The Letters of John
The three letters bearing the name of John are the work of the last of the apostles, the disciple whom Jesus loved, come to a great age. They have the gentleness and depth of his Gospel, and gather into one word that sums up all revelation: God is love. The first, the longest, is a luminous meditation on love, light, and truth. The two others, very brief, are notes addressed to communities and to friends. All say the same thing: the one who has met Christ is called to love as he did.
God is love
At the heart of the first letter shines the highest definition Scripture gives of God: “God is love; whoever remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.” 1 John 4:16 John does not say only that God loves, but that he is love, in his very being. This illumines the mystery of the Trinity: if God is love from all eternity, it is because he is not solitary, but the communion of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And this traces the path of man: since God is love, one can know him only by loving. Whoever does not love has not known God, whatever his discourses; whoever loves, even without great words, already remains in him. All Christian life holds in this movement: to welcome the love of God and to let it pass toward the neighbor. John here meets the summit of the whole Law. Already the Old Testament commanded to love God with all one’s heart and the neighbor as oneself; Christ had brought back to these two commandments the whole Law and the prophets. John only unveils their root: if we must love, it is because God is love and loved us first. He calls this commandment at once old, for it comes from the beginning, and new, for Christ carried it to its perfection by giving his life. To love is therefore not a morality added to faith, it is faith itself become living.
The love that comes from God
John takes care to state where this love comes from, so that it is not confused with a mere feeling. “Not that we have loved God, but that he loved us” 1 John 4:10 and sent his Son as the sacrifice of atonement for our sins. There is the source: love begins not in us, but in God, who loves first, freely, even to giving his Son to save us. Our love is only a response, a reflection of the one we have received. This is why John constantly links the love of God and the love of the brother: to claim to love the God one does not see while hating the brother one does see, is to lie. True love descends from God and is proven in the concreteness of human relations.
Walking in the truth
Love, in John, is never separated from truth. Already false teachers denied that the Son of God had truly become man. John gives the criterion of right faith: “every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ come in the flesh is of God.” 1 John 4:2 The Christian faith holds to this reality: God truly became incarnate, he took our flesh, he did not pretend. To deny this is to ruin salvation. To the truth of faith, John joins the truth about oneself: to call oneself without sin is to deceive oneself; but “if we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just forgives us our sins.” 1 John 1:9 The Church has always heard there the call to humble and trusting confession, where the forgiveness of God comes to purify the heart. To walk in the truth is to believe rightly and to acknowledge oneself a forgiven sinner.
We shall be like him
John opens finally a dazzling hope. Even now, he says, we are children of God, and this is still only a beginning: “we know that, when it is made manifest, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” 1 John 3:2 The end of Christian life is to see God face to face and to be transformed into his likeness, what the Church calls the beatific vision. The two short letters that follow prolong, on the scale of friendship, these great themes: the second recalls that love consists in walking according to the commandments and warns against seducers; the third praises hospitality toward the brothers and rejoices to see the children of God walking in the truth. Truth and charity, down to the smallest notes, remain the two wings of Christian life. These letters also deliver the Church’s first combat against error. Teachers were beginning to hold that the Son of God had taken only the appearance of a body, that flesh and salvation were foreign to each other. John, who had touched with his hands the Word of life, sets against this lie the rock of the Incarnation: God truly became flesh. In laying down this criterion, he protects the whole faith in advance, for on the reality of the Incarnation depend the Cross, the Eucharist, and our own salvation in our flesh. The last of the apostles thus leaves the Church a compass: to recognize the Spirit of God by its confessing Jesus come in the flesh.