Given and Giving
God’s love is “one another” love. This makes perfect sense, for God is one God in three Persons, blessed Trinity. John was writing in a situation where people in the church were dividing Jesus. We’re accustomed to the church being divided. The church is in the world. We are in the world. We are liable to the division common to this world. We haven’t yet figured out how to remain united, though the answer stares us in the face every Sunday.
In John’s day, they were dividing Jesus. Some taught that the divine Christ was separate and different from the human Jesus, that the divinity came upon the man at his baptism; thereafter, all Jesus Christ did until the cross was in that combination of man and God. Then, at or just before the cross, the divinity left Jesus. Only the man Jesus of Nazareth died. This was being taught and believed.
Such distinctions may elicit a big yawn from us, but it was a major concern both for John and for Paul writing to correct the Corinthians. In their day, it was difficult for many to accept the full humanity of Jesus Christ: he only—you know—looked human, acted human. Now, it’s just the opposite: even within the church, people find it impossible to allow the full divinity of Jesus Christ: he only—you know—spoke about God, pointed people to God, then died a senseless, meaningless death, another victim of imperialist tyranny; he might have been a superstar, but in the end, he’s just a man. The mind doubts because the heart is impoverished, beloved, and we have lost our sense for wonder. In an age of virtual realities, our hearts are starved for wonder!
We affirm Jesus Christ is “true God and true man, two perfect natures united and joined in one person.”[1] Scripture takes pains to let us know that Jesus Christ is fully divine and fully human. Luke testifies that divinity was with Jesus at his conception; indeed, it was divinity, the Holy Spirit, who caused Mary to conceive. Why do people struggle with the Virgin birth? Unprecedented? Preposterous? The physiology? With God, all things are possible. Amen? Is conception in a virgin too much even for God? Have we lost our sense for wonder?
Leaving out what John says in the first verses of his account, he again testifies to the divine affirmation of the divinity of Jesus Christ, the public affirmation, at the baptism of Jesus, at the water: “This is the one who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ” (5:6). The water, the events at the Jordan, testify to the truth about Jesus Christ. John does not speak of the water only, but also of the blood. Divine affirmation of the divinity of Christ comes also at the cross, by the blood, the atoning blood, the only blood that could atone, the blood of Christ. “He did not come by water only, but by water and blood” (5:6). How much and how often in times gone by the church spoke and sang of the blood. How little it’s spoken of in our day, as though it were a source of embarrassment, foolishness, or too brutal, too barbaric for cultured, civilized, enlightened sensibilities. And what is atonement, anyway? And what’s blood got to do with it? And what has love got to do with any of this? Bloody love.
Many were at the Jordan. Several gathered near the cross. Some experienced the testimony, others did not or explained away what they saw and heard, what they felt. The difference is the Spirit, choosing, mysterious, revealing: “it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth” (5:6). Pilate spoke for all of us, spoke for the world, when he asked what we’re all asking, these days: “What is truth?” There was a time when culture and civilization were for the service of truth; now, once again, they are for serving the fallen heart.
For the world, power makes truth, and power is identity; there is power in identity: power to say what is truth and to rule out truth contrary to the dictates of power. Self-righteousness and compulsion go hand in glove. The world is correct that there is power in identity. The world has gotten bogged down in postmodern, post-Christian identity politics. Paul tells us for a reason that, “all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:27-28). The identity that matters is the identity of Christ: “Who do you say I am” remains the crucial question.
With Peter, we respond Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” William Barclay wrote, “John is saying that both the baptism and the Cross of Jesus are essential parts of his Messiahship.”[2] Jesus is as much the Messiah bloody and dying on the cross with earthquake and eclipse, as there brilliantly emerging from the bright waters of the Jordan amid the thunder from heaven and the Spirit as a dove. We perceive this Trinity there at the Jordan. At the cross, though? We say, God, there at the Jordan. At the cross, though? Sacrifice someway disturbs deep things in us. Cost. Demand. Blood. Truth. Life. We have a God of sacrifice, but we don’t want sacrifice; we want love, which means endorsement, to do whatever feels right to us, whatever feels good to us—you know: love.
John relies upon Jewish legal tradition, in which “A triple human witness is enough to establish any fact.”[3] “We accept human testimony,” John writes, “but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son” (5:9). If three human witnesses are sufficient to establish that something did indeed happen, is so, then three divine witnesses are more than enough to establish both that Jesus is not merely a man and that he is not just a divine semblance of a man. Jesus Christ is “true God and true man, two perfect natures united and joined in one person”: in that unity is our salvation.
Concerning what John is aiming at, here, John Stott writes: “It is God who bore witness to His Son in history, in the water and the blood.”[4] There is no testimony more trustworthy than the testimony of God. But who will accept this testimony? Who can accept it? How little people trust that testimony! As though God’s were the least trustworthy testimony! God gives that very testimony today: “it is God,” Stott continues, “who bears witness to [His Son] today through His Spirit in our hearts.”[5] There’s the crucial difference: the Spirit, bearing testimony to the Son, by the grace and love of the Father. We experience the Trinity, we have that experience of God, as we receive the testimony of the Father concerning the Son, testimony we both receive and believe because of “His Spirit in our hearts”; not in our heads, mind you, but our hearts. As the heart goes, so goes our thinking. What’s in our head matters: even more, what—who—is in our hearts.
But we know there are many who reject this testimony. There are those in my extended family and among my dearest friends who do not believe, who pride themselves on their militant, trenchant disbelief. All the unbelief saddens us, even as it saddened Jesus. John puts the problem in a way we might not have considered: “Whoever does not believe God has made Him out to be a liar, because they have not believed the testimony God has given about His Son” (5:10). We know it is a serious thing to reject Jesus Christ, but we might not have considered that it is so serious because to reject Jesus is to regard God as a liar, untrustworthy, untruthful. Is this the sin against the Holy Spirit?
Many of us hope, it is good to hope that, somehow, it will all work out for everybody, in the end. This hope hopes in the mercy of God, trusts in the mercy of God. The perfection of trusting in the mercy of God is to trust the decisions of God. John writes, “this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son” (5:11). There is the hope, and there is the trouble: God gives eternal life; He gives it “in His Son”: “No one comes to the Father except through me,” Jesus audaciously proclaims (Jn 14:6). Jesus is the only way. If I were saying that on my own account, it would be the height of arrogant, ignorant presumption, as the world is quick to point out. Even we still, residually, feel that same indignant response in our frothy hearts. I don’t say it on my own account: I tell you the words of Jesus himself: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day” (Jn 6:44).
The Father draws people to Jesus; the Spirit enables them to receive and believe what Jesus says, know who Jesus is. Apart from Jesus, there is no life with God. Truly, apart from Jesus, we can do nothing (Jn 15:5). And if those were my own words, they would indeed be words of arrogant, ignorant presumption, but they are not my words, they are the very words of Jesus Christ, God’s testimony. This is why John can write, truly, faithfully, humbly, “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (5:12).
Stott helps direct our attention in what John has been saying: “eternal life [. . . .] is not a prize which we have earned, but an undeserved gift.”[6] We do not receive gifts because of who we are, or what we have done, or what we can do for someone. A gift is a voluntary act of the giver, given because of how the giver feels about us, because of the sort of relationship of giving the giver would like to enjoy with us. We receive gifts because of whose we are.
We love getting; we love keeping: we love our possessions! It is very hard for people to let go of things, any thing, sometimes. When we love giving more than keeping, we will begin to know something of the love of God. The world speaks and thinks of faith as getting: get faith and feel those blessings come pouring in: you’ve got to believe it to receive it! Name it and claim it! Hallelujah! Can I get an Amen? First, you’ve got to get faith. So, go get it.
That’s terrible advice: frustrating and futile. God speaks of faith as giving and given. The faith of Christ is a giving faith. God gives us faith, the faith of Christ. This faith is given by the enabling, empowering giver, the Holy Spirit. We experience the Trinity as we experience faith, given and giving. This is part of what Stott may have in mind, when he writes that, “The way to life is faith, and the way to faith is testimony.”[7] We in Christ know the way to life is faith. Stott adds that the way to faith is testimony: first, God’s testimony to us in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Then our testimony, the testimony of our mouths, our hands, our hearts, the testimony of our lives, to one another and to others as yet outside the church. Let your life speak.
What is your life saying? Lives for the world say Me. Lives for God say You. God is reshaping our lives in Christ by the Spirit so that we can say You more clearly, more often, more freely, more fully. It’s important to John that we know this because it’s important to John that we know we have eternal life (5:13). Such knowledge is blessing, the blessing of God’s love. Receive the blessing of God’s love. Give the blessing of God’s love. Be the blessing of God’s love. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
[1] So the Scots Confession (1560), Chapter VI.
[2] William Barclay. Letters of John and Jude. Daily Study Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975. 107.
[4] J. R. W. Stott. Epistles of John. Tyndale NT Commentaries. London: Tyndale, 1964. 181.
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