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1 John 5:1-6 CEB Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born from God. Whoever loves someone who is a parent loves the child born to the parent. This is how we know that we love the children of God: when we love God and keep God’s commandments. This is the love of God: we keep God’s commandments. God’s commandments are not difficult, because everyone who is born from God defeats the world. And this is the victory that has defeated the world: our faith. Who defeats the world? Isn’t it the one who believes that Jesus is God’s Son? This is the one who came by water and blood: Jesus Christ. Not by water only but by water and blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. What do you believe about Jesus? Now, maybe you would say something like he is the Son of God and your personal Savior. What about his life? Does that matter to you? Do his actions and ministry while on this earth make a difference to your salvation? In other words, do you think how Jesus lived ultimately made any difference in the saving work God did through Christ or could Jesus have lived any way he wanted, and as long as that life ultimately led to our salvation, the rest doesn’t matter? 1 John is wrestling with this kind of division in the community, where those members who had departed did not hold that Jesus’ life or humanity mattered. Only the work of the divine Christ was necessary for them. Since Jesus’ humanity did not matter, neither does humanity itself, and the care of another does not count for much in that kind of faith. If Jesus as a human being matters, so does community, and this whole faith life can only work when we exist in community with one another, that’s how we live out God’s commandments.
The community of 1 John, these followers of “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” struggled with how their faith life worked and they based a lot of it around how they understood Jesus and the Christ. The Gospel of John, the gospel at the core of this community, has a problem with how it presents Jesus. Namely, he doesn’t seem very human. Think about it, “Jesus seems scarcely to eat or drink in the normal sense, for when he discusses food (4:33, bread (6:33ff.), or water (4:7-14, 7:38; 9:7), they are symbolic of spiritual realities.”[1] He uses the death of Lazarus, a good friend whom he loves, as a teaching moment about belief (11:5-6). My goodness, we are even told he knows all things in John 16:30 so “he cannot ask for information.”[2] For instance, when he asks a question of Phillip about where the bread is going to come from to feed the thousands, the Gospel feels compelled to share that Jesus already knew the answer, and so was just testing them. John’s Jesus doesn’t sweat blood in the garden or ask God to take this cup from him. With a Jesus so divorced from his human side in the gospel, it is understandable that some took this to one logical conclusion, that Jesus’ humanity hardly matters. Remember that the community of 1 John and the group that left, these secessionists all viewed the Gospel of John as authoritative, but each one interpreted the message differently. The secessionists heard the Gospel say, “And the Word became flesh,” and that’s all that mattered for salvation, that the Word, the Logos, the divine Christ came into the world bringing eternal life with him (John 1:14 NRSV). It did not matter what the Word did while present, “not the kind of life he lived or death he died.”[3] Elsewhere in John, the Gospel offers words that can be read to support this position, as it says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3 NRSV). Here, the emphasis is on God sending the Christ to bring eternal life rather than anything Jesus does while here. Now, this may seem like some quaint historical footnote, except, the secessionists were winning in this conflict with the 1 John community. They were gaining adherents. Their version of Christ and what it had to say about the kind of life they lived here on earth was winning out. Why? Well, the secessionist view valued individualism to the point that “salvation would become an individual matter [...] divorced from the idea of belonging to a saved people.”[4] Think about it for a second. Think about a task you had to do in your life where you had to depend on other people to complete it, those fallible neighbors of ours, the ones that forget things and drop the ball. Isn’t it easier when you can just do everything by yourself? No messiness of waiting for someone else to get around to doing their job, so much simpler just to do the whole thing on your own! Plus, there are all those messy relationships. There are birthdays and anniversaries to remember! Feelings get hurt and words get tossed about carelessly! Why not just become dependent on the only person you can count on, you? We still see this in Christianity today. Many Christians today are not connected to any community, no church, no group, as though this faith can be practiced in isolation. People will still talk about Christianity as a private, individualized thing. Have you been born again? Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? Again and again, it makes this presumption that as long as you alone believe that right thing, all is well! This kind of religion is easy, it carries no ethical demand nor does it depend on someone else. Jesus makes no demands on you except to believe, that’s it, that’s all. What a lukewarm, comfortable religion! I imagine many love this kind of semi-Christianity, no wonder it is so popular! Except, we have our reading today in 1 John, where at first, the author seems to agree with this kind of faith life, saying, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born from God.” Except, what does it mean when we have all been born of God? We all become children of God, right? 1 John continues, “Whoever loves someone who is a parent loves the child born to the parent.” Do you love God? Yes? Great! That must mean you love what God loves, right? Well, God loves the children of God, so guess what? Mutual love! You need to love each other too. Well, what does that mean? 1 John is keen to tell us! This love is “when we love God and keep God’s commandments.” Now, you might be assuming that these commandments are something like the Ten Commandments, but these are not the commandments the author cares about. There are really only two for 1 John, “one of which is the commandment of mutual love [and the] other commandment is to believe in Jesus.”[5] It’s this latter commandment that can sound like the individual private Christianity we have talked about, but 1 John tackles this by saying that you need to believe in Jesus, the human Jesus who lived and worked and died on a cross, not simply the divine part. This becomes clearer in 1 John 5:6, where we have a very curious line, “This is the one who came by water and blood: Jesus Christ.” Then there is the next line, “Not by water only but by water and blood.” You see, the secessionists did not think that what Jesus did in life mattered, but the author of 1 John says that the water and the blood do matter. The water is the baptism and the blood is the cross. These two events are “the framework of the salvific ministry of Jesus.”[6] In other words, the life and work of Jesus shaped what salvation is for us as God’s children. Jesus spent his humanity showing us what love looks like, defining its width and depth, and the fullness of love cannot be found in a singular Christian. Love must have an object. To love fully is to love someone else. Jesus’ life and ministry showed us love, from A to Z. Here, in 1 John we are invited to respond to the love of God by loving what God’s love, one another, again not just in word but in action and deed. All this humanity around us matters, and to be in community with one another matters even more. We cannot believe in Jesus, the human Jesus who is also the divine Christ, without imitating the love we see in Jesus, the mutual love for one another. After all, “This is the love of God: we keep God’s commandments,” as “loving God means loving God’s children.”[7] To say that Jesus is the Christ is to say that Jesus’ humanity mattered. To care for one another, to love as Jesus loved, matters for our salvation. I am not preaching some kind of works salvation here, but rather I am saying that our belief in Jesus must and should encompass his humanity and what he did as a human here on earth. If we hope to love God well, we must become the afterglow of that love personified in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. We must light each other’s way through this world in the warm glow of love. Amen. [1] Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves, and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 114. [2] Ibid., 115. [3] Ibid., 117. [4] Ibid., 152. [5] David Rensberger, Abingdon New Testament Commentaries: 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, ed. Victor Paul Furnish (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 127. [6] Brown 1979, 117. [7] Rensberger 1997, 130.
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