1.05 - The Apostle John In His Letters
Chapter 5 The Apostle John In His Letters (Revelation 1:9)
St John’s Reserve—Companionship with St Peter—Contrast between the Friends—St John’s Place in the Primitive Church—The Apostle of Love—The Apostle of Wrath—Combination of the Mystical and Matter-of-fact—St John’s Symbolism a product of this Union—Twofold Conflict of the Church: Imperial Persecution, Gnosticizing Error.
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I John, your brother and partaker with you in the tribulation and kingdom and patience which are in Jesus. — Revelation 1:1
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IN his letters, if anywhere, a writer is wont to un-bosom himself. Our examination of the Epistles should therefore have brought us nearer to St John’s personality. The material they yield for this purpose is indeed somewhat disappointing. A single page of St Paul’s is more self-revealing than all that this Apostle has written. There is a veil about him, —a reserve never quite penetrated. We see John standing by Peter’s side in the first Christian movements at Jerusalem (Acts 3:1, etc.; Acts 4:13, etc.; Acts 8:14); we find him twenty years later counted as one of the three “pillars” of the mother Church (Galatians 2:9); but not a word is quoted from his lips, nor a single act of personal initiative ascribed to him. From the prominence thus accorded to St John, with the lack of any notable doing on his part, the inference is that the force of his character was felt and his influence exerted throughout those earlier years in the counsels of the Apostolate and the inner circles of the Church, rather than in the field of its external activities.
St John was, in fact, the complement of St Peter; their friendship was of the kind often contracted between opposite natures, each meeting the defects of the other. Peter was the man of action,—impulsive, demonstrative, ready at a word to plunge into the sea, to draw the sword, to “go to prison and to death” with his Master; John was the man of reflection,—quiet, deliberate, saying little, but observing, thinking, meaning much. “All members” of Christ’s body “have not the same office”; and St John had other work to do than that of his compeers. The cousin of our Lord (John 10:25 = Matthew 27:56) and “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” his qualities of mind and heart secured for him a foremost place amongst the Twelve; and his type of thought, reflecting so much that others had comparatively missed of what was deepest in the mind of Jesus, impressed itself on his fellow-workers from the outset. The Fourth Gospel, in its completed form the fruit of sixty years’ meditation, contains the substance of St John’s testimony “concerning the word of life” as he delivered it “from the beginning” (1 John 1:1-3); and this teaching quietly and gradually permeated the Christian Society, through his converse with its leading minds, and through the manner in which he touched the secret springs of its life. In the writings of St John’s last years the Church recognized accordingly “that which was from the beginning,” “the message which” its children “had heard from the beginning” (1 John 1:1, 1 John 2:7, 1 John 3:11, etc.) through the same Apostle. Where the Pauline and Johannine theologies lean to each other, it may be presumed (though the fact is not commonly recognized) that the primary debt lay on St Paul’s side; St John’s historical witness largely supplied the data and presuppositions for St Paul’s doctrines of the Holy Spirit and the indwelling Christ, which St John in turn retouched and cast into their final expression. It was given to this Apostle to pronounce the alpha and omega of mystical Christianity.
During the period covered by the Acts of the Apostles, in which SS Peter and Paul played their glorious part as Christ’s protagonists, St John remained in the shade, though by no means inactive or ineffective there. When Peter asked the Master at the last, “Lord, and what shall this man do?—what is to become of John?” along with the affection prompting the inquiry, there was a touch of curiosity about the future of his friend, whose moods often drove Peter into impatience:12 what sort of Apostle could this dreamer make? The reply, “If I will that he tarry till I come—?” seems to signify that John must bide his time, that he would come late to his own. So the event proved. It was not until after the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70, not till the pioneer work of the Gospel in the Roman Empire was done and the great founders had passed away, that the Apostle John reached his zenith and took his place at Ephesus, already an old man, in the centre of the catholic Church, attracting universal reverence and observance. It was by his writings finally—the Gospel and Epistles, the work of the last decade of the century, composed when the author was past eighty years of age (the Apocalypse was probably, in whole or in part, considerably earlier)—that he made his great contribution to the spiritual wealth of the Church and of mankind; of public speech or action on St John’s part only slight traces have remained. For these books it is still reserved to gain their complete sway over the Christian mind. To this day John tarries his Lord’s coming; he knew how to wait.
Every one thinks of St John as the Apostle of love. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God” (1 John 4:7), is his characteristic appeal. From John’s pen comes the most endeared text of the New Testament: “God so loved the world, that He gave His Son, the Only-begotten.” The Epistles issued from a heart steeped in the redeeming love of God. When he wrote them, the blessed Apostle had entered deeply into the experience of perfect love; he spoke out of his own consciousness in saying, “Whoso keepeth Christ’s word, truly in him the love of God hath been perfected”; and again, “Herein is love made perfect with us . . . because as He is, we too are in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear. ... We love, because He first loved us” (1 John 2:5, 1 John 4:17-19). Through long pastoral service, and in the ripeness of protracted age, St John’s love to the brethren had grown into a most tender, wise, discriminating fatherly care, which embraced all the flock of Christ but spent itself most upon the Churches of the Asian fold. Never since he died has the Church Universal possessed a living father in God to whom it could look up with the affectionate veneration that gathered round St John’s person at the close of the Apostolic age.
The love which attained perfectness in the Apostle John was more than a general emotion, a devotion to the body of Christ at large. He was great in comradeship and friendship. The man that “loveth not his brother whom he hath seen” (1 John 4:20), the Apostle judges incapable of love to the unseen Father. For this reason, amongst others, John was “the disciple whom Jesus loved”; to his tendance the Lord from the cross commended His widowed mother. Peter and John, constantly side by side in the Gospel story, are significantly found together on the Easter morning (John 20:2-10)—who knows how much St John then did to save his companion from despair? His “love” was, we may be sure, a “bond of peace” in the Apostolic fellowship and through the anxious years of the Church’s infancy. The appeals and reasonings of the First Epistle reveal the close ties of affection binding to the Apostle the members of his wide Asian flock; he sought in the strengthening and purifying of the spirit of love the prophylactic for the Church against intellectual error. The Second Epistle, in its few lines, exhibits the writer’s watchful solicitude for each community of his jurisdiction; it conveys a grave and strong warning, with the tact that love imparts: the admonition begins with the entreaty, based on the old commandment, “which we had from the beginning, that we should love one another” (2 John 1:5; 1 John 2:7-8). In the instances of Gains and Demetrius, the Third Epistle illustrates the warmth of St John’s friendships, and the way in which he turned to account the qualities and gifts of his helpers in Christ’s service. One imagines that the Apostle John’s success in the direction of Church affairs was due to the strength and multiplicity of his personal attachments and to his influence over individual workers, rather than to any skill in organization and the management of business. But St John was more than the Apostle of love. His aspect is not always that of the mild and amiable patriarch of the Church, breathing out, “Little children, love one another!” It was a different John from this who would have called down “fire from heaven” upon the Samarian village that refused his Master hospitality (Luke 9:51-56), and whom Jesus distinguished as Boanerges (not from the loudness of his voice, but from the sudden, lightning-like flame of his spirit), for whom, along with James his brother, their mother asked the two chief places right and left of the Messiah’s throne (Matthew 20:20-28). Under the placid surface of St John’s nature there lay a slumbering passion, a brooding ambition, that blazed up on occasion with startling vehemence. Now it is the John Boanerges who re-appears in the Apocalypse—strong in contempt and hate no less than in love, whose soul resounded through its whole compass to the “indignation of the wrath” of Almighty God, that thunders against the haters of His Christ and the murderers of His people. Nor in Gospel and Epistles is this Divine anger—love’s counter-part in a world of sin—very far to seek. The chapter which tells how “God so loved the world,” ends with the fearful words concerning the disobeyer of the Son, “The wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36). The holy wrath of the Apostle flashes out against immoral pretenders to high Christian knowledge, when he exclaims in the First Epistle, “If we say that we have fellowship) with God and walk in darkness, we lie”; “If a man say, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar”, (1 John 1:6, 1 John 2:22, 1 John 4:20). When he likes, the gentle John can be the most peremptory and dogmatic of teachers “He that knoweth God,” he asserts, “heareth us; he who is not of God, heareth us not. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error” (1 John 4:6; see Chapter 19 below).
The story about John and Cerinthus, that when they happened to meet in the public baths at Ephesus, the Apostle fled as if for life, crying, “Away, lest the bath fall in, while Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is there!” though unhistorical, has a point of attachment in St John’s known disposition.
We discern the same strong temperament—love with its possibilities of anger, notes of sharp severity breaking through the winning and tender strain of the Apostle’s converse—in the two minor Epistles: witness the stern exclusion of Antichristian teachers in 2 John 1:10-11, and the denunciation of him who “greets” them as “partaker in their evil deeds”; witness the handling of Diotrephes in 3 John 1:9-10. With all its breadth and its power of abstract thinking, St John’s mind was of a simple order: he paints in black and white; he sees “light and darkness,” “love and hate,” the kingdom of God and of Satan everywhere in conflict (compare Chapter 17). He is with all his soul against the Devil and “his children,” because he is for God and Christ. He recognizes no neutral tints, no half-lights; to his mind, the Lord loathes nothing so much as the luke-warmness of Laodicea—“neither cold nor hot” (Revelation 3:15-16). The constitution of the Apostle John presents another striking contrast, in its union of the mystical and the matter-of-fact. Exactitude in detail, truth and vividness of local colour and dramatic force of characterization, are combined in the Fourth Gospel with the profoundest analysis and with transcendent spiritual power. No writer has a firmer grasp of the actual and a truer reverence for fact; the attempts to disprove the historicity of his witness break always upon the rock of the Johannine realism. St John’s symbolism, which gets free play in the Apocalypse supplies the link between the positive and the transcendental in his mind. He had both sight and insight; the world and life—above all, the life of Christ and of the Church—were full of “signs” for him; they were charged at each point with infinite meanings. This inner significance made outward occurrences sacred to St John, and rendered his observation of them all the more keen and precise.13
The same traits appear in the two smaller letters. 3 John contains three portraits of Christian character, drawn in the briefest lines but with incisive force; the writer was a sure and penetrating judge of men and circumstances. 2 John indicates the author’s knowledge of a Christian Society at some distance from himself,—its situation and dangers; the playful yet most serious way in which he styles the Church of Pergamum (as we have supposed: see Chapter 3) the “elect lady” and the Church of Ephesus her “elect sister,” is in St John’s imaginative vein. This representation illustrates the readiness, manifest throughout the Letters to the Seven Churches, with which the Apostle caught the significance of local and historical position and realized its bearing upon the character and fate of communities.
St John kept a tranquil heart through a long life-time of storm and stress. He had been banished to Patmos, and endured there, as a convict under the Roman Government, “a life of toil and hopeless misery” more dreaded than death;14 the Apocalypse was the product of this experience. Meanwhile the Gnostic heresy—the most deadly corruption Christianity has ever known—was spreading like some noxious weed through the Asian Churches: 1 and 2 John are both directed against this error; we perceive its early working at Pergamum and Thyatira through the Letters of Revelation 2:1-29. In these conflicts the Apostle saw the fulfilment of his Master’s word.
“Now,” he writes, “many Antichrists have arisen; from which we know that it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18), the “last hour” of the Apostolic era—nay, for aught he could tell, of human history itself (see Chapter 14 below). But St John was in no wise disturbed by the omens of the time. Despite appearances, he knows that “the world passeth away and the lust thereof,” while “he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever” (1 John 2:17-18); he writes to a Church threatened with schism and perversion from the faith, expressing the love he bears toward it “for the truth’s sake, which abideth in us and shall be with us for ever” (2 John 1:2). John’s house of life—Christ’s great house, the Church—is founded upon the rock; the storms beat against it in vain. The facts of Christianity are the fixed certainties of time. “That which was from the beginning, which we have seen with our eyes and our hands have handled—the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested unto us” (1 John 1:1-2)—these realities of God, once planted in the world, will be destroyed by no violence of secular power and dissolved by no subtlety of scepticism. “We know that the Son of God is come”—the event is final and decisive; “for this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8; 1 John 5:20). Jesus Christ knows and has measured all opposing forces, and His mission will be carried through to the end; we “have confidence in Him” (compare Chapter 25). This note of perfect Christian assurance sounds in every line St John has written. In “our faith” he sees already the “victory that hath overcome the world” (1 John 5:4).
So the Apostle John passed away, leaving the Church in Asia Minor and the Empire beleaguered by foes and entering on a gigantic struggle. The world assailed her with overwhelming force in the triple form of political oppression, social seduction, and intellectual sophistry. He had prepared, in his Gospel, Epistles, and Revelation, weapons for this conflict which stood his brethren in good stead, and will do so to the end of time. He died with the calmest assurance of his Master’s triumph, with the Hallelujahs of the final coronation of Jesus ringing in his ears. We greet him under the character and aspect in which he chiefly wished to be regarded by after-times: “I John, your brother, and partaker with you in the tribulation and kingdom and patience which are in Jesus.”