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!