NOTES for Jo1 3:15-16

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.