Love Conquers the World

Easter 6 2024; 1 John 5:1-6, John 15:9-17

In a recent homily my Yale colleague Teresa Morgan reminded students here that it can difficult to remember where the famous love commandment of Jesus—”love one another”— appears in John’s Gospel, because it actually occurs three times (13:34; 15:12, 17). Two of these are in this Gospel reading for Easter 6. Yet the same command appears no less than five times in the closely-related First Letter of John (1 John 3:11, 3:23, 4: 7, 4:11, 4:12).

In this year B, readings from 1 John have appeared each week since Easter 2—these weeks are the only time this letter is read in the Sunday lectionary. This Sunday and last, they also accompany words of Jesus from the Gospel of John, and we get to hear clearly the resonances between the two works.

Raymond Brown observes that “only an expert can point out whether an isolated Johannine quotation…is to be found in [the Gospel] or in I John.”¹ 1 John is traditionally described as a letter, but unlike 2 and 3 John it is not shaped as one at all. It is simply an extended, and somewhat repetitive, discourse rather like the Last Supper speech parts of which we have read in the Gospel. Many themes, and even specifics of phrasing and terminology, are just the same. Apart from the times Jesus is mentioned in the third person, much of the “letter” could even be dropped into this Gospel discourse from John without any obvious violence to the content.

In the course of this epistle reading from 1 John 5 we find a set of connections characteristic of both works. Belief in Jesus—or rather belief that he is the Christ (more on this in a bit)—amounts to “birth from God” (cf. John 3:3) and hence to the creation of a community of God’s children who love one another (John 15) as well as their divine parent. This love means obedience to the commandments, although the Letter never defines “commandments”; the author is content to have us remember from the previous chapter (and last week’s epistle, and today’s Gospel) that the whole meaning of the commandments is to love one another.

This faith, and this practice of love—one and the same thing for John, not just things that are both important—are then described (three times in quick succession; the word actually appears four times in the Greek text) as “conquering the world” (NRSV). This translation is apt, relative to “overcome” used in other versions; the repeated word is nikaō, as in nikē, victory. The sudden appearance of this political or military language is striking, but fits with a continued theme in John, of that “kingdom not from this world” to which the believer belongs and in which Jesus rules. The vine, the flock, the new community of love, is a social body set over against the values and assumptions of the surrounding world and its understanding of power.

Then in the epistle there appears a curious aside about Jesus himself who has come “by water and blood,” and “by the water and the blood,” and then to the Spirit who testifies (1 John 5:6). This water and blood have caused considerable scholarly ink to be spilled, but the expansive if sometimes imprecise way John uses images encourages less concern with exactitude than with the central force of the idea.

St John the Evangelist - Nardo di Cione (Florence, active by 1343/46–died 1366). Yale University Art Gallery

Some interpreters have tried to link “water and blood” with the sacraments (taking the two as references to baptism and eucharist), or to the incarnation (taking them as aspects of Jesus’ real physical existence, over against some who denied it—cf. 1 John 4:2), or with the key framing events of Jesus’ own baptism (water) and death (blood). There may be truth in more than one of these. Some readers will also recall the detail in John’s account of the crucifixion where “blood and water came forth” (19:34) after Jesus’ side was pierced, and the similar emphasis there on the “testimony” (v. 35), which echoes the language here.

However these images work exactly, they evoke the reality of Jesus’ life and death as a whole, which for John is both grounded in history and also transcends it, so that Jesus can even at the Last Supper speak of his victory as accomplished, and at various points in the story describe the believer as someone who has already passed from death to life. It is this work of Jesus as a whole—from being “made flesh” (1:14) to “it is finished” (19:3) in the Gospel— that this Letter also presents to the readers. It thus emphasizes not just “faith” in a general way, but faith that Jesus is “the Christ” (1 John 5:1, 6), meaning literally faith in his messianic identity or true kingship, and his status as victor in that conflict with the world.

The Gospel for Easter 6 complements this epistle reading very directly. It continues the passage read last week centering on the vine metaphor, also clearly understood by the Fourth Evangelist as an image of the Church after the Resurrection. The love command occurs twice here. It is not merely a sort of general statement about the value of love, but a claim that love is part of that remaining or abiding that characterizes the parts of the vine, that community of God’s children also described in the Letter.

Jesus himself speaks and make a connection similar to the one that 1 John insists on, between love and his own story. In the epistle the “water and blood” had witnessed to the love that conquers the world through complete self-giving. Here in the Gospel we find the famous phrase—reused or misused to refer to noble but unrelated forms of self-offering, such as service of different kingdoms and conquests—that “no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (15:13) playing a similar role. This saying links the love command with Jesus’ own destiny; while it may draw on a wider insight about self-giving love, here it is not about self-sacrifice in general, but about Jesus’ own fate and glory. Of course the disciples might expect to share in both.

The love command is simple but not easy. John—both Letter and Gospel—are telling us this is not merely a worthy ethical precept, but something to do with the nature of God’s presence and action in the world and the Church. To take Jesus’ laying down of his own life merely as an ethical example would be to miss at least part of the point. John suggests that the coming of the Word and his conquest of the world actually changes reality, and us. Abiding in him, as his friends and his family, we not only experience his love but become part of the reality he has brought into being.

While his disciples and friends find this love abiding in him, this does not mean that the Church has cornered the market. In last week’s epistle, verses from 1 John 4 just prior to what was read today, John says “love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8). So while those “abiding” in Jesus have a unique experience of this love as his friends, they are actually experiencing reality itself, in contrast to life lived in accord with the apparent logic of the world. Violence, suffering, and pursuit of material advantage are not only wrong, but unreal; love is the truth, for Jesus has conquered the world.

1. Raymond E. Brown, The Epistles of John. The Anchor Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982, p. xi.