N.T. Wright:
1 JOHN 1:5–2:2
God’s Light and Our Darkness
5 This is the message which we have heard from him, and announce to you: God is light, and there is no darkness at all in him. 6 If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in the dark, we are telling lies, and not doing what is true. 7 But if we walk in the light, just as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his son makes us pure and clean from all sin. 8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar, and his word is not in us.
2 1 My children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. If anyone does sin, we have one who pleads our cause before the father—namely, the Righteous One, Jesus the Messiah! 2 He is the sacrifice which atones for our sins—and not ours only, either, but those of the whole world.
Elizabeth faced a difficult choice. She had moved into her new home a few weeks before, and her parents, who had been overjoyed when she got the new job and so could set up on her own, had been determined to do something special for her. They had bought a wonderful period armchair, of a sort they knew she admired, and had had it covered in exactly the right material to go in her new living room. They were glad to have done it; she was delighted to have it.
But then, the day before they were due to visit, disaster struck. Elizabeth and some friends were sorting out some books and pictures, when suddenly … nobody knew quite how it happened, but a mug of hot, strong coffee found itself spilled right across the new chair. They scrubbed and wiped and did all they could, but the ugly stain was there, plain for all to see. She knew her parents would be devastated, as she herself was. What should she do?
Of course, what she most wanted to do (apart from turn the clock back) was to hope they’d put their visit off. Maybe then there would be time to clean it up, or even commission a new cover. They need never know … But it was no good. They were coming. One glance and they’d know. The only thing to do was tell the truth and see what could then be done.
We must leave the little domestic drama at that point—as with all storms in teacups, if you happened to be in that teacup, it felt very stormy at the time—and move to the cosmic drama that John is playing out. It’s all very well for him to say, in his wonderful opening paragraph, that we have fellowship with God himself, with the father and the son. But what if we have already spoiled the wonderful gift that we’ve been given? What if we have already ruined our lives by carelessness, stupidity or downright wickedness?
If we don’t have something of that reaction, it may be because we haven’t really appreciated what the word ‘God’ means. Think back to some of the famous God-moments in the Bible. Moses sees God in the burning bush, and does all he can to escape, to avoid being caught up in God’s great new project. Isaiah sees God in the Temple, and is scared for his life. Peter meets Jesus on the boat and tells him to go away because he, Peter, is a sinner. John sees the risen Jesus in glory and falls at his feet as though dead. That is the proper reaction to being told that we are being welcomed into fellowship with the father and the son. We have messed it up. We have already spoiled things. We are—or ought to be—ashamed. If only God would put it off until we’d had a chance to clean up!
But that’s not how it works. Yes, God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. The darkness which encroaches upon our messy, rebellious, unbelieving lives cannot survive in his sight. One glance and he’ll know. There’s no point hiding: if we pretend to be in fellowship with him while ‘walking in the dark’ (in other words, behaving in the less-than-human way we often choose), we are telling lies. If we say we have no sin, we are simply deceiving ourselves. We certainly won’t deceive God. In fact, if we tried to say that we were not sinners (verse 10), we would be making matters worse. We would be making God out to be a liar, since he has said, in scripture and in person, that he has come to rescue us, knowing us to be sinners.
But that is the answer. In terms of the storm in a coffee cup, it is as though—though this wasn’t actually how it worked out—the parents just happened to have a wonderful new product which, by some chemical magic, was able to remove coffee stains so completely that you would never know anything had happened. Imagine the sequence of Elizabeth’s emotions if that had been the case: from fear and shame, to deep embarrassment and sorrow, to sudden joy and delight. Too good to be true? Well, perhaps with coffee stains it is. But in the cosmic drama, extraordinarily, this is how it works.
The key is that God’s future has been displayed, as we saw, in and as his son, Jesus. But Jesus is, of course, the one who died on the cross; and from the very earliest days of Christian faith, his followers believed that his death had been the very thing the world had been waiting for. It was the ultimate sacrifice. No more would pagans have to offer sacrifices to their gods, not that it did much good anyway. No more would even the Jews have to bring sacrifices to the Temple, even though that had been commanded in the law. The God who gave the law had now summed up his rescuing purposes, for which the Temple and its sacrifices were advance signs, in the glorious display of his love in Jesus. The blood that flowed from Jesus’ body as he hung on the cross was somehow, strangely, the very lifeblood of God himself, poured out to deal with sins in the way that all the animal sacrifices in the world could never do.
And that blood, that sacrificial death, that God-life given on our behalf and in our place, is available for all who ‘walk in the light’. That doesn’t mean we have to get our act together, morally speaking, before God can do anything. What it means is that when we consciously turn to the light—when we face up to what’s gone wrong in the past and don’t try to hide it, and when we are determined to live that way from now on—two things happen. First, we find ourselves sharing that intimate God-life, not only with God himself but with one another. Second, we find that Jesus’ blood somehow makes us clean, pure and fresh inside. It deals with the nasty stain, the residual dirtiness, the scratchy, ugly feeling that something went badly wrong and we can’t get rid of it. All that is gone when we turn to the light and start to walk in it. All because of Jesus.
That’s why John encourages us to face up to the past. No point hiding: he’s going to see, he’s going to know what’s happened. In fact, he’ll see and know more than we allow ourselves to remember. But if we make a clean breast of it, then he will forgive us and cleanse us. Why does John say at this point (1:9) that God is ‘faithful and just’? Because God is faithful to his promises, the promises to forgive. And because, in the death of Jesus, he has shown himself to be ‘just’, to be in the right. This is the way he is putting the whole world to rights, and us with it.
Now it would be easy for someone to say—someone who hadn’t grasped just how serious the whole situation really was—that if God was going to forgive people like that,
one might as well go on sinning. You can tell when the true message of the gospel has got across, because someone will always draw that wrong conclusion from it. But that would be like Elizabeth saying, ‘Well, that’s fine; since my parents have a miracle cure for coffee stains, I’ll throw coffee over all the furniture next time!’ It doesn’t make sense. So John says, ‘I’m writing these things so that you may not sin.’ It’s a delicate balance. Sinners need to know that Jesus has died for them, and that they can be fully and freely forgiven. Forgiven sinners need to know that this is not a reason to go on sinning. Both are true, and are at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian.
One other thing, too, is very near the heart of it all. It seems that John is writing to Jewish Christians who might have been tempted to suppose that Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, was the remedy for their problems, for their sins, and for them alone. Not a bit of it, says John.
Jesus’ sacrifice atones for our sins, ‘and not ours only, but those of the whole world’. Just as God didn’t remain content to be in fellowship only with his own son, but wanted to extend that fellowship to all those who met and followed Jesus; and just as John is writing this letter so that its readers may come to share in that same divine fellowship; so now all who know themselves to be forgiven through Jesus’ death must look, not at their own privilege, but at the wider task. God intends to call more and more people into this ‘fellowship’.
Why not? Is the blood of Jesus somehow insufficient?
Tom Wright, Early Christian Letters for Everyone: James, Peter, John and Judah, For Everyone Bible Study Guides (London; Louisville, KY: SPCK; Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 133–137.
