NOTES for Jo1 3:1-10

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.

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.

These are astonishing words. They give us hope and at the same time condemn us. After all, we enter the new birth, birth from above, by faith in Jesus Christ. This means that in us, who believe in Him, the seed of God already abides, perhaps still very small, no larger than a mustard seed, but capable of growth. From this it follows that we do not sin. But we do sin. And whoever says that he does not sin is a liar (see 1 John 1:8-10). What is this, another contradiction? No, as always, it is not a contradiction but a paradox. To the extent that God's presence, the "seed," acts in us, to that extent we do not sin, because we cannot sin. To the extent that we ignore it, fail to take it into account, and do not give it freedom in us, to that extent we sin, because we cannot help sinning. So there is enormous hope: we can live outside sin, and this possibility has been given to us. But there is also the heaviest condemnation, because we make so little use of this possibility.

There have been many disputes in the history of the Church about orthodoxy, about ‘right faith’. Yet John gives first place not to orthodoxy, not to right opinions—the literal meaning of the Greek word ‘orthodoxy’—but to what is called by another Greek word, ‘orthopraxy’, which translates literally as ‘right actions’ or, more broadly, ‘right living’. John, however, prefers the language of the Jewish-Christian tradition and speaks not of orthopraxy but of righteousness (vv. 7, 10; in the Synodal translation, someone who acts righteously is described as ‘doing righteousness’).

God and the devil confront one another not in some grand battles on a cosmic scale, but in the lives of individual people, in the choice a particular person makes in a given situation, in the decisions that person takes. Righteousness, after all, means following the Torah and keeping the commandments given by God.

Opinions about God are not decisive as long as they do not affect orthopraxy, whether in one's relationship with God or with one's neighbour. The apostle seems to set the bar very high when he says that someone born of God does not act sinfully (v. 9; in the Synodal translation, ‘does not commit sin’). Both now and in John's time, everyone knew that there are no sinless people. The only exception is the Saviour Himself, but this is the sole example. Does this mean that people ‘born of God’ do not exist?

But it is no accident that the apostle speaks of those who ‘act sinfully’ and those who ‘act righteously’ (v. 10; in the Synodal translation, those who ‘do righteousness’). Even in pre-Christian times, the Torah distinguishes between a sin that occurred by accident and a sin resulting from an act—that is, from a conscious choice made by a person in a particular situation. Clearly, for John too there is a difference between accidental or involuntary sin, sin committed through weakness or by mistake, and sin resulting from a conscious choice. Such sin is incompatible with Christian spiritual life—and indeed with a sound spiritual life in general.

Someone who lives the life of the Kingdom will simply not think of committing a voluntary and conscious sin. And if the thought does occur, it means that they do not yet truly know anything of that life. For what is at issue is not religious convictions, however deep and correct, but the experience of another life, beside which the life of the fallen world seems not life at all but merely its pale shadow. And, of course, no one who has tasted real life will be attracted or deceived by such a shadow, just as marsh lights will not deceive someone who has seen the sun.

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.