NOTES for Jo1 5:14-15

John's words about receiving what is asked of God through Jesus Christ can seem overly optimistic. Indeed, almost every Christian has experience of unanswered requests with which he turned to God, turned to Christ, either receiving no answer at all or receiving not the answer he counted on and hoped for. Yet such experience characterizes not so much God's responsiveness or the Savior's attitude toward us as our own spiritual condition. Words about faith sound textbook in such a context, but that does not make them any less deeply true.

Of course, this means faith as trust in God, not faith as a system of views and convictions in which a person is confident. The question of trust is what proves to be central here. Trust not only opens to a person the door of communion with God; to a certain degree it changes the reality in which a person lives and to which he is related. Indeed, today even scientists are increasingly convinced that any reality is real only insofar as it is observed, and therefore has an observer. The universe can exist only if there also exists an absolute Observer.

This postulate would be merely another version of the cosmological proof of God's existence if it did not also apply to the human person and to every spiritual being at all that possesses self-awareness and bears free will. Every such being, and therefore every person, creates his own reality, which is real exactly to the degree that his own spiritual life, and life in general, approaches fullness. Only God possesses the absolute fullness of being and life, and a person's life is full insofar as it is connected with God's life.

Here faith-trust plays a key role: it joins two wills, God's and the human will, creating a single God-human space of being and life, and therefore a single God-human reality. It is in this God-human reality that what the apostle writes about exists: here God's will and the human will coincide, God and the human person jointly create what happens in it, and the person's requests are fulfilled unconditionally - as unconditionally as they coincide with God's plan for human life.

Today we read the fifth chapter, in which the apostle clarifies and develops his thought about discerning spirits. Once again, in somewhat different words, he offers a criterion for discernment, saying that everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, is born of God. This means that the birth of the Spirit about which we read at the beginning of the third chapter of John’s Gospel occurs at the moment when, regardless of how much or how little you know about Jesus, you say in your heart: He is God. Bewilderment and grumbling then fall away, and you no longer need any proof. You simply know that this Jesus, who came by water and blood, also came by the Holy Spirit, and that He is your God. What a miracle that He has made this birth available to us!

As he concludes his discussion of the Christian's spiritual life, John returns once more to the question of sin and the Kingdom. The apostle affirms that the fullness of life in the Kingdom is bound up with the person of Jesus Christ. The heavenly Father bears witness to the life whose fullness the Son—the Messiah—has brought into the world. And God's breath speaks of that same life, reminding everyone it touches of it. What is at issue here is not a religious reality but a spiritual one, existing before and above every religion. Anyone who seeks God after Christ's coming into the world and the beginning of the Kingdom's history inevitably comes into contact with the Kingdom and will sooner or later meet Christ—provided, of course, that they do not turn aside from the path but follow it to the end.

John speaks here of Christianity not as a new religion with a new doctrine, but as a new life whose reality is as objective as any other reality, independent of what a person believes or what opinions they hold. Whether this new reality will have a bearing on the life of a particular person, however, depends on that person.

No one forces anyone into the Kingdom; for a time, its presence in the world can be ignored altogether. But if a person does choose the Christian path, the question of sin becomes unavoidable. John, meanwhile, speaks of sins that lead to death and sins that do not. These words of the apostle have even given rise, in the history of the Church, to a whole range of theories about mortal sins: which sins should be regarded as such and which should not.

Yet in the context of all that John has said about sin and righteousness, it is not difficult to see that sin leading to death is conscious and voluntary sin, sin of which a person does not repent because they choose it deliberately, knowing what they are doing. The point is not that this deliberate choice makes the sin more grievous, but that by choosing it the person identifies with the sin and becomes one with it.

God could, of course, separate a person from their sin even in this case, but such a separation would then violate that person's free will: it would mean that they had chosen one thing, while God was imposing something else on them against their wishes. Thus a person who consciously chooses sin, if they consistently confirm that choice time after time and repent of nothing, eventually finds themselves outside the Kingdom: there is, after all, no place for sin in the Kingdom. And therefore no place there for someone who cannot conceive of themselves without their sin.