NOTES for Jo1 2:12-17

In his letter, John says things that may seem to express outright hatred of the world. Many people take them precisely that way. Indeed, how else can one understand his call not to love the world or what is in the world (v. 15)? Yet John gives a comprehensive description of what in our fallen world deserves hatred. It is important to remember that this is not emotional or intellectual hatred, but hatred understood as an absolute rejection of what one hates and a refusal to admit it into one's own life. What, then, does John urge us to hate?

What fallen human nature and the eyes of fallen human beings crave, and what a person living the life of the fallen world boasts of (v. 16; in the Russian Synodal translation, ‘the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life’). Everything so characteristic of the purely natural world, of the order of things incompatible with the Kingdom and its life. At least, of the order of things that now exists. The point is not that the world created by God has suddenly turned out to be bad in itself. Nor is it that human life in all its fullness and in all its manifestations has suddenly ceased to please Him. The point is the spiritual quality of that very life.

It is a question of what predominates in it, what determines its quality: the ‘breath of life’ that God gives everyone at birth, or nature, which, if that breath weakens, begins to assert its own sway and then becomes self-sufficient. It is this self-sufficiency, not nature as such, that becomes the curse of fallen humanity. Not only because such self-sufficiency distorts human life in its present condition, but also because it closes off the possibility of transformation, and therefore the possibility of entering the Kingdom.

Human beings' natural self-sufficiency is compatible only with their present, fallen condition. Anyone seeking the Kingdom must renounce it. If the seeker succeeds, they will no longer live the life of the world in its present condition (which John calls ‘kosmos’ in Greek), but the life of the Kingdom.

It is no accident that the apostle says of such a person that, in doing the Father's will, they ‘abide in eternity’ (v. 17; in the Russian Synodal translation, ‘abide for ever’). He is speaking of the eternity of the Kingdom, where there is room for transformed nature, but no room for that closedness in nature which, when manifested in human beings, separates them from God and their neighbour. And therefore from the fullness of the Kingdom's life as well.

How should these words be understood? Is the world really worthy only of rejection? It seems that the issue is not literal lack of love for the world, created beautiful by God, but the rejection of the fallen state of the world, of the sin that permeates the world. By taking sinfulness as an inseparable property of the world and using it to justify our own sinful inclinations, we really do turn away from the love of the Father.

“I have written to you, young men, because you are strong...” Let us listen today to these words of the apostle. For we very often like to quote the words the Lord spoke to the apostle Paul: My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor 12:9). This somehow comforts us in our own weakness; we feel better at the thought that even a man such as Paul was weak, so what can be said about us? We use this to excuse ourselves and say that if we leave something unfinished, it is because of our weakness; the Lord simply did not wish His power to be manifested in us on that occasion. But are we right to think this way? Are we always right in such a situation? It seems that we are not always right. “I have written to you, young men, because you are strong...” We must not merely rely on God’s power; we must also train the strength within ourselves. In this connection we recall a poem by Nikolay Gumilev, or more precisely a fragment from it (“Vision,” 1916):
He lay exhausted on a bed of sickness
(What is more bitter, more grievous than a bed of sickness?),
And suddenly his weary eyes caught fire;
He sees, he hears in sacred rapture—
Emerging from the gloom, emerging from the night,
Saint Panteleimon and George the warrior.
<...>
And following his friend comes George
(Like trumpets of victory, George proclaims):
“Renouncing battles, you thirsted for salvation,
But the tears of the strong are not right before God,
And God did not hear your renunciation;
Tomorrow you will rise, and rise for glory.”
<...>
In fact, even on a bed of serious illness we can be strong enough not to renounce God by acknowledging our weakness.

There is great hope in these words. Although at first glance the text seems very stern, if we read it closely, it turns out that a liar is only someone who does not keep the commandments while claiming to know God. When you understand that you keep some commandments poorly or incompletely, it is important to remember that this means you have not yet come to know God, not that you are lying. It does not mean that if we fail to keep all the commandments, we have fallen away forever; it means only that we do not yet know Him, and that we have a clear instruction about what we must do in order to know God: keep His commandments and His word.

If someone hates, this does not mean that person is lost forever. It means only that they are not now in the light; but if they ask the Lord for the gift of love and strive to love the person they hate today, the Lord’s Light will illuminate them. If we do not succeed in acting as He acted, this does not mean that we are cursed. It means only that today we are not in Him and are far from Him; and if we set out on the path of imitating Christ and strive to follow Him, we will abide in Him.

Continuing his discussion of Christian life, John draws attention both to what has remained unchanged in spiritual life and to what has changed with Christ's coming. What remained unchanged after His coming was the path of righteousness itself: the path of the inward Torah, the path of the commandment and the path of the word.

It is no accident that the apostle connects the word and the commandment. The inward Torah meant precisely that the commandment was received not simply as a legal or moral norm, but above all as God's intention addressed directly to a person, as an experience of direct communion with God that changes a person's entire life. Received in this way, the commandment inevitably became an inward imperative, both spiritual and moral—provided, of course, that the person took spiritual life at all seriously.

An inward imperative of this kind in turn became the form in which direct communion with God was expressed. Accordingly, someone walking the path of righteousness sought to become aware of their own intentions and bring them fully into alignment with God's intentions, experienced as that inward imperative. All this was known even in pre-Christian times. John calls it the ‘old commandment’: the formation of the tradition of the inward Torah and its associated experience quite possibly goes back to the Babylonian captivity, or perhaps to even earlier times.

But with Christ something new also entered the world: the Kingdom He brought with Him. And with the Kingdom there finally came the possibility, with His help, of following the path of righteousness, the path of the inward Torah, to its end, becoming what was then called ‘living Torah’. Of shaping one's life so that nothing other than the inward Torah would govern it, not even one's own sinfulness.

This is precisely the sense in which the apostle says that the darkness is passing and the light of truth has already entered the world, shining equally in Christ and in His disciples—if, of course, they are His disciples in more than words. This fullness of the Kingdom's life, revealed among people as the fullness of love, is the new thing that came into the world with Christ. And in this fullness, the path of righteousness that began long before the Saviour's coming into the world finds its completion. Thus the ages meet, and the old and the new are joined.