Last week we spent a bit of time thinking about the so-called Johannine literature, which includes 1 John, and the scholarly arguments about who might have comprised the Johannine community and what the group’s history might have been. Most scholars recognize that there’s something distinctive going on with the Gospel of John and the Johannine epistles, though opinions differ over how to explain that distinctiveness.
One of the things that really stands out about the Johannine literature is its use of particular themes and vocabulary. Compared to the rest of the New Testament, for example, the Johannine literature frequently thinks in terms of light and dark—a dualistic view of the world. Although the epistles and the gospel seem to have been written by different people (just judging by style, grammar, and that kind of thing), a shared theme like light and darkness helps scholars lump them together. Another theme that runs across these four works (and to a lesser degree Revelation) is knowledge, often expressed through the metaphor of sight. There are other themes as well, themes that help scholars think about the nature of the community that might have given rise to the Gospel of John and the Johannine epistles.
One of these themes is really evident in 1 John 3:1-7, which is in the lectionary for the third Sunday of Easter. That theme is abiding. The Greek word behind our English translation abide is meno, and the word meno appears throughout the New Testament. Meno can mean abide, or stay or remain, so it’s a useful word that can function in a lot of different contexts. It shows up in one form or another twice in the Gospel of Mark, three times in the Gospel of Matthew, and six times in the Gospel of Luke. But meno appears 41 times in the Gospel of John! It also appears 24 times in 1 John and three times in 2 John. So, even by a simple metric like counting appearances, the theme of abiding is strikingly common in the Johannine literature when compared to the synoptic gospels. (It also appears once in Revelation, twice in 1 Peter, six times in Hebrews, three times in 2 Timothy, once in 1 Timothy, once in Philippians, eight times in 1 Corinthians, three times in 2 Corinthians, once in Romans, and 15 times in Acts). Numbers aren’t everything, but it’s obvious from counting how many times a word appears that something unique is going on with the Gospel of John and 1 John, at least, compared to the rest of the New Testament.
I think it’s interesting to think about the function of a word like meno in the context of a group like the Johannine community (or the “Johannine School” as they are sometimes imagined). If the reconstructions of Raymond Brown and other scholars are correct (and to summarize what I said last week, there is considerable disagreement about this), then the Johannine community had been on the move, theologically and geographically, for decades. They had begun in Judea and Galilee with Jesus, but they had moved steadily away from synagogue worship and into theological isolation, and they had moved steadily north and west, first into Samaria and then Syria and ultimately into Asia Minor (what is now Turkey). For a generation or two, by the time the Gospel of John and the Johannine letters were written, this group had been itinerant and increasingly estranged from its roots. What, then, could a word like “abide” mean to them? Why would they use such a word so frequently, when they were not abiding, staying, or remaining in any one place for so long? Why did they weave the notion of abiding into their theology so fully, when they were not experiencing it in their social and geographical lives?
I don’t know for sure, but I wonder whether the Johannine community simply came to see their groundedness in each other and in God rather than in a particular place or a larger network of religious belonging. This happens, sometimes, in diaspora communities (communities of people who have been expelled from their homelands or have left them); diaspora can often strengthen some forms of belonging and togetherness, even as others fade away. Some diaspora communities focus on language, or food, or music as a new center for their culture, since they can no longer dwell in the land where they understand themselves to belong. The Johannine community seems to have chosen God as the location for this communal heritage; they described themselves consistently as abiding in God and abiding in Christ in spite of not having a permanent home, or perhaps because of it.
How did it work for them? In 1 John 3:6, the author says that “no one who abides in him sins.” The “him” here is God; the referent reaches back to verse 2, where the text claims that “Beloved, we are God’s children now.” The author is asserting a kind of belonging—a form of abiding—founded not in geography or any human forms of religion, but in an association or relationship with God. The idea that someone could be God’s child, or that a people could be God’s children, would have been very familiar to anyone who knew the scripture of ancient Israel very well. The Hebrew Bible frequently describes Israel and Israelites as God’s children. Indeed, here in 1 John (in contrast to the Gospel of John), the author seems to building on Jewish understandings of God, rather than rejecting them. In verse 4, the word “lawlessness” appears twice. The word in Greek is anomia, which is a negative form of the word nomos, which means “law.” Here the “law” in question almost certainly isn’t civil law or natural law; here the “law” is probably Torah. We could translate this anomia as something like “anti-Torah” living. So, this is a very Jewish notion of belonging with God, even if the Johannine community might not have been strictly Jewish (if “strictly Jewish” was even a thing a community could be in that time). This seems to be a law-keeping, God-abiding, divinely-related community that thought of themselves in the tradition of Israel, and sent the document we know as 1 John to unknown recipients to share its perspective.
One more point about this passage, before we turn to some final thoughts. Notice, in 3:2 with my emphases added, what time this community thinks it is. “Beloved, we are God’s children now,” they write, “what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” The community thinks it is living in a middle time, an in-between time, after having become God’s children but before some unknown further event or revelation. 1 John is asserting relationship with God, but hinting at something more, something unknown but important, yet to be revealed. This is a middle kind of eschatology, an already-not-yet way of understanding its own fate and its own identity, that is well-suited to a people on the move.
So what? “So what” is always an important question to ask of any text, and it’s especially important when you’re asking how to interpret a 19-century-old exhortation for a new time and place. We don’t have much in common with the people who either wrote or received 1 John; what does it have to do with us?
My response is that the experiences of displacement, uncertainty, estrangement, and complicated belonging are common to many people, both ancient and modern. This might be especially true of the kinds of people likely to be hearing the Revised Common Lectionary readings this Sunday: Christians in traditions that, at least in North America, have been in decline for years. Like the Johannine community might have done, Mainline Protestant Christians have had to leave their theological and geographical homes, they have watched old ties become severed, and they have had to reckon with huge changes in their common life. They are a people on the move, for better and for worse, and they are looking for new forms of identity and belonging. They are in a middle kind of eschatology, an already-not-yet existence, having departed from what used to be but not arrived at what is still to come. The sort of people who might be hearing this passage from 1 John in the lectionary this Sunday are probably familiar with the feeling of being uncertain, the realities of exile from what they once knew, and the difficulties of hanging on to fragments of a broken past.
The emphatic beginning of this passage, then—the part that begins “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God”—might be as powerful a statement of belonging in the 21st century as it was in the 1st or 2nd centuries. In the face of a lot of change and uncertainty, the Johannine community asserted belonging, not based on geography or history, but on the basis of community with God. As congregations shrink, denominations fracture, and theological traditions change, this sentiment might ring ever truer. “Beloved, we are God’s children now,” the author writes; “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” That was an encouraging word nineteen centuries ago, and it’s an encouraging word now. Who knows what we will become?