Reading: 1 John 2:3–11
At the centre of today’s reading, John makes a profound statement about the age in which we live: “The darkness is passing, and the true light is already shining” (1 John 2:8). Superficially, we might think that the days immediately before the incarnation of Christ and the days immediately after looked quite similar. Roman imperial might still dominated the military and political scene. The rich marginalised the poor. Violence and evil seemed to rule the world. On the other hand, we might be tempted to think that our world is vastly different from the world in which the Son of God walked. When Christ’s disciples beheld him with their eyes and touched him with their hands, there was no internet, no printing press, no International Space Station, no motor vehicles. It is easy to forget that our dating system BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, in the year of the Lord) marks a fundamental division of history. Jesus is the Light whose coming has caused the darkness to begin to fade and who chartered a kingdom characterised by his kind of self-sacrificial love. That’s how John views history; in John’s view, those of us who live since the incarnation—whether first or twenty-first century—live at the dawn of redeeming love.
In John’s day, with false teachers recently departing from the church over the doctrine of the incarnation, John wants to assure his audience and urge them to remain in Christ. The opponents may have continued to claim to know God, but knowing God as he has been revealed to us in the incarnate Christ is such an earth-shattering reality that those who know him cannot remain the same. Knowing God is so unfailingly transforming that John is able to say, “We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands” (v. 3). Specifically, he has in mind the way that knowing God transforms us to love one another, “Anyone who loves their brother and sister lives in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble” (v. 10).
In this way God’s command to love our neighbour—which we can find at least as far back as Leviticus 19—has been made new; now “its truth is seen in him and in you” (v. 8). When Jesus died, John tells us, he was like a seed that “falls to the ground and dies” and “produces many seeds” (John 12:24). Jesus’s death as a seed produces more seeds—followers who look more and more like him in their love for their brothers and sisters. That is why being united to Christ, like knowing God, unstoppably changes us: “Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did” (1 John 2:6).
John describes this as God’s love being “truly made complete.” In love God sent his Son, and in his Son we are sent to love one another. God’s love reaches its goal when it has made us its instruments. Redeeming love has dawned.