NOTES for Jo1 3:11-24

The language of the First General Epistle of the apostle and evangelist John is so close to the language of his Gospel that the question of authorship looks completely idle. It is all the more interesting how the beloved disciple uses the Teacher's expressions. In the Gospel the Lord says: "he who believes Him who sent Me has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life" (John 5:24). In today's passage from the epistle we read: "we know that we have passed from death into life." We have every right to think that with this Greek expression in both cases the apostle is accurately conveying the words of Christ that he remembered. Why then, as the apostle says, do we know that we have passed from death into life? Because we love the brothers.

To be honest, these words sound somewhat shocking. The turns of history make us think that the reason for confidence in the accomplished passage from death into life lies in other things. Yet for the apostle everything is so simple: we know that we have passed from death into life because we love the brothers. It is even a little painful, because this is precisely what, as a rule, we do not know how to do... At the same time, reading these words is very joyful, because Christianity turns out to be a much more living faith than one might think by looking at ourselves.

Jesus calls His words "love one another, as I have loved you" a "new commandment." But what is new in it, if the call to love God with all one's heart, all one's soul, and all one's strength, and one's neighbor as oneself, had been spoken at least six or seven centuries before Christ's coming? John connects love with the Kingdom, just as his Teacher did.

First of all, John draws attention to the fact that hatred belongs to the fallen world, while love, at least the love Jesus speaks of, does not. That is precisely why the world accepts neither Christ Himself nor His followers. The problem, however, is broader: the hatred of the fallen world has long opposed every manifestation of love in this world; already Cain's conflict with Abel was an example of such opposition. Love can be present in the world, but as something alien to its nature. But the Kingdom too is alien to the fallen world's nature; in the Savior's words, it is "not of this world."

Yet the connection between the Kingdom and love is not shown only in this; it goes much deeper. Love could be called the nature of the Kingdom, insofar as one can speak of nature at all with reference to the Kingdom. Of course, the world that is being transformed and becoming part of the Kingdom enters there whole, with all its nature. Only evil remains outside, the evil that distorts the nature of the world, not nature itself. But the transformed nature's relation to God changes. God, of course, is present even now in every particle of His creation.

His presence more often turns out to be impersonal and remains unrecognized. God, as it were, hides from the world, present in it but not revealing Himself. The Kingdom is different: there He no longer hides. And there His presence reveals itself precisely as love, which becomes as integral a part of the life of the Kingdom as natural energy is here. God's breath, permeating the Kingdom, becomes for its inhabitants the energy of love. Love without which life in the Kingdom is impossible.

How often we are frightened by the words that "whoever hates his brother is a murderer," and that by murder he deprives himself of eternal life, drives out God who lives within him, and drives love out of his heart. Yes, these words are frightening. But we do not often think about what hatred really is. On the one hand, it is good if every time we begin to be angry, irritated, and spiteful, we remember these words, are frightened, and they stop us. Yet fear of sin can also lead away from God if one looks only at the fear itself.

Hatred is not even just a feeling. It is stronger. When you hate, you want the person not to exist. At all. Therefore it is equivalent to murder, when one person makes another cease to be. When you hate, you annihilate in thought.

This is terrible, yes, but then it turns out that a remedy, an antidote to hatred, is easy to find. At first it is enough to agree that the person whom we hate should exist. It is not necessary to want to be friends with him and communicate with him. What is needed is to give him the right to life inside one's own heart, even if at first we would want ourselves to live at the North Pole and him at the South. If we can agree that this person lives somewhere, walks on the same earth as we do, is created and preserved by the same loving God, then we no longer hate. And this means that the Lord can plant in our heart the seed of forgiveness and love for this person; where there is no hatred, there remains, even if often very tiny, a little place for love.

As in his Gospel, the apostle John the Evangelist defines here the true love through Christ's sacrifice, His death for our salvation. So if we accepted this witness, accepted the fact that God's love is manifested to us, then rises naturally the question about our answer to Him. How can we answer to His love? The apostle John answers: love in return, and it should, if it is a true love, - be our sacrifice. It seems everything is clear: He laid down His life for us, we also lay down our life for Him. However John writes something else: our sacrifice will add nothing to God; our sacrifice has a meaning when will bring for those, for whom Christ laid down His life. Therefore we can become copartners of the salvation of the world, partakers of His love.

As in his Gospel, the apostle John the Evangelist defines here the true love through Christ's sacrifice, His death for our salvation. So if we accepted this witness, accepted the fact that God's love is manifested to us, then rises naturally the question about our answer to Him. How can we answer to His love? The apostle John answers: love in return, and it should, if it is a true love, - be our sacrifice. It seems everything is clear: He laid down His life for us, we also lay down our life for Him. However John writes something else: our sacrifice will add nothing to God; our sacrifice has a meaning when will bring for those, for whom Christ laid down His life. Therefore we can become copartners of the salvation of the world, partakers of His love.

The question of what is and what is not sin becomes one of the central questions for every religious person. What criteria can one follow in this case? The Bible offers us commandments and many different interpretations of them.

In essence, all biblical books are in one way or another connected with the question of keeping or violating the commandments given by God. But one can relate to keeping them in different ways. One can be guided by external criteria, as most believers usually do. In that case much depends on how one understands this or that commandment, how one interprets it. What, for example, should be considered or not considered murder, theft, sexual immorality, blasphemy?

The Decalogue already forbids all this. But there have been and still are many variants of interpreting the commandments of the Decalogue. Above all because all interpreters in one way or another analyzed them from outside, as if from the side, trying to establish rules and laws given once and for all. The Bible itself refutes such an approach. Already the Old Testament offers us at least two variants of legislation based on the Decalogue. And they do not coincide in everything. Thus the Bible seems to tell us: do not seek the only true and only possible interpretation; it does not exist. The fulfillment of the commandments depends on place and time.

Only God's will is unshakable, those divine intentions that stand behind each of the commandments of the Decalogue. A person's behavior can differ in different situations. Old Testament legislation is only an example of how the commandments can and should be applied in real life. There could have been more such examples. And in order not to become confused, God's commandments must become for a person an inner spiritual imperative. What in Gospel times was called the inner Torah.

Its commandments, as Jeremiah said, are not carved on stones, but written in the human heart. Then every situation will be perceived by a person through the prism of this inner Torah. And one will be able to rely on one's heart in what concerns sin or its absence. If the heart, led by the inner Torah, does not condemn a person, then he can calmly turn to God. Such a person, of course, is not sinless either, but he can say to himself and to God from a pure heart: in the struggle with my sin I have done everything I could.

It was observed for a long time that the main theme of John's messages is the theme of love. Of course there is nothing surprising here: because even the last conversation of the Savior during the Last Supper was also devoted to love, this love which becomes the hallmark of Christians and the hallmark of the Kingdom. It would seem, before a lot was said and written about love, including in the biblical books. Then why Jesus speaks about love, as "a new commandment"? And why the apostle repeats His words, linking this love to the personality of Jesus Christ, to Whom without trust it is impossible?

Of course if it was about this love, which was known for a long time before the coming into the world of the Savior, there would have been nothing really again in the commandment about love. But He says Himself: love each other, as I loved you. It is not surprising that the apostle connects the possibility of Christian love between people to the faith in Jesus Christ: without trust in the One, Who revealed this new love to the world, without communicating with Him, without the fact of living with Him the same life of the Kingdom, nobody of men can love like that.

And the problem here is not in the intensity or the depth of the relationship (and love in the sense, in which the authors of the biblical books understand this word, is not emotion, but especially relationship), but in its new quality. Of course love remains love also in the Kingdom, and in the not transformed world. But in the not transformed world it can be nothing big, than relationship. But here is, in the Kingdom it becomes not only relationship, but also this spiritual environment, inside which this relationship is born and develops. This kind of environment also exists in the not transformed world, but here it remains natural, psychic (because the psyche is also a part of the nature, although completely special).

But in the Kingdom, where the human nature is transformed, relationships between people can’t already exist any more in a purely natural environment, here they ask for a spiritual mediation, because the Kingdom is also penetrated by the breath of God, it is above all spiritual, and only after natural. And the love becomes this spiritual environment, inside which are build all the relationships of the Kingdom. One could call love the main substance of the Kingdom, its own nature. And the concrete forms of the existence of this nature are defined by these relationships of love, which connect the inhabitants of the Kingdom between them. It is not surprising that John calls Christians to love: because it is the same thing as to call them to live the life of the Kingdom. The only life that we can consider Christian.

"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.