1 John 3:1-3, 11-18
See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous. Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him. This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.
We have been looking at some of the “one another” passages from scripture, and this morning we come to reflect on the call to “love one another”. Last week we heard Paul describe “love your neighbour” as the whole of the law, and we were reminded that this instruction goes as far back as Leviticus and was described by Jesus as the greatest commandment together with “love the Lord your God”. Variations on “love one another” appear so many times in the Bible that it would have been more than my week’s work to give you anything like a fair estimate of how many times the imperative is repeated, so I hope it will suffice to say that love is what God has been teaching us from the very beginning.
“Love one another” really covers everything we have heard over the past three weeks, and more besides. It means accepting one another, encouraging one another, serving one another, in all ways acting for the good of one another. It is everything from that famous passage from 1 Corinthians 13 which we heard on Christmas Day. It means being patient and kind, not envying or boasting, being respectful and selfless, not jumping to anger or bearing a grudge, rejecting evil and rejoicing with the truth, always protecting and trusting and hoping and persevering, and never failing...or at least never failing to try. “Love one another” is no small ask and the truth is that we will fail at it time and again, but we never run out of chances to love more and love better.
As we reflect further on what it means to “love one another”, I want to try something a little bit different for the rest of this morning. I will spend some time reflecting on the passage from scripture we have heard, and then I will offer some other perspectives on love in the form of song and quote and story and poetry, with space in between each to ponder a question that perspective raises about how we might live out this call to love one another. If there is just one thing in all of that which particularly strikes you, then I encourage you to take a firm hold of it and meditate on it throughout the week, even if you forget everything else.
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Scripture: 1 John 3
Of all of the “love one another” passages I might have chosen, I chose these verses from 1 John because I have something of a soft spot for this letter. I translated it as part of my studies, and it is a letter that has love at the very heart of it. The wonderful verse “God is love, whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them” - which I once painted on a banner to take to Leeds Pride as part of an affirming Christian presence - comes from chapter four. And the declaration that “there is no fear in love but perfect love drives out fear” is just a few verses further on. The author of this letter understands perhaps better than any other biblical writer the power and importance of love.
It’s also worth remembering here the connection between this letter and the fourth gospel, which also bears the name of John. Scholars disagree over whether or not they really were written by the same person, and whether or not that person was the John named as one of the twelve disciples, but there is a school of thought that argues that they at least come from the same community, possibly founded by a disciple who was close to Jesus. They certainly share a number of themes, and love is not least among them. It is the fourth gospel that tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son”, and speaks both of the Father’s love for Jesus and Jesus’ love for his friends.
In fact the passage we heard from 1 John 3 is very similar to verses from John 15, where we read: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” These are of course words of Jesus, which reminds us that the focus on love in this morning’s passage is not the personal fixation of the author, but a direct response to and outworking of the teaching of Christ.
The text actually begins not with our love for one another but with God's love for us. As the next chapter will go on to say, love comes from God and it is because God first loved us that we ought to love one another, and so that is where we must start. Because I translated this passage as a student, I can be a bit of a geek about the language and suggest that the first word is really closer to “behold” or “look at” than the more passive “see”. It is easy for us to see the love of God without ever really looking at it or fully appreciating it as something to behold. I think that’s especially true for those of us who have grown up being told that God loves us, so that it has always been there as a sort of backdrop to our lives, a blessing which we must try not to take for granted in its familiarity.
Perhaps the author sensed something of that complacency in their readers, because they seem to want them to really take notice of God’s love, and the verses that follow help us understand why. It is the love God has already shown for us that gives us our identity as children of God and which will shape us into what we will be in eternity. It is what grounds our past and our present and our future, and it gives us the confidence and example we need to be able to love one another. If you have never really beheld the love of God, I encourage you to take some time this week to sit with the truth that God loves you, and to ask for a fuller sense of how high and wide and deep that love is.
In more language geekery, I would also suggest that a more accurate translation would speak of the love God has “given us”, rather than the love God has “lavished on us” as the NIV has it. It's a sparser form of words which doesn’t immediately have the same feeling of generosity, and that did come as a little bit of a disappointment at first, but then I looked up other uses of the same Greek word, and there is a whole list of references from the Johannine writings which speak of God giving eternal life and understanding and the Spirit. This cluster of verses makes clear that God’s love is part of a great act of generosity, so much so that lavished almost seems too trivial a word. God doesn’t seek to charm us with excessive gifts of token value like a besotted lover in a romantic movie, but bestows upon us a gift of love that is a promise of all joy and wisdom and comfort. And because it is a gift we can choose to accept it or reject it, so perhaps we might ask ourselves if we are not only beholding God's love but truly receiving it, believing that it is for us and allowing it to work in us.
I looked up my old notes on 1 John this week, and I must have been way smarter back then, before pregnancies and pandemic ate my brain, because I casually wrote sentences like this: “David Rensberger suggests there is an ‘interweaving of ethical and Christological motifs’ which is common to 1 John, and that ‘believing and loving are two aspects of a single human response to divine love’, so that the author defends a unity and interdependence of theology and ethics”. What I think this means is that the author is as interested in what his readers do as in what they think. He wants them to believe Christ is the incarnation of the eternal life (1 John 1:1) and the atonement for the whole world (1 John 2:2) and he wants them to walk in the light (1 John 1:7) and live as Jesus did (1 John 2:6) as a consequence. Our theology (what we believe about God) has to match up with our ethics (how we interact with the world) or we make a nonsense of both. As James put it so succinctly in his letter, "faith without works is dead".
We see that balance between thought and deed worked out in a slightly different way in the rest of the passage from 1 John 3, as the focus turns towards loving one another. The references to Cain answer the question he put to God when asked where Abel was - "Am I my brother's keeper?" - with an emphatic if unspoken yes. His duty was to keep his brother, not to kill him, and it is beyond question that his actions were evil. But then the author goes even further to say that it is not just murder that is the issue but hate. Again we see that our attitudes are as important as our actions. These may seem difficult words to live by, because it is easier to control how we act than how we feel, but they clearly echo Matthew 5:21-22, where Jesus says "You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgement", and so we must take them seriously.
Because our actions are easier to control than our attitudes, the answer may be to work on those first. CS Lewis once advised: “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love them.” Perhaps that is why in the next paragraph we find some concrete examples of what loving one another looks like in practice. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?” Loving one another involves a willingness to make sacrifices, to recognise the needs of the other and to respond to those needs. I wonder how we might put that into practice in the coming days.
I’ll end this section with one last thought, because I quoted from the NIV just now as that is the version we have in church, but a more literal translation of the second verse would be “If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but closes their heart to them, how can the love of God be in that person?” I think that phrase “closes their heart” is particularly evocative, because what it describes is not just a failure to show kindness but a choice to show hardness. May we never close our hearts or grow hard towards one another, but may we instead open ourselves to all of the joy and trouble that comes from human relationship, so that we may find ourselves loving one another in action and in truth.
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Song: ‘Love One Another’ by Bob Dufford
You can listen to the song here.
How might we bear each other’s burdens and bind each other’s wounds as the song call us to?
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Quotes: children on being asked to describe love
“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth." Billy - age 4
"Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your fries without making them give you any of theirs." Chrissy - age 6
"Love is what makes you smile when you're tired." Terri - age 4
"There are two kinds of love. Our love. God's love. But God makes both kinds of them." Jenny - age 8
"Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen," Bobby - age 7
"Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well." Tommy - age 6
"You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget," Jessica - age 8
How would you have described love as a child and how would you describe it now?What have you learnt about love and what would you teach someone else?
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Book: ‘You’ by Emma Dodd
This wonderful children's book includes the lines “I love you when you’re having fun...and when you’re sometimes sad. I love you when you’re kind and good...and even when you’re sad.”
How do we love one another through all of our moods?
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Poem: ‘Fall in Love’ attributed to Pedro Arrupe
You can read the poem and listen to a recording of it here.
How would loving one another as Christ has loved us decide what we do with our evenings, what we read, what breaks our hearts or amazes us? Or put more simply, how might loving one another change and shape our lives?
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