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Making this a better world

1 John 1:1-2:2

April 14,, 2024

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Misunderstandings happen all the time due to the fact that communication is a complex process. Often, when those misunderstandings are uncovered, they’re good for a laugh. But sometimes miscommunication can lead to terrible consequences. 

 

For example, in 1998 NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter to study Martian climate and the composition of its atmosphere. All went went until the Orbiter entered the Martian atmosphere, when it instantaneously disintegrated. 

 

That happened because the Earth-based computer guiding the probe was using the English standard for measuring the satellites trajectory while the satellite itself was using  the metric standard. That mistake destroyed a project that cost the American taxpayer $193.1 million. Fortunately, that was only a machine; no living beings were hurt. 

 

The same could not be said of a two plane collision on Tenerife in the Canary Islands that killed 583 people in 1977. The tragedy occurred on a day in which the fog was so thick that neither pilot could see the other. It was the perfect setting for a potential disaster — if communications were not abundantly clear. 

 

Sadly, a misunderstanding between the pilot of the first plane and the air traffic control tower led that pilot to believe he had been given clearance to takeoff. However, another plane was still on that runaway. The result was the deadliest accident in aviation history. 

 

Both of those incidents happened due to accidental miscommunica-tions. However, some misinterpretations are the result of intentional bad choices made by the people involved. Although modern Christians are often not aware of it, the letter of 1 John was written in an attempt to try to correct just that sort of situation. 

 

As I will explain in more detail a little later, certain early followers of Jesus thought that the Christian faith wasn’t a particularly good fit with the sophisticated Greek culture that prevailed in their region, so they decided to adapt its theology to turn it in what they thought was a more palatable direction. In the process, they radically distorted the faith to the point that it would be unrecog-nizable to any of us living today. 

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The book of 1 John was written to try to steer followers of those intentionally warped ideas back toward the true faith of Jesus. And it does that by focusing on the theme of fellowship with God. When we think of fellowship today, we think of potlucks or grabbing a cup of coffee and a few moments of conversation after church or perhaps a Road Rally for those few lucky congregations.

 

But in New Testament times, fellowship meant far more than that. The Greek word used in this passage, koinonia, refers to a partnership, whether the people involved were sharing a business, a special activity or some common interest. And that Greek meaning is exactly what the English word fellowship meant originally also. 

 

So you could make the case that the word fellowship means we’re partners with other Christians because we’re all in the same boat. The author of 1 John extends that thought even further by saying that, as Christians, our fellowship — our partnership — is not just with other Christians, but also with God. 

 

I always find the thought that God would trust us to be his partners to be both stunning and awe-inspiring. After all, God is thoroughly acquainted with both our worst qualities as well as our best and yet God trusts us anyway. Similarly, Jesus was betrayed, denied and abandoned by his disciples and yet he instantly trusted them again after the resurrection. 

 

I will go into that more in a little while, but right now I’d like to talk about why fellowship was such a key theme in the letter of 1 John. And to explain that, I have to go into a brief run down of some of the some of the issues the early church had to deal with as pressures from the surrounding culture led some Christians astray. 

 

Even though the political and military worlds were dominated by Rome, the most popular and pervasive culture was that of the Greeks. To be sophisticated in those days was to follow Greek ways.

 

Early Christians in the province of Asia Minor — that’s the area we call Turkey today — were trying to determine how to win more people to the Christian faith and they came to the conclusion that, in the eyes of the Greek world, Christianity was a backwards superstition. Clearly that wouldn’t do. 

 

So they tried to combine elements of the Christian faith with long-standing Greek teachings. What they came up proved to be a powerful mixture that did attract a number of people. However, as I’ve said, it also drifted so far away from the words of Jesus that the church as whole would eventually hold a religious conference that would label those teachings a heresy. 

 

The people who held those culturally-blended beliefs were called Gnostics, which is based on the Greek word that means “knowledge.” The reason for that is those people convinced themselves that they had been give secret knowledge that was unknown and unsuspected by the common crowd. Without that secret knowledge, they believed no one could go to heaven. 

 

They taught that all matter was evil. That includes the physical world and even our own bodies. To them, only spirit is good. So they believed that the goal of life is to escape the prison of your body and this world. That fits nicely with the teachings of Plato. 

 

But think what it does to their understanding of Jesus. If all matter is evil, the incarnation is impossible. That is, the Son of God, who is pure spirit, could never become a human being, since a holy and divine spirit could never come into contact with evil matter. 

 

That was bad enough, but there was a separate sub-branch of the Gnostics called the docetists, who claimed that Jesus never really had a body at all. He only seemed to have one. So their sub-group was named after the Greek verb that means “to seem.” 

 

Another variation of that idea was the teaching that Jesus was simply an ordinary human being until his baptism. At that moment, they said that the Christ spirit entered his body and guided him all the way up until immediately before his crucifixion. At that point, the Christ spirit left him and only the human Jesus suffered. 

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There were others who took that Gnostic idea even further, saying that if the body is already evil, it didn’t matter what you did in this world. After all, when you broke free from the prison of your body, you would not only shed your body, you would also shed any sins that had been committed in that body. And all of that would happen without any need for repentance.

 

All Gnostics taught that our bodily prisons could only be escaped through being taught secret knowledge and practicing certain religious rituals. That knowledge could only be passed on to those who were deemed worthy enough to receive it.

 

So what these teachings did was to create something like an artificial spiritual aristocracy within the church. Gnostic Christians looked down on all other Christians since they believed that those others were clearly not worthy to be granted the secret knowledge that could have been their ticket to heaven. 

 

Their belief helped to destroy the existing fellowship in all churches that were infected with the gnostic members. Meanwhile, gnosticism in all its forms was leading people away from the true faith. 

 

Therefore, the book of 1 John was written to combat gnosticism. It does that by insisting throughout the letter on the need for Christians to love each other and by emphasizing Christ’s call for ongoing fellowship throughout the church as well as with God. 

 

That’s why John begins his letter by placing a strong emphasis on his direct personal connection with Jesus. So the very first words in this letter are these, “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life […].” 

 

Notice the attention he places on the physical elements of his time with Jesus. He is attempting to establish his credentials as a witness to the reality of Jesus so he could undermine the arguments of those who never met Jesus, but who used their lack of direct experience to spin off wildly wrong theories. That theme continues throughout our New Testament lesson today. For those who said that what they do in this life doesn’t matter, John writes:  

 

“God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true […].” And so it goes throughout the entire book of 1 John. One by one he knocks down the Gnostic teachings and tries to explain what true Christianity is all about. 

 

But what does all this mean to us today, living some 1,900 years after those words were written? It may seem like ancient history, but Delight and I knew a couple who attended a church in Waterloo, Iowa that was spreading docetic teachings just 40 years ago. So those wildly wrong ideas have never really died out. 

 

But more than that, the heart of the Christian message has never changed either. It is a message that focuses on the God who is love and who loved us enough to truly become human like us. And who really did die on the cross in order to conquer death itself and to put to death the consequences of our sins, so that we might enjoy a full personal relationship with God.

 

All sin is an attempt to replace God as ruler of our own life. As Philip Yancey once put it:  “Adam and Eve had everything a person could want in Paradise, and yet a thought still nagged them, ‘Are we somehow missing out? Is God keeping something from us?’ […] The real issue was:  Who will set the rules — the humans or God? Adam and Eve decided in favor of themselves, and the world has never been the same.” 

 

But John tells us that Jesus offers us a way to return to a trusting relationship with God. More than that, Jesus helps us to re-enter a full fellowship with God. And, as I mentioned earlier, that means God believes in us enough to make us partners with him in the work of transforming this world into a boundless society of love. 

 

My father once wrote, “I see the church as an inclusive fellowship. Instead of having boundaries to keep [some people] out, it has a magnetic center to draw them in and all who are drawn to the center are necessarily drawn to one another. Our magnetic center is Jesus Christ. […And as we draw closer to him, he creates a fellowship among us.] We are a fellowship not only because of our common magnetic center, […] but because we need one another […] for the enrichment and the correction of our thinking. We need others for the stimulus which comes from their faith, courage and enthusiasm. We need others if we are to take an effective share in the practical labors which the building of the Kingdom involves. 

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Or as John put it so well in the words of our text:  ‘What we have seen and heard we tell to you also, so that you will join with us in the fellowship that we have with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.’”

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by Jim McCrea