NOTES for Jo1 2:22-28
John's words that whoever does not have the Son does not have the Father either seem excessively harsh to many. And this is hardly surprising: looking around, they see many people who, although not Christians, nevertheless experience a very real, genuine and profound communion with God. For others—here, of course, we are speaking of Christians—the apostle's words become grounds for rejecting every spiritual experience outside the Church as spiritually unsound, or even outright demonic: if, they say, ‘whoever does not have the Son does not have the Father either’, then no one except Christians can have any revelations. Everything else, in that case, is an aberration of spiritual vision, a mirage, ‘spiritual delusion’.
Yet the apostle is speaking not of those who have never known Christ, but of those who, having known Him, have left Him and gone their own way. This is, of course, a completely different spiritual situation. We do not know and cannot know what plans our Saviour has for those who do not know Him and have no connection with the Church. One thing is clear: He never said that He would confine His spiritual work to the boundaries of the Church alone.
The Church is His body, but this does not mean that He is indifferent to everyone else. Nor does it mean that no one except Christians can have any genuine spiritual experience. God's breath embraces the whole world, and every seeker can sense it. Leaving Christ and the Church is another matter: it is, in effect, a rejection of one's chosen spiritual path, which destroys the spiritual life of the person leaving. And the point here is not that God wants to punish such a person and deprives them of the possibility of communion with Him.
The point is that rejecting one's spiritual path means inevitable spiritual degradation. It is not a step backwards, not a return to what existed before conversion; it is the destruction of everything accomplished along the entire journey. Figuratively speaking, rejecting one's chosen spiritual path is not a return to the foot of the mountain one once began to climb, but a fall into an abyss. And then, of course, there can be no question of a full spiritual life, and thus of genuine spiritual experience. This is what the apostle bears witness to.