It is John’s insistence that, when people have sinned, excuses and self-justifications are irrelevant. The only thing which will meet the situation is humble and penitent confession to God and, if need be, to other people too.
Then John says a surprising thing. He says that we can depend on God in his righteousness to forgive us if we confess our sins. On the face of it, we might well have thought that God in his righteousness would have been much more likely to condemn than to forgive. But the point is that God, because he is righteous, never breaks his word; and Scripture is full of the promise of mercy to all who come to him with penitent hearts. God has promised that he will never despise the contrite heart and he will not break his word. If we humbly and sorrowfully confess our sins, he will forgive. The very fact of making excuses and looking for self-justification shuts us out from forgiveness, because it blocks our way to penitence; the very fact of humble confession opens the door to forgiveness, for those with penitent hearts can claim the promises of God.
(2) There are some people who say that they have not in fact sinned. That attitude is not nearly so uncommon as we might think. Any number of people do not really believe that they have sinned and rather resent being called sinners. Their mistake is that they think of sin as the kind of thing which gets into the news. They forget that sin is hamartia, which literally means a missing of the target. To fail to be as good a father, mother, wife, husband, son, daughter, employee or person as we might be is to sin; and that includes us all.
In any event, anyone who claims not to have sinned is in effect doing nothing less than calling God a liar, for God has said that all have sinned.
So, John condemns those who believe that they are so far advanced in knowledge and in the spiritual life that sin for them has ceased to matter; he condemns those who evade the responsibility for their sin or who hold that sin has no effect upon them; he condemns those who have never even realized that they are sinners. The essence of the Christian life is first to realize our sin and then to go to God for that forgiveness which can wipe out the past and for that cleansing which can make the future new.
A PASTOR’S CONCERN
1 John 2:1–2
My little children, I am writing these things to you that you may not sin. But, if anyone does sin, we have one who will plead our cause to the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. For he is the propitiating sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.
THE first thing to note in this passage is the sheer affection in it. John begins with the address: ‘My little children’. Both in Latin and in Greek, diminutives carry a special affection. They are words which are used, as it were, with a caress. John is a very old man; he must be, in fact, the last survivor of his generation, maybe the last man alive who had walked and talked with Jesus in his days on earth. So often, age gets out of sympathy with youth and acquires even an impatient irritableness with the new and freer ways of the younger generation. But not John; in his old age, he has nothing but tenderness for those who are his little children in the faith. He is writing to tell them that they must not sin; but he does not scold. There is no edge in his voice; he seeks to love them into goodness. In this opening address, there is the yearning, affectionate tenderness of a pastor for people whom he has known for a long time in all their wayward foolishness, and whom he still loves.
His purpose in writing is to prevent them from sinning. There is a twofold connection of thought here – with what has gone before and with what comes afterwards. There is a twofold danger that they may indeed think lightly of sin.
John says two things about sin. First, he has just said that sin is universal; anyone who claims never to have sinned is a liar. Second, there is forgiveness of sins through what Jesus Christ has done, and still does, for men and women. Now, it would be possible to use both these statements as an excuse to take sin lightly. If all have sinned, why make a fuss about it, and what is the use of struggling against something which is, in any event, an inevitable part of the human situation? Again, if there is forgiveness of sins, why worry about it?
In response to that, John, as the New Testament scholar B. F. Westcott points out, has two things to say.
First, Christians are people who have come to know God; and the inevitable accompaniment of knowledge must be obedience. We shall return to this more fully; but, at the moment, we note that to know God and to obey God must, as John sees it, be twin parts of the same experience.
Second, those who claim that they abide in God (2:6) and in Jesus Christ must live the same kind of life as Jesus lived. That is to say, union with Christ necessarily involves imitation of Christ.
So, John lays down his two great ethical principles: knowledge involves obedience, and union involves imitation. Therefore, in the Christian life, there can never be any suggestion that sin should be taken lightly.
JESUS CHRIST OUR FRIEND AND DEFENDER
1 John 2:1–2 (contd)
IT will take us some considerable time to deal with these two verses, for in the New Testament there are few other verses which so concisely and clearly describe the work of Christ.
Let us first set out the problem. It is clear that Christianity is an ethical religion; that is what John is concerned to stress. But it is also clear that human beings are so often an ethical failure. Confronted with the demands of God, they acknowledge them and accept them – and then fail to keep them. Here, there is a barrier erected between us and God. How can we sinners ever enter into the presence of God, the all-holy? That problem is solved in Jesus Christ. And, in this passage, John uses two great words about Jesus Christ which we must study, not simply to acquire intellectual knowledge but to gain understanding and so to enter into the benefits of Christ.
He calls Jesus Christ our advocate with the Father. The word is paraklētos, which in the Fourth Gospel the Authorized Version translates as comforter. It is so great a word and has behind it so great a thought that we must examine it in detail. Paraklētos comes from the verb parakalein. There are occasions when parakalein means to comfort. It is, for instance, used with that meaning in Genesis 37:35, where it is said that all Jacob’s sons and daughters rose up to comfort him at the loss of Joseph; in Isaiah 61:2, where it is said that the function of the prophet is to comfort all who mourn; and in Matthew 5:4, where it is said that those who mourn will be comforted.
But that is neither the most common nor the most literal sense of parakalein; its most usual meaning is to call someone to one’s side in order to use that person in some way as a helper and a counsellor. In ordinary Greek, that is a very common usage. Xenophon, the Greek historian (Anabasis, 1:6:5), tells how the Persian emperor Cyrus the Younger summoned (parakalein) Clearchos into his tent to be his counsellor, for Clearchos was a man held in the highest honour by Cyrus and by the Greeks. Aeschines, the Greek orator, protests against his opponents calling in Demosthenes, his great rival, and says: ‘Why need you call Demosthenes to your support? To do so is to call in a rascally rhetorician to cheat the ears of the jury’ (Against Ctesiphon, 200).
Paraklētos itself is a word which is passive in form and literally means someone who is called to one’s side; but, since it is always the reason for the calling in that is uppermost in the mind, the word, although passive in form, has an active sense, and comes to mean a helper, a supporter and, above all, a witness in someone’s favour, an advocate in someone’s defence. It is also a common word in ordinary secular Greek. The Athenian statesman Demosthenes (De Falsa Legatione, 1) speaks of the persistent requests and the party spirit of advocates