NOTES for Jo1 3:21

The question of what is and what is not sin becomes one of the central questions for every religious person. What criteria can one follow in this case? The Bible offers us commandments and many different interpretations of them.

In essence, all biblical books are in one way or another connected with the question of keeping or violating the commandments given by God. But one can relate to keeping them in different ways. One can be guided by external criteria, as most believers usually do. In that case much depends on how one understands this or that commandment, how one interprets it. What, for example, should be considered or not considered murder, theft, sexual immorality, blasphemy?

The Decalogue already forbids all this. But there have been and still are many variants of interpreting the commandments of the Decalogue. Above all because all interpreters in one way or another analyzed them from outside, as if from the side, trying to establish rules and laws given once and for all. The Bible itself refutes such an approach. Already the Old Testament offers us at least two variants of legislation based on the Decalogue. And they do not coincide in everything. Thus the Bible seems to tell us: do not seek the only true and only possible interpretation; it does not exist. The fulfillment of the commandments depends on place and time.

Only God's will is unshakable, those divine intentions that stand behind each of the commandments of the Decalogue. A person's behavior can differ in different situations. Old Testament legislation is only an example of how the commandments can and should be applied in real life. There could have been more such examples. And in order not to become confused, God's commandments must become for a person an inner spiritual imperative. What in Gospel times was called the inner Torah.

Its commandments, as Jeremiah said, are not carved on stones, but written in the human heart. Then every situation will be perceived by a person through the prism of this inner Torah. And one will be able to rely on one's heart in what concerns sin or its absence. If the heart, led by the inner Torah, does not condemn a person, then he can calmly turn to God. Such a person, of course, is not sinless either, but he can say to himself and to God from a pure heart: in the struggle with my sin I have done everything I could.

"Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God..." The heart... but why the heart? After all, the ability to make judgments would seem to belong to the mind, not the heart. There was a man who was not religious at all, a man of the modern age (he lived in the seventeenth century), Francois de La Rochefoucauld, a moralist who anticipated the appearance of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, and he said this: the mind is always the dupe of the heart. He may have meant something other than what we are about to make him say. But here is another opinion, from a very different person who lived at about the same time, the words of Spinoza: passions are not overcome by reason, but only by stronger passions. We are not speaking of this by chance now, and it is not by chance that the Apostle speaks of the heart not condemning us, for we are standing at the doors of Great Lent. We will eat less and feed our brains worse in order to make the heart more sensitive and to let it tell us whether it condemns us. Very often, if not always, we repent of what our mind offers us for confession. And what are our sins? Almost all of them are passions, and so we try to overcome them with the mind. Of course, we try to make it look as though we conquer them by asceticism... But what asceticism can there be for a modern city dweller who has to go to work every day and think at work despite hypoglycemia, who has to run around with children and elderly parents? Asceticism in the true sense is impossible under such conditions; all of this is only self-restraint within our strength. So only the mind remains to help us with the passions. Yet here is the witness of two very different people that this may be completely useless. And now let us return again to the Apostle's words: "...if our heart does not condemn us..." Let us look at this wondrous organ, the heart. It is one of the most frequent words in the Bible. Here is what B. Vysheslavtsev, the philosopher of the heart, as some call him, writes: "It is necessary to recognize the heart as the primary organ of religious experience. In the simplicity and accessibility of this word 'heart,' this symbol constantly present in ordinary speech, lies its high religious value. A person 'without a heart' is a person without love and without religion; irreligion is, in the end, heartlessness." Let us dedicate Great Lent to receiving the Sacred Heart of Jesus into our own heart and to finding, in the boundless Sacred Heart of Jesus, a little place for our heart.

The thought that the apostle John wants to convey to us is extremely simple: believe in Jesus and love one another. But how many times does the apostle repeat it in this short text and in an epistle that is not very long? He approaches it from different sides and uses examples from Holy Scripture and from life in order to communicate what is most important and self-evident to him. This clarity is the clarity of the spirit; beyond it, everyone encounters the powerlessness of words, which are unable to convey spiritual experience, the experience of touching the truth. It is impossible to keep revelation within oneself: streams of living water flow from the person who has come to know God who is Love; and every time the apostle says, “love one another,” it is obvious to him that there truly is nothing more important. But these words will remain an empty sound until the person reading them touches the living God, until they simply love. Only then does a person become able to understand that nothing is more important than love, and that this is precisely why evil attacks so fiercely any sign that somewhere—even only a little, and not yet in the way John writes about it—people choose not hatred but love.