2 John 2:4-6
I was overjoyed to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we have been commanded by the Father. But now, dear lady, I ask you, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but one we have had from the beginning, let us love one another. And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments; this is the commandment just as you have heard it from the beginning—you must walk in it.
Today’s message is going to be pretty short as we finish up the John letters. We will easily be able to cover both the 2nd and 3rd letters. They are remarkably short – one fifteen verses and one only thirteen. These are the ones that may or may not have been written by the same author as the first letter. The second letter has some of the same phrasing as the first letter – but it also has enough difference to cause suspicion in some scholars. We’re back to the same “we don’t know” that we have heard over and over in studying the New Testament letters – especially ones, like these, written in the second century.
As with the first letter, there’s a lot about love in this John’s teaching – and above all – the reminder that this is what they have had from the very beginning – from Jesus himself -- the command to “love one another.”
But there is another very important theme in these two letters – a theme that we also found all too often when we were studying Paul’s letters, as well. That of false teachers – ones this author call “antichrists” – and false doctrines in place of that one they received from Jesus himself – the one they have had from the very beginning. A teaching they received from those who heard it with their own ears and saw it with their own eyes. This is a point the author or authors of the John letters make over and over again.
Again, as we discussed last week, these false teachings appear to primarily deal with differing claims as to the nature of Jesus. For the community out of which the various “John” writings came there was no question. Jesus was God, the Son -- at one and the same time both fully human and fully divine.
This is what most of us accept today. We recognize it as paradox and something we cannot quite reconcile to fit our human brains, and so we say the theological equivalent of “oh well,” shrug our shoulders, and let it go. I seriously doubt that anyone present in this room this morning spends a whole lot of time worrying about the nature of Jesus. We just accept and get on with the business of living our daily lives while also serving God’s purposes for us.
But the emergence of the Christian faith took place in a polytheistic world. In what is now southern Europe, the Near East and northern Africa, multiple gods were commonplace and these gods had, for centuries of belief descended and lived – briefly -- among humans – taking on human appearance but never truly relinquishing their godhood.
Even the Hebrew faith had only fairly recently come around to true monotheism – having for centuries claimed monotheistic ideals while in actuality operating on a “my god is better – tougher, stronger – than your god” belief.
If gods came and went on earth with such regularity then it’s easy to see that establishing just what Jesus was would have been a complicated issue for the emerging faith. Remember that Christianity was built on and by communities from the Jewish, Zoroastrian, Egyptian and Greek systems – and more. For each of these it would require not only learning new things about Jesus, but relinquishing a lot of old beliefs they had been taught for centuries.
Think, for a minute, about how hard it can be when we are faced with the truth that something we’d been taught as children, something we’d taken for granted all our lives, is wrong. When we are called the change our minds. Whether it’s a family secret, a cultural norm, or simply something we’d picked up by mistake – it isn’t easy to change the direction of a long-held belief.
We still have to do some of this for ourselves in examining our faith claims, but most of the heavy lifting was done for us in the first few centuries of Christianity by people like the all the New Testament writers we’ve been studying and by the Church ‘Fathers” who took those writings and shaped them into a mostly coherent doctrine. All we have to do – which is heavy enough – is figure out what we accept and reject from all that and then, what we do with it on a day to day basis.
For the writer or writers of all three John letters the answer is simple – first and foremost – and above everything else – we are to do what we have been told right from the very beginning – we are to love one another. This is repeated over and over again. We are to love one another. Everything else comes after that.
There are a whole lot of people today calling themselves Christians who would, I suspect, benefit from applying that teaching to their own lives and their interactions with the world around them. Probably all of us.
- But now, dear ones, I ask you, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but one we have had from the beginning, let us love one another. And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments; this is the commandment just as you have heard it from the beginning—you must walk in it.
Love one another
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