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January 7, 2022“Of course I want to! Be healed!”
The first letter of John is a great New Testament epistle very much unlike any of the others. It is more a spiritual reflection on faith in Christ Jesus than so much what living that faith entails. It is perhaps the most beautiful meditation on love in all of scripture. It doesn’t follow any linear path with point C following a point B that in turn followed a first point. It often repeats ideas over and over. And it is primarily concerned with a certain few central understandings, namely, that Jesus is God come in the flesh, that is, as a true human being and that unless we know him who is Life and Truth itself, by keeping his commandment to love, we remain in the “darkness;” that we must resist sin (the world) which is still possible if we “do not keep ourselves pure;” and finally, that there are those who seek to distort or even destroy what we “have had from the beginning” and that they are of “the world” and not of Christ. At a mere five short chapters, it can be easily read in one sitting. If you haven’t read it in a while (or haven’t read it!!), you owe it to yourself to read it all again.
We have been following the letter in the liturgy since Christmas. We are now, today and tomorrow, in the last chapter as the Christmas season ends. In today’s passage the author concludes a central theme with the three testimonies of the Spirit, the water and the Blood. They are one because Jesus was from the Spirit of God (which brought about his birth from his mother Mary {Lk 1:35}), was baptized in that Spirit and finally shed (poured out) his blood on the cross that has resulted in that Spirit now being poured out upon the world. The Blood is crucial to 1John’s insistence that Jesus was a true human being (1Jn 1:1). For if Jesus had not truly died for us on the cross, our salvation does not seem to make sense. It is also through the Spirit that Jesus is the light that illumines the whole world and has overcome the world and its darkness through that same Spirit that is love.
Because this letter was written to a community wracked by the heresy we call Docetism, which believes that Jesus was not truly human, as well as Gnostic beliefs that held that the faithful were somehow above sin (that they could do anything guiltlessly), and that they believed the world was coming to an end, there is a certain very critical tone to it. That tone has been used by some interpreters to justify a distinction between so called authentic (saved) Christians and those inauthentic (unsaved) ones. We today are not really permitted, however, to make such judgments (by Christ’s commandment to love). We are here only to love one another not to test one another’s “true” spirit. However, we can certainly test our own spirit. Do we indeed love one another? Have we forgiven everyone? Have we abandoned judging and criticizing one another? Have we practiced accepting everyone as they are, seeking to abandon all expectations or insisting that others conform to some image of them we have? Do we, in the words of St. Paul, have the same attitude towards all? Have we ceased trying to exert our will or control over anyone or anything? Have we overcome anger, pride, jealousy and spitefulness? Do we give rather than take? All these are gifts from Christ’s Spirit of love that brings light to the world along with its other kindred spirits of peace and harmony, meekness and humility, generosity and compassion. In the words of the first letter of John, do we seek to “walk just as He walked.”
Jesus so desires to give us this great gift of life in its fullness. We need to ask with the same deep faith, trust and humility (as well as abandonment) of that Gospel man full of leprosy, “Lord, do you really want me to have this!” and hear the Lord reply, full of love for us as he immediately stretches out his hand to touch us, “Of course I want to! Be healed!”
