NOTES for Jo1 2:28

In today's reading, the apostle John offers us criteria for determining the truth and acceptability of a given teaching or statement concerning the relationship between a person and God. The first criterion is given in verse 24: "Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father." In other words, the first condition for remaining in communion with God is faithfulness to the Gospel teaching. But there is also a second criterion, which John mentions in verse 27: anointing. What is this? In Jewish terminology, anointing was an outward sign of God's election and blessing. Here the anointing probably means not only blessing, but also the living presence of the Holy Spirit in the heart; it is no accident that this "living" anointing, as John says, "teaches us about everything." So the first criterion is the Gospel teaching, and the second is our living relationship with God. At the intersection of these criteria stands the teaching of the Church, which is created precisely on the basis of Scripture and the living experience of relationship with God.

The words of the apostle John in today's passage from his First Catholic Epistle largely continue the manner of thought and expression of God through the Old Testament prophets. Many of them said that ignorance of God was the principal cause of sin and lawlessness in people—not the absence of information about the requirements of the law, but the absence of knowledge of God. And now, after all the events of Christ's earthly life, death, and resurrection, the apostle says that the truth about God has been revealed to us. This truth is such that it enables us to abide in the Father and the Son. What does this mean? How should we understand these words about abiding in God?

The apostle himself explains this in the famous words: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called and be children of God.” Returning once more to one of the Epistle's principal themes, he speaks of the distinguishing marks of God's children: practicing righteousness and loving one's brothers.

Although in this passage the apostle speaks only about the Father and the Son, his revelation nevertheless has a Trinitarian character. For the tone of astonishing purity, tenderness, and light clearly bears witness that he writes under the inspiration of the Spirit.

Whom does the apostle mean when he speaks of ‘antichrists’? Today's usage associates the figure of the antichrist with something infernal; to us, an antichrist is necessarily a creature of hell. John, however, evidently uses the word in its original sense: an antichrist is someone who opposes Christ, the Messiah. An opponent of the Messiah. And the apostle offers what seems to be one of the earliest Christian creeds in the history of the Church, consisting of a single statement: whoever does not accept Jesus as the Christ, as the Messiah, is not a Christian. In refusing this confession, a person also loses the Father, and communion with God itself becomes impossible for them. Such a statement may seem too harsh.

It also seems to contradict the experience of spiritual life: today, there can hardly be any doubt that communion with God is possible in traditions other than Christianity. But John makes one important qualification. He says that the antichrists he mentions ‘went out from us’, from the Christian community, from the Church. In doing so, they proved that they ‘had never been of us’. Evidently, he is speaking not simply of non-Christians, but of Christians who have fallen away. Of those who had already entered the Church and then, of their own free will, left it.

Not of those who are seeking their spiritual path or have found it outside the Church, but of those who have turned aside from their path or abandoned it altogether. Such a renunciation always carries the risk of serious spiritual consequences, even the loss of the possibility of conscious communion with God. This concerns not only Christians, although Christians naturally bear a particular responsibility. Any abandonment of one's spiritual path, whatever that path may be, leads to similar consequences. Simply because every step along a spiritual path changes a person, objectively and irreversibly.

On leaving the Church, a person does not return to the state they were in before conversion and baptism. After baptism, returning to that state is impossible. One may become an unbeliever and cease to belong to the Church, but one cannot become ‘unbaptised again’. A spiritual life not lived through to the end is an unpleasant thing: it always takes its revenge. The possibilities given to a person may destroy their life if they refuse to use them. And this is more true of spiritual possibilities than of any others.