This week we are studying 1 John 3:1-10. This pairs one of the more hopeful texts in the canon (1 John 3:1-3) with one of the more perplexing and possibly troubling ones (1 John 3:4-10). So we’ll have our work cut out for us. Here are a few notes on this text to get us started:
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT: I still haven’t found any clearer discussion of the related set of texts that are 1 – 2 – 3 John than the overview video at the Bible Project (here).
This time around, I also like that overview because it sides with my seminary New Testament professor in saying that “most” think of the author as the author of the gospel of John, contra our published curriculum, which says “most” think of the author of the little books as someone other than the evangelist. But then again, I’m sure the author of our published curriculum has his sources, too. No one seems to disagree that the authors of these texts, if they were plural, were at least related, through a spiritual community for whom the gospel of John was important.
So that social context is, presumably, important. But – was there such a community? And if there was, would it have been a community of “Jewish Christians” or of Gentile Christians, or what? Bible Project folks think “Jewish Christians.” Adele Reinhartz would dispute this, I suspect with good reason (see her article in Ancient Jew Review). I’m inclined towards Reinhartz’s conclusion. But that at least means that this author (or authors) deploys concepts drawn from Judaism in important ways. And that, I think, matters for how we might need to understand one of the key words in our text, “lawlessness” (Greek anomia). [On which, see another Bible Project video here.]
The form of the text is not actually a letter. There is no greeting, no conclusion – formally, it’s more like a sermon.
Our text comes about half-way through the larger text, as the author is winding up the first part of the presentation, and getting ready to move on to the second – this is if I’m following Bible Project’s division of the book, which I am. As I already noted, these verses seem to me to fall into two parts, vv1-3 and vv4-10. At least, in a way. The themes of being “children of God,” and of revelation, carry through from beginning to end.
Verses 1-7 show up in the lectionary, but verses 8-10 do not, so what the author tells us about the children of the devil would be something we wouldn’t know was in the Bible if all we knew were the lectionary. Bible Content Examinees be warned.
CLOSER READING: The author includes the readers in the “we” who are called and who are God’s children. This calling and being demonstrate or reveal the love we have been given by the Father. They are also a reason the world does not know us. Because the world does not know him, either.
In this context, him seems grammatically to refer to “the Father.” What precisely that means about “the world” that doesn’t know him may be a little open for discussion. Does it include everyone who’s not a member of the community being addressed in this text? Or could there be some folks in other or adjacent communities, like neighboring synagogues, for instance, who also DO know the Father? We may not be able to answer this question. But we might do well to keep it in mind, any way.
Revelation comes up in v2, and keeps coming up: there is a revelation still to come (v2); but there is a revelation that has already taken place (v5, 8), and there is a revelation of the two kinds of children, those of God and of the devil, that allows us to tell them apart (v10). Seeing and knowing the revealed one (v6) makes a difference in how people behave.
So one difficult question is how v6 does, or does not, or could, or could not, apply to the people addressed in vv1-4. We are called children of God; and we are those children; so does it make any sense to worry that we might be revealed to be children of the devil after all? Whether now or at some point in the future?
What may be particularly difficult for contemporary readers of these verses, when we encounter the sin and lawlessness language of v4 and the children of the devil language of vv8 and 10, is that contemporary Christians may have a regular practice of confessing sin and receiving assurance of pardon. (Presbyterians do, for sure.) That is, we tend to think of ourselves as people who continue to sin, or to struggle with sin, and to think that the way to deal with this is to confess. And try to do better. And to pray about it. But not to think of ourselves as being “of the devil” or as “children of the devil.”
1 John 1:8-9, as a matter of fact, encourages us so much in this kind of thinking that we use those verses as a call to confession. V10 will even suggest to us – or to some readers, anyway – that we’re just in denial if we claim to have no problem with sin.
In other words, this makes for a difficult text. The difficulty is famous, and more than one remedy for it has been suggested over the centuries. Maybe 1 John 3:4-10 is referring to unacknowledged, unrepented, habitual sin, rather than the kind we confess and try to deal with.
Or maybe there is an important distinction to be made between the kind of justification believers have by grace through faith, and the difficult process of sanctification, in which we keep recognizing ourselves as less than pure, and need to persevere in the process of purification. That is, this is an aspirational text.
Or maybe the language of “children of the devil” is an instance of some hyperbole, designed to get the readers to recoil in shock and think “Oh, I don’t want to be one of those! I need to get my sin under control here.”
What does seem to be clear is that the author is stressing that there is an indispensable behavioral component to “righteousness;” people who are righteous actually do what is right (v7).
Knowing and doing what is right is the opposite of lawlessness (v4). It seems to me that this language may need to alert us to the way Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, is already being treated a lot like torah – in Greek, nomos, “law” – by the early believers. Sinning is, practically speaking, a sign of being without the instruction that is torah, or “law,” or the vision of Christ. Because really seeing and knowing what is right results in doing what is right.
Finally, in v10, we will find out that righteousness and love – the kind of love that we have been given by the Father, in fact – inclines those who know and do what is right to love a brother or sister.
In light of our multi-week study focus on hope, it is the hope that people have in God that will move them to purify themselves according to the sinless standard of God and the Son of God.
Part of the difficulty we may have with this text has to do with the way we read in to it implications about eternal life, salvation, redemption, etc. We need to consider whether we must, or even ought to, do that reading in.
Another part of the difficulty may stem from what we have in our minds as the “sin” the author is talking about. The text itself gives an example in v17: having the world’s goods and seeing a brother or sister in need and yet refusing help.
That example is different from ones we might have in our minds. Like “I keep on judging Sister So-and-So in my heart for not shushing little Johnny in worship.” Or “I keep on raping women who come to me for pastoral counseling, and then telling them to keep quiet about it.” Or “I keep on challenging my husband’s authority when I think he’s over-disciplining the kids.” Those are real-life contemporary examples that people could come up with.
Examples matter, both for how the text “strikes us,” and for the “principles” we draw from it. So we will need to pay some attention to the examples that are in our minds, and to the examples the author gives us, as we try to come to terms with this admittedly difficult text.
Some reflection/discussion questions on the text are here.
Image: “Feuchtwangen_Pfarrkirche_-_Vorhalle_Fresko_Evangelist_Johannes” (cropped), Wolfgang Sauber, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
