NOTES for Jo1 4:1-12

The world is filled with spiritual phenomena, events, and teachings. All this is very diverse, because even from one spirit — the Holy Spirit — very different gifts and fruits can proceed. But the Holy Spirit is not the only spirit acting in the world. How are we to understand, how are we to discern, from what spirit one or another phenomenon or teaching comes?

The apostle John offers a criterion that at first glance is somewhat unexpected. Did everything that the Spirit of God revealed to people (in the Old Testament, for example) always speak of Jesus Christ? Directly, it would seem, no. But Jesus says to the disciples: "Search the Scripture, because it speaks about Me." And the apostle Paul calls the Old Testament a "tutor leading to Christ." In fact, the chain of covenants that forms the axis of sacred history gains meaning and purpose only when it leads to the fullness of the union of God and man, and therefore to the God-manhood of Christ, to the Son of God come in the flesh.

Does this criterion "work" now, when spiritual phenomena have become more diverse than ever before, and when every teaching in one way or another is forced to reckon with the phenomenon of Christianity? I think it does "work," as a necessary but not sufficient criterion. A teaching that comes from God will necessarily affirm the God-manhood of Christ, but "mimicry" is also possible, when a "spirit not from God" teaches: "Yes, Christ, of course, but we still need..." And here we cannot do without a special gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of discerning spirits.

The apostle speaks to us about the necessity of testing the spirits, that is, distinguishing what is God's and what is satanic in life. Before these words the apostle stresses that what is characteristic of a Christian is faith, keeping the commandments, and a heart open before God. And he formulates the famous words sometimes called "the criterion of the apostle John." Every spirit, says the apostle, that confesses Christ come in the flesh is from God. If we look attentively at the history of the dogmatic development of Christianity in the era of the Ecumenical Councils, we will see that in the end all false teachings were rejected by the Church precisely according to this criterion. And conversely, correspondence to it helps distinguish Christian confessions from quasi-Christian sects.

But besides their dogmatic and historical significance, these words are also very important in the practical life of Christians. First of all, the apostle John speaks about distinguishing the spirits that speak in the human heart. What is right and what is wrong, what is worthy of a Christian and what is unworthy: to a significant degree, for distinguishing this in one's own life, one must use precisely the criterion of the apostle John.

What the apostle John says today is very simple and very hard... The constantly repeated word "love" is the key. What could be simpler? What could be harder? The apostle says that we know God lives in us by the fact that we love one another, and immediately he puts forward another version as well: that God abides in the one who confesses that Jesus is the Son of God. In general, all of us, calling ourselves Christians, already confess that He is the Son of God. Some of us even read the Creed every day. But with love things are somewhat worse... So what do we have in the way of criteria for abiding in God? This is what we get: there are no simple answers. We are in Him insofar as we believe in Him, and outside Him insofar as we do not know how to love... and only He can somehow sort out this confusion and teach us to love.

For the apostle, love and knowledge of God are not only inseparable from one another; for him they are two sides of one and the same reality. No one has ever seen God, John says, but if we love one another, then God abides "in us," and the corresponding Greek expression can mean both "within each of us" and "among us." In this case God's love abides "in us," in both meanings of the expression, in all fullness. At first glance the thought that all knowledge of God is love may seem strange. There are other forms of it, after all, that do not deny love but also do not place it at the center of a person's relationship with God.

But if love is viewed not only as relations among people but also as a form of God's presence, the primary and foundational form for the Kingdom, much becomes clearer. Indeed, how can a person see God? The only real possibility, not counting speculative abstractions that usually have no relation to genuine knowledge of God, is awareness of that breath of life which God "breathed" into a person at creation.

Consciously placing it at the center of one's own life in all its manifestations. Only in this way can knowledge of God and communion with God become reality for a person. Then God's power and God's love become reality for him too: those forms of God's presence that were accessible to humanity even before Christ came into the world. Every other experience of communion with God proves derivative from the experience of becoming aware of this Presence.

But with Christ's coming the situation objectively changes: now every experience of the Presence, if it is genuine, is inseparable from the Kingdom entering the world. The breath of life given to everyone can today become a door into the Kingdom, if only one knocks. But only Christ can open the door, and when He opens it, the new foundation of a person's life becomes the energy of love on which the whole life of the Kingdom is founded. Only the life of the fallen world is founded on natural energy, yet God is hidden even behind natural energy.

But behind the energy of love God is not hidden; in it and through it He is revealed, and therefore it lies at the foundation of the Kingdom. But if, according to the Savior's words, the Kingdom is within us and among us, then love, if we are residents of the Kingdom, will also be within us and in our midst. And behind its concrete manifestations within us and among us stands the whole fullness of God's love revealed to the Kingdom. Everything else, every form of being, awareness, and knowledge of God, is derivative from God's love. Regardless of how much people understand this.

We continue to seek signs, for it seems that without them it is so hard to believe. We continue to wait for the Lord Himself to appear to us, to dream that we will see Him with our own eyes and hear Him with our own ears.

But we do not see the miracle of love in our life. Yet these miracles precisely, when suddenly and unexpectedly you understand that this person has looked at you with love, or that your own stony heart has suddenly warmed at the thought of another person, are the sign of God's presence in our heart and in this world.

The phrase "No one has ever seen God" sounds strange on the lips of the apostle John, who reclined at the Last Supper with his head on Jesus' breast, who saw Him on the Cross and saw Him risen. Yet perhaps the apostle meant something else: that God's existence cannot be proved, that He cannot force His disciples, even those whom He calls children, and that John himself still cannot force them to believe what he saw with his own eyes and heard with his own ears.

But everyone can see love. Because even in a world full of wars, hatred, and strife, love is always present and always conquers. For God has already conquered on the Cross by His love, and He is greater than the evil of this world. God is all-conquering love.

God loved people not because they always behaved well, not because they were especially likable, not because they loved Him... He loved us for no reason at all. And when we say, “Why should I love Vasya Ivanov? He does not love me,” we move the conversation out of the realm of love and into the realm of mutual accounting and other barter exchanges. Love exists for no reason; love consists in someone simply loving—not “in response to love,” but simply...

Boldness on the day of judgment... What is the apostle John talking about? Boldness means both courage and confidence. But imagine His judgment. Eye to eye with the only Righteous One... Is it really possible at that judgment to remain calm and confident? The apostle John says that the Lord has given us enough capacity to love, and love can reach such perfection in us that we will act as He does, and therefore will not fear His judgment... Simple? Not simple at all, because this is only a capacity, a possibility. This is what He has given; His gift is boundless, His gift has been given in fullness. But the degree to which we accept His gift is another question. And it depends not on someone or something else, but on us ourselves.

"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.