about the Father and the Son, his revelation nevertheless has a Trinitarian character. For the tone of astonishing purity, tenderness, and light clearly bears witness that he writes under the inspiration of the Spirit.

Whom does the apostle mean when he speaks of ‘antichrists’? Today's usage associates the figure of the antichrist with something infernal; to us, an antichrist is necessarily a creature of hell. John, however, evidently uses the word in its original sense: an antichrist is someone who opposes Christ, the Messiah. An opponent of the Messiah. And the apostle offers what seems to be one of the earliest Christian creeds in the history of the Church, consisting of a single statement: whoever does not accept Jesus as the Christ, as the Messiah, is not a Christian. In refusing this confession, a person also loses the Father, and communion with God itself becomes impossible for them. Such a statement may seem too harsh.

It also seems to contradict the experience of spiritual life: today, there can hardly be any doubt that communion with God is possible in traditions other than Christianity. But John makes one important qualification. He says that the antichrists he mentions ‘went out from us’, from the Christian community, from the Church. In doing so, they proved that they ‘had never been of us’. Evidently, he is speaking not simply of non-Christians, but of Christians who have fallen away. Of those who had already entered the Church and then, of their own free will, left it.

Not of those who are seeking their spiritual path or have found it outside the Church, but of those who have turned aside from their path or abandoned it altogether. Such a renunciation always carries the risk of serious spiritual consequences, even the loss of the possibility of conscious communion with God. This concerns not only Christians, although Christians naturally bear a particular responsibility. Any abandonment of one's spiritual path, whatever that path may be, leads to similar consequences. Simply because every step along a spiritual path changes a person, objectively and irreversibly.

On leaving the Church, a person does not return to the state they were in before conversion and baptism. After baptism, returning to that state is impossible. One may become an unbeliever and cease to belong to the Church, but one cannot become ‘unbaptised again’. A spiritual life not lived through to the end is an unpleasant thing: it always takes its revenge. The possibilities given to a person may destroy their life if they refuse to use them. And this is more true of spiritual possibilities than of any others.