NOTES for Jo1 1:1-10

In verse 3 we read: “so that you too may have fellowship with us.” It follows that people’s fellowship with one another is conditioned by each person’s communion with God. Only communion with Him, only prayer, makes the experience of one person’s Encounter with another possible. He unites us. He teaches us to love.

Yet the Apostle John describes not simply communion with God, but the assurance of a man who saw Jesus Christ with his own eyes and touched Him with his own hands. He bears witness to this in his epistle, showing that fellowship is built upon testimony. We can testify to what we ourselves have learned about God through our own experience and thereby give life. Today we cannot physically stretch out a hand and touch the Lord’s hand, and few people receive apparitions. Does that mean that fellowship and life are now impossible, at least the kind of which the apostle writes?

There is the experience of Encounter: when you communicate with someone and understand that the Lord is in him, that when you look at him you see God, and when you touch him you touch God. Sometimes this is indeed an extraordinary person whose life makes it obvious that he follows Christ and imitates Him. But sometimes it happens quite unexpectedly: you simply meet someone’s gaze and suddenly experience genuine joy that the Lord created us so different from one another; you look into another person’s eyes and learn something new about God. It is the experience of encounter and the experience of joy.

In God there is no darkness at all. In every person there is both light and darkness. Yet a spark of the divine Light can be discerned in everyone. The Lord forgives us our sin and our darkness, illuminates the darkest corners of the soul, and burns away sin with the fire of His love and His forgiveness.