Christchurch Parish News, June 2015
A reflection on 1 John
Now that I’m well into my forties, every so often I get an automated text message from my GP offering me the opportunity to pop into the surgery and have my blood pressure taken. It makes sense. If my blood pressure has crept up, it may due to some naughty lifestyle choices I’ve slipped into and need to remedy, prevention being better than cure, or it may be because there’s a more serious health issue that’s arisen which needs urgent action. Either way, blood pressure is a good indicator of one’s general level of health.
I was reminded of these text messages because during the season of Easter, on Sunday mornings, we’ve been hearing in the gospel according to John and John’s first letter quite a lot about an equivalent spiritual health check. Quite simply, if we want to know how our discipleship of the Lord Jesus Christ is going, we are to look to how we’re loving our brothers and sisters in the church. For example, Jesus says, ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’ (John 13:34). In other words, our love for one another in the church is the healthy symptom of how we are following the way of Jesus.
In John’s first letter, the focus is even stronger, in part because John is writing to a church that is having a difficult time and is riven with dissension and schism. John writes, ‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone one who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love’ (1 Jn 4:7-8). The closer and deeper our relationship with God becomes, the more our lives exhibit God’s love in us for his children: ‘if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us’ (4:12b). And finally, the most famous of all such verses: ‘God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them’ (4:16). All of which sounds fantastic. And yet is that actually our experience of church? For many of us, it probably isn’t. At best, it’s likely to be a mixed bag, with some good experiences and some bad (and some very bad!). This can be disappointing and also very confusing. After all, if this is the church, full of Christians, born anew as John would say, animated by the Spirit, how come as a group of people we’re so often no better or worse in our conduct towards each other than the other clubs, societies and networks we belong to?
I don’t think we should down play this and pretend this isn’t a problem for the church generally. Tom Wright, former Bishop of Durham, reckons that the poor behaviour of Christians towards one another (let alone to those outside the church) is the most powerful argument against the truth claims of Christianity (trumping even that of how a good God could allow evil things to happen in the world). Stanley Hauerwas, the most notable Western Christian ethicist of our time, when asked what he thinks the first thing Christians should start doing in our age in order that the church may flourish once again in the West, gives a very simple, curt answer: stop lying to each other.
At this point, there’s one very large spiritual trap that we’ve got to avoid falling into. If we feel that there is this gap between our own conduct in our everyday lives and how we are called to live as Christians, the mistake would be to try to love each other more. It may sound counter-intuitive, but it simply won’t work. Imagine if we were to try it for even just one Sunday. Remember that we’re not talking about being super nice and polite to each other. We’re already very good at that. No, that’s not what we’re being called to do. We’re being called to love each other sacrificially. Does that mean giving up your favourite pew seat or declining to park in the Priory car park first – ‘no, after you, I insist!’ – etc.? Does it mean bear hugging each other at the peace (I suspect many of us at this point would run a country mile)? Or after the service would we all be clamouring to buy everyone a round of coffer or tea with extra chocolate biscuits for the choristers? By the end of such a time of gathered worship, we’d all feel exhausted and would very likely scurry away, vowing never to return.
It’s a silly example, of course, but as a simple thought experiment it shows that trying to love one another just doesn’t work. We all know that’s not love, least of all genuinely self-sacrificial love. So the wrong response to hearing Jesus’ commandment and John’s exhortation would be to flex the emotional sinews and get ready for some serious loving. Yuk! Thankfully, John, in his letter, is at pains to make sure we don’t fall into this spiritual trap. In chapter five, he writes, ‘By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments’ [my italics] (5:2). Our focus is first and foremost always to be on loving God. The Christians that John was addressing in his letter are understood by most commentators to be Jewish Christians and as such (just as for Jews today) the prayer that would have been the bedrock of their spiritual life would have been the prayer called the Shema, which we read in Deuteronomy: ‘Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might’ (Deut 6:4-5). As the gospel writers record, Jesus cites the Shema when asked what is the most important commandment (e.g., Mk 12:28-31). He then, of course, goes on to cite the command from Leviticus, ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Lev 19:18b). For Jesus these two commands encapsulate the law. But note that the Shema comes first. The love of God comes first. Why? Answering that will help us understand why when we don’t, it is so often difficult to love our brothers and sisters in Christ.
John gives his answer in an almost blink and you’ll miss it kind of way. If you’re of a certain age, you may recall the television detective, Columbo, played by Peter Falk. Columbo had a very curious interviewing technique. Just when you thought the interview was over and Colombo was on his way out of the room, he’d always throw in this one final question in a very off-hand manner. And you knew that that the answer to that question was the answer that mattered more than any other. Well, in a similar vein John ends his letter with a simple statement that seemingly comes out of nowhere: ‘Little children, keep yourselves from idols’. When you first read the letter, you’re left thinking, where did that come from? What’s that got to with the rest of the letter with all its focus on love and God being love and God abiding in us and us abiding in God and God loving us and we loving God and loving the children of God (it’s enough to make your head spin and even pine for one of Paul’s stroppy letters!)? But it has everything to do with it. Martin Luther once wrote that our hearts are idol factories, in that they constantly create things for us to worship other than God. These idols can be anything but they are often to do with power, money, prestige, position and control (and many other things besides). They can take almost any form. For example, it could be your job, your family, the kind of house you’ve got, the car you drive, the money you earn, your education, your children’s achievements, even your church or your tradition, or how you serve your community. We worship our idols so that they might give our lives meaning. We do so with our time and our talents and in return we seek for them to give us our sense of self-worth and value.
Yet it’s all false. Whilst many of the things that we commonly turn into idols are good things in and of themselves, they can’t bear the weight of being placed in first position in our lives and consequently they let us down and disappoint us. If the status you get from your job is what it’s all about for you, you’re devastated when you get fired and consequently you’re plunged into depression for months. If your children are your idol, when they mess up or don’t do as well as you had hoped in whatever way, you’re crushed and feel that you’re a lousy parent and can’t face the school gate, and so on. A revealing phrase for referring to our idols, coined by Tim Keller, a minister in Manhattan, is ‘counterfeit gods’ (and Keller’s written a good book about them by that name if you’re interested). John is reminding us, and it pays rereading the whole of his first letter with this warning against idolatry ringing in our ears, that when our love of God is compromised because in fact we’re loving and worshiping (giving worth to) something or someone else in our lives instead, the ill effects cascade throughout our lives like an upturned bucket of dirty water thrown over a bride’s wedding dress. In this, he’s saying nothing new of course. It’s not for nothing that the second commandment given to the people of Israel on Mt Sinai is an injunction against idolatry: ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol’ (Ex 20:4).
But knowing that we need to be giving God first place in our lives and loving God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our might, doesn’t make it necessarily any easier. It still risks sounding quite like, “You just need to try harder!”, rather than the good news that it is. It’s for this reason that John in his first letter never lets the reader stray from an understanding of God that is insistently particular. He doesn’t want us to lift his statements about God being love out of their narrative context. By that I mean we’re not to isolate his prayerful words from the context of the story of God’s loving activity, which is the story by which we as the church are called to live. To do so would not only be to water them down into vague, feel-good abstract generalities that few would argue with, but more importantly, the words, however initially comforting they might appear shawn of their (embarrassing?) particularity, would ultimately not be able to bear the weight we put on them. ‘God is love’ as an abstract statement by itself is all but vacuous. So let me take a couple of examples from 1 John and encourage you to read the letter to discover the others: ‘In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins … Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God … Who is it that conquers [overcomes] the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God … This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but the water and the blood’. You get the idea. It’s all about Jesus. At every turn, John directs our attention and focus to Jesus, the Son of God. He isn’t directing our attention to some vague, general understanding of God that you might end up talking about when chatting to a stranger on the train or in the pub when discussing whether or not you believe in God. No, it’s utterly specific. Utterly particular. John wants us to focus on this God who sent his Son, the messiah of Israel, to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins, thereby fulfilling in the most unexpected of ways the centuries-long calling of Israel.
The deeper we experience and understand the impact of this singular, newly generative act of God in Jesus Christ and its healing, liberating cosmic significance for all of creation, ourselves included, the deeper our love for God grows, the less we idolise the other aspects of our lives, and the more loving we consequently become towards our brothers and sisters in Christ and beyond, without our even being aware of it. What a calling to have. What a life to live.