First John is replete with confident claims. Claims that those who really are part of the people of God won’t sin. Claims that those who do sin aren’t part. Claims that those who are part of the people will agree with what the author and community say. Claims that those who don’t listen aren’t truly born of God in the first place.
I find all this deeply challenging. It conjures up images of Gary Birdsong, the “pit preacher” I encountered at UNC Chapel Hill who used a verse from 1 John to claim a sinless life even while he stood pompously denouncing every individual at UNC for being steeped in sin–and the Christian groups not least of all.
I read it as part of my canon and recognize the voice as the voice of the faithful community that had been left by those who would not continue in the love to which they had been called–and yet at the same time I realize that if anyone today claimed that adherence to their own voice were such a sufficient proving ground for fidelity to God that I would (and have) run in the opposite direction as fast as my out-of-shape lungs would allow my legs to carry me.
And yet, there is a theological beauty in to the letter’s claims.
The letter understands that our relationship to God is not about a detached judicial standing (a trap we too often fall into in the post-Reformation west), but about transformative engagement. To be in the family of God is to bear anew the family likeness.
If we are followers of the righteous one, then we, too, will be righteous. When we see him as he is, then we will finally know what we, too, are destined to be. In beholding his light, our faces shine with the same, reflected hue.
And so the letter draws our attention quite close to home, to the family of believers as the proving ground for our faith. Because our story, the story of our God, is one in which love itself is made known in God’s sacrificial love.
What, then, does it mean to act in accordance with the family likeness?
If God so loved us that he gave his son for us, if the son so loved us that he gave his life for us, then we, too, ought to love one another with the same self-sacrificial love.
And here is where the saying that the one who does not love his brother whom he can see cannot love the father whom he can’t see. The family of God around us is this Father’s family. We are called to love as God has loved, and God’s own love is a love that we ourselves have received, a self-giving love of which we are to deem our sisters and brothers worthy as well.
But more than this, to know the one who is in the light is to walk in the light. To know the one who is righteous is to be righteous. And so, to be in the community of light, life, and righteousness, and to fail to love those whom we encounter there is to fail to love the God whose presence the community is making known.
