"Some Things Bear Repeating”

Last month Karen and I went on a road trip. It took us a little over 4400 kilometers in all, and along the way we enjoyed some wonderful scenery: the picturesque former mill town of Almonte just outside Ottawa, the quiet lakeside village of Haliburton, the thundering roar of Niagara Falls, the serene Thousand Islands, and the tree-covered slopes of New York’s Adirondacks and Vermont’s Green Mountains.

However, stunning though much of the scenery was along the way, none of that was the main intention of our trip. No, our real purpose was to spend time with relatives and friends from the past fifty or more years. And one of the highlights along the way was to worship with the church I had served more than forty years ago, back in the early 1980s. It was a delight to see faces and reminisce with worshippers we had not been with for decades. Admittedly there were those among us who had put on a little weight and others who had lost a little hair (and some of us both!). And the grey-bearded gentleman who read the Scripture had barely reached his teen years when we had last seen him. And there they were, continuing faithfully today.

Being with these people again was a living reminder that as believers and followers of Jesus Christ we are in it for the long haul. Jesus talked about the life of discipleship in terms of abiding in him, or as one rendering of the New Testament puts it, making ourselves at home with him. And for his own part Jesus has promised that he will be with us to the end of the world. And that is what forms much of the background behind the First Letter of John, from which we have been reading over the past few weeks.

John is writing as a long-term pastor and he is writing looking back on his own even longer-term walk of discipleship with Jesus. We can’t be entirely sure, but the likelihood is that John was just a young teenager when with his brother James he left his fishing net behind in his father’s boat and heeded Jesus’ call to “Come, follow me.” Three years later he would be the only one of Jesus’ male disciples to be found standing by the cross. And the third morning after that he would be the first to peer inside the empty tomb and look with amazement on Jesus’ disused grave cloths lying discarded in a heap.

Now, as we read from the first of his three letters, the scene moves a thousand kilometers north, from Jerusalem to Ephesus, near the coast of what is modern-day Turkey. We learn from Irenaeus, who lived a generation later, that John ministered there until some point in the reign of the emperor Trajan.

Now Trajan ruled from 98 to 117 AD. So it is now approaching seventy years after the events in the gospel and John is nearing the end of a long and fruitful ministry. We don’t know much more about him, except for one little story that somehow managed to survive through the generations and was recounted three centuries or so later by Jerome, the translator of the Bible into Latin. It runs like this:

The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, ‘Little children, love one another.’ The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, ‘Teacher, why do you always say this?’ He replied with a line worthy of John: ‘Because it is the Lord's commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.’

A word to all

Accurate or not, that little anecdote is certainly consistent with that we read in 1 John chapter 2 this morning. There we find John using his authority both as one who knew Jesus personally and as their long-term pastor to gently lay down the law with his congregation.

It was not as though he was coming up with anything new, says John. Indeed the commandment he was leaving with them was as old as Scripture itself, going right back to Moses. And it is this: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18)

Of course John had been present when Jesus cited it as one of the two great commandments (Matthew 22:37-40). But then John had been there again when Jesus upped the ante, when he raised the command to love to a whole new level. It was on the night before he was to give up his life for them on the cross that Jesus said to his followers, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35)