“The need of the world is not for heroic
acts of martyrdom, but for heroic acts of material sacrifice.”[1]
Lesson Focus:
God’s love for us enables us to love others like God has
loved us. More often than not, we are
called to express our love for others through our care for those who do not
have.
Lesson Outcomes:
Through this lessons students should:
1. Understand
that an important part of Christian love expresses itself through material care
for others.
2. Examine
the quality of love that we have for one another in the church.
3. Identify
ways in which we might grow in our practice of love for one another and for the
world.
Catch up on the
story:
John has been describing for us what it means to be a
child of God. We have been and are in
the process of being changed into the likeness of Jesus. While Jesus is for us the fullest revelation
of who God is, we still do not yet know Jesus in his fullness. When he returns we will finally know him
fully and, as children of God, we will become like what he is.
Another important aspect of being children of God is our
freedom from sin. We have had our sins
taken away and so, we should not continue to commit sin. John made a startling
statement that those who have truly been born of God cannot sin. We explored what this means, and came to the
conclusion, with a little help from John Wesley, that indeed we do not need to
sin, and will not as long as we are attentive to authentic prayer and worship
in mind, body and spirit. As the Spirit
breathes into us, we are transformed and empowered so long as we continue to
breathe the Spirit in and out. Finally,
John tells us that doing right means loving our brothers and sisters. John will continue discussing what this kind
of love looks like.
The Text:
This week’s text can be split into two sections. The first, 3:11-17 defines the sort of love
that Christians should have for their brothers and sisters in Christ. The second, 3:18-24, gives us some assurance
in the midst of our shortcomings in love as well as helping us to understand
the link between belief and love.
Section #1: Love
From the Beginning…
John
begins this section declaring that this command to love is what “we” have heard
from the very beginning. This statement,
“from the beginning” harkens back to the opening line of the epistle where John
declares that what was from the beginning was the person of Jesus Christ. This message of love then, is tied tightly
to the work and person of Jesus. John may be referring to Jesus’ words in the
Gospel: “A new commandment I give you: love one another” (John 13:34). As such, the command to love spoken of here
is nothing new.
What
is the nature of this love that we have been commanded to show and to whom is
it to be given? Most commentators
believe that John is referring to love for one’s Christian brothers and
sisters. Love for neighbor, as Jesus
defined for us in the parable of the Good Samaritan, must begin with love for
one’s fellow Christian. The community of
faith is the place where we learn and practice the love that we are called to
have for the world. Without loving our
Christian brother or sister first, it will be impossible for us to share with
the world the love that we have received.
As
John has done throughout the letter, he compares and contrasts a negative
example of love with a positive one. He
begins first with the negative in the form of an admonishment. We are not to be like Cain, who you will
remember from your elementary Sunday school class, killed his brother
Abel. John claims that Cain was from the
evil one. This is not to discount Cain’s
personal responsibility in the matter.
Rather, it is to display that those who engage in murder, and even hate
are still under the influence of the realm of evil and death, the realm, John
says, that we have been freed from because of Jesus.
Verse
14 can be taken the wrong way. John is
not asserting that love is how we cross over form death to life, but rather
that love is the result of our being freed from the power of death. The proof that a person possesses eternal
life is displayed through expressions of love for one’s brothers and
sisters. Love expressed in concrete
action for others is the evidence of
Christian faith.
If
love is the evidence of Christian faith and love, then hate, and the murder
that springs from it, is the evidence of lack of faith. Most, if not all of us, are not, nor will
become murders. John’s description,
however, should not fail to convict us and call us to examine our inner
thoughts towards our Christian brothers and sisters (not to mention the world
at large). Something as simple as hate
can derail our Christian life. Hatred is
the wish that another person were not there.
It is the denial of a person’s right to live in full connection within
the community. Nowhere is hatred
expressed more, by Christians at that, than on social media. Our posts in support of this or that cause,
or our posts in opposition to this or that movement, often reveal to us and the
world around us just how much hate lives in our hearts. Those who hate, John says –and he draws on
sayings of Jesus in Matthew 5:21 and in other places -- do not “have eternal
life abiding in them.”
John
now moves to the positive image of love.
He goes straight to Jesus and his actions for the best and clearest
picture of love. We know what love is
because Jesus, in love, laid down his life for us. It was not just that Jesus sacrificed himself
for us, but that in Jesus’ death he said no to his own life so that we might
live. It was for our benefit. Love that does not work for the benefit of
the other is not love.
What
Jesus has done for us, the love that we have experienced through Jesus we ought
to share with others. This is more than
a mere telling of the love of God through Christ; it is a concrete, lived out
expression of love for the other. It is
a self-sacrifice for the benefit of another.
No doubt, due to the nature of Jesus’ sacrifice for us that resulted in
his death, we will champion the kind of love that actually leads one to
literally give up one’s life in martyrdom.
For some, in some contexts, this might be a close reality. This is not so here in America or most of the
developed world. We might, at some
point, be asked to lay down our life for our Christian brother or sister, but
this is not what John has in mind.
The
last verse in this section, verse 17, displays for us John’s intention, and
that intention is much more mundane than dying as a sacrifice. The love that is expressed in laying down
one’s life for another person is love that sacrifices one’s material goods,
time and money so that another might live.
Here John speaks of love that is displayed through compassion and mercy
for those who do not have adequate means of caring for themselves.
The
NRSV’s phrase “yet refuses to help” fails to communicate the true nature of
what John is expressing. The NIV’s “but
has no pity” is a little better, but still misses the mark. What these two translations render as
“refuses” and “no pity” comes from the Greek phrase that means, “to close the
bowels.” The intestines were regarded as
the seat of emotion and compassion. To
close off one’s intestines means to shield their inner selves from the
suffering and want that takes place around them. The language is active in nature. This intentional shielding oneself from the
very real physical reaction that takes place upon seeing someone in need and
refusing to help. It is a conscious
choice. The image is vivid and describes
something we almost all certainly have felt.
We have seen great and small human need and felt the knot in our stomach
that is compassion. Yet, we all have, at
sometime or other, shut off our minds to those feelings and have gone on our
way.
John’s
point is that, “Christian love is love which gives to those in need, and so
long as we have, while our brothers [and sisters] have little or nothing, and
we do nothing to help them, we are lacking in the love which is essential
evidence that we are truly children of God.”[2] John concludes the section with the
admonition, based on his argument to this point, to love not just in speech and
word but also in the truth of love expressed through action. I’m sure that, if the popular Christian rock
band from the ‘90’s, DC Talk, would have been around in John’s day, he would
have quoted their song, “Luv Is A Verb.”
So What…?
The
question that John poses in verse 17 should stop to give us pause. How can the love of God truly remain in
someone if they choose to turn from the needs of their brothers and sisters in
Christ? While it is true that John is
speaking about the love that members of the community of faith have for one
another, this community is the place that we practice our love for the world at
large. If we cannot seriously take care
of one another we will not be able to exercise our love for the world, and if
we cannot exercise our love for the world then we fail at being the body of
Christ, the physical hands and feet of God in our world.
What
is at stake here is more than just the nature of our own community of faith,
how we might love and live together, it is the very nature of our witness to
the larger world. If we are to take
seriously the part of our mission statement, which says, “…to bear witness to
the kingdom of God,” then we must intentionally and tangibly express our love
for our Christian brothers and sisters, so that we can better express our love
for those in need in our community.
This
is not to say that our church does a bad job with loving one another and caring
for each other’s needs. I know our
church to be just that kind of place, a place of love and generosity. It never hurts, however, to be reminded of
the true nature of the love that we are to exercise. We can always do better. I’ll leave you with the words of DC
Talk,
Words come easy but don't mean much
When the words they're sayin' we can't put trust in
We're talkin' 'bout love in a different light
And if we all learn to love it would be just right
Critical Discussion Questions:
- What does God look like in this text/Who is God in this text/What is God doing in this text?
- This message that we have hard from the beginning, that we should love one another, is intimately tied to the One who was from the beginning, Jesus. The nature of love has always been about God’s self-sacrificial care for his creation. Love itself is born in God’s creative act. It is expressed through God’s promise to a barren Abraham and Sarah. It is manifested in the Exodus, and it is exemplified in the incarnation, in Jesus’ becoming one of us. Love seeks the good of the other. God is always seeking our good. God is love.
- What does holiness/salvation look like in this text?
- Our sanctification is bound up with our willingness to allow the Spirit to perfect us in love. We will only be a holy people, who call others to be holy, when we allow the Spirit to help us to love in intentional and tangible ways. There can be no salvation without our reciprocating God’s love. There can be no holiness with out expressing our love to one another and to the world.
- How does an encounter with this story shape who we are and who we should become?
- We must become a people who gather to practice love for one another so that we can love our world. We must love in word and deed. We must seek and find ways in which we can better and more fully love each other. We must identify the things, attitudes, structures and the like that keep us from loving one another.
Specific Discussion Questions:
Read
the text aloud. Then, read the text to yourself quietly. Read it slowly, as if you were very
unfamiliar with the story.
- John says that we must not be like Cain who was from the evil one. What does that mean? What does Cain do that might show that he is from the evil one?
- Why does Cain kill Abel? Why does John say that we should not be astonished when the world hates us?
- John says that we have passed from death to life because we have loved one another. What does John mean by that? Do we receive life because we love? Or, do we love because we have received life? Why would that distinction matter?
- How are hate and murder connected? Has there ever been a time when you have hated someone? How did that come about? Have you moved on from that? If so, how?
- According to John, how do we know what true love is? Who shows us what true love is? What is our proper response to an encounter with that love?
- In verse 17 John asks this question, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and see a brother and sister in need and yet refuses to help?” What do you think
- John is addressing a community of believers and in encouraging them to care for one another. Why is it important for us to care for each other, as brothers and sisters in Christ, first? How might our care for one another impact our witness to the world around us?
- As a church, how good are we at tangibly caring for one another? How might we be better at it? What are some specific and intentional ways we might practice our love for one another so that we can love our world better?
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