NOTES for Jo1 3:16

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.

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.

The thought that the apostle John wants to convey to us is extremely simple: believe in Jesus and love one another. But how many times does the apostle repeat it in this short text and in an epistle that is not very long? He approaches it from different sides and uses examples from Holy Scripture and from life in order to communicate what is most important and self-evident to him. This clarity is the clarity of the spirit; beyond it, everyone encounters the powerlessness of words, which are unable to convey spiritual experience, the experience of touching the truth. It is impossible to keep revelation within oneself: streams of living water flow from the person who has come to know God who is Love; and every time the apostle says, “love one another,” it is obvious to him that there truly is nothing more important. But these words will remain an empty sound until the person reading them touches the living God, until they simply love. Only then does a person become able to understand that nothing is more important than love, and that this is precisely why evil attacks so fiercely any sign that somewhere—even only a little, and not yet in the way John writes about it—people choose not hatred but love.

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.