Am I my brother's keeper?
Part 6 of our series on 1 John.
3:9 Every person that is born of God does not perform sin, because his seed remains in him; and they are not able to sin, because they have been born of God. 10 In this it’s clear who are God’s children and who the Devil’s children. Every person not performing justice, is not of God, and the one not loving his [Christian] brother or sister.
11 Because this is the proclamation which you heard from the beginning, that we should prize one another; 12 not like Kayin was of the Evil One, and slew his brother; and wherefore did he slay him? Because his works were evil, but his brother’s works were just.
13 No wonder, my brothers and sisters, if the world loathes you! 14 We know that we have crossed over from Death into Life, because we cherish our Christian siblings; the person that doesn’t love [their Christian siblings] remains in Death. 15 Every person hating their Christian brother or sister, is a human-slayer; and we know that every human-slayer does not have eternal life abiding in themselves. 16 By this we know Love, that he lay down his life for us; and we are indebted to lay down our lives for our Christian brothers and sisters.
17 Whosoever has the means of sustenance (of earthly existence), and observes their Christian sibling in a state of need, and shuts the door on their feeling of compassion for them, how is God’s love in them???
18 Children, let’s not ‘love’ [only] with speech nor with lip service, but in deed and truth. 19 And by this we will know that we are of the Truth, and persuade our hearts in his presence, 20 whenever our heart should condemn us, because God is greater than our heart and he knows all things.
21 My dearest friends, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence in relation to God, 22 and whatever we might ask, we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and we carry out the things that are pleasing before him. 23 And this is his commandment, that we trust the name of his son, Jesus Messiah, and that we love one another, just as he gave a commandment to us. 24 And the one keeping his commandments remains in him, and he himself [remains] in them. And by this we know that he remains in us – from the spirit [of] which he gave to us.
Translation – it’s a tricky game and you always lose. Translating John is a great example of that. In today’s passage I’ve gone with a variety of translation choices, which aim to bring out some different nuance and ideas. At some points that sacrifices maintaining a word-to-word correspondence, and so you lose a little of the repetition that threads its way through John’s writing. At other points, I just indulge in odd choices, to try and jar you a little from familiar phrasing.
Notice some of the echoes here too. In verse 13, the language of “this is the proclamation which you heard from the beginning” is very very similar to 1:5, but there the proclamation is “that God is light and darkness isn’t in him, nope, not one bit”, but here it’s not content but implication, that we ought to prize one another. Prize, cherish, love. You’re probably used to ‘love’ in English translations, for the agapē word group. I wrote a whole bunch about love back in this post, and that obtains here too. But let’s attend to what’s distinctive here.
The proto-typical counter-example of love is Cain (Kayin in my transliteration). So the opposite of love for John is hate, and hate is exemplified in killing, in particular Kayin kills Abel, his brother. This is ultimately because Kayin is characterised as being ‘of’ the Evil one (see my earlier discussion of “of” language in John). This is why 3:9-10 belongs as much here as the previous section, because your deeds reveal who you are “of”, and just deeds characterise the children of the Just one (God), and evil deeds characterise the deeds of the children of the Evil one.
For John’s antithetical ethic, there’s only love and hate, there’s not really an in between. We moderns think, “oh, well, it’s great to love other people in word and deed, that’s a nice cherry on top, but it’s optional, bonus, extra, going above and beyond. Regular, normal life is pursuing my own life, liberty, and happiness, right? As long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. Hate is bad, so don’t go out of your way to harm others”. John inhabits a different world – you’re either seeking the good of others, with will, emotion, and actions aligned, or you’re fundamentally failing to love them.
This is why I think we need to think about hate, because if we set aside the ordinary use of the word and reflect upon Johannine usage, I would say that hate is the failure to have a disposition of the will, orientation of the heart, and actions of the hands towards the real and ultimate good of the other. If that’s the case, then the failure to love is hate, and we ought to start feeling real uncomfortable about our attitude, and treatment, of others. Let me make the pointy end of this real sharp for myself: do I really love Palestinian Christians, or is my apathy, indifference, or ignorance a form of hate by neglect?
John doesn’t just not pull his punches, it’s like he’s put weighted lead in the lining of his gloves. The person who doesn’t love their fellow Christian believers is tantamount to a murderer, and this can be a testimony that you haven’t been transformed by the gospel in a saving way. I hear echoes of the Sermon on the Mount here, anger leads to murder. John links this back to Jesus’ life, love, and death in v16. How do we know the shape of love? In Jesus’ laying down his life (cf. John 10:11, 15, 17, 18; 15:13, all of which echo the same language of laying down one’s life), we see what it means to love others, and this lays the same obligation upon followers of Jesus. The pattern holds true – our experience of God’s love does not result only in a love for God from us, but must result in a life of love from us to others.
Verse 17 sounds a lot like James 2:15-16, and pinpoints a particular point of failure to love as a form of hate. In a world of subsistence living, to have the means of subsistence and to see a person without it, and to withhold it from them, this is hate. It’s inconsistency with God’s love is blinding.
I do wonder if the thread in v19-21 about confidence and condemnation is occasioned by the pastoral concern, that having read the above we might be wondering, “oh dear, is anyone even a Christian? Am I a Christian?” Let me just send you back to chapter one, which I think answers this question in a crystal clear way, but one that’s easily forgotten. Every time John reminds you that you absolutely must evidence your faith by your works (see, that’s very like James!) the answer can never be “work for salvation”, but “confess your sins, and trust in the gospel, for it’s the gospel that motivates and enables the works that evidence faith”. That’s why in v23 the commandment is what? Firstly to trust in Jesus, and secondly to love one another. There is no loving one another that doesn’t spring from trusting in Jesus, there is no trusting in Jesus that does not lead to loving one another. And next we shall talk about spirits….