In the unfortunate event that I have failed to make these posts less boring than my master’s thesis, you may be relieved to hear that this is the final instalment of my series on the Holy Spirit in 1 John and the Farewell Discourse. I hope, though, that I’ve been able to illustrate a bit of why I believe that the first letter of John bears a truly exciting witness to the Spirit. I hope you’ll come to agree that it tells us something substantial and precious about that mysterious person of the Trinity who challenges us, if you will, with “a problem like Maria…How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?”
In 1 John 4, we will be invited to see lines drawn between ideas like stars in a constellation—Spirit, abiding, and love. In the Farewell Discourse, these fiery words studded the dark backdrop of Jesus’ impending death; here, they are meaningfully aggregated such that a unique way of understanding each point of light, and the Spirit’s self, begins to take shape.
At the end of 1 John 3, we heard that the love God commands is, like Jesus, veiled in flesh. The love that pleases the Divine, the death-defying love which only a cruciform power could give, shows up most frequently in the mundane. God has made us capable of this love and will continue dispel from our hearts the shame that inhibits it. Yet, our assurance comes not only from our observable actions, but from God’s intangible gift: “And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.” (3:24).
1 John 4 continues the theme, emphasizing Christ’s embodiment (4:2) and further specifying the reciprocity of divine-human abiding: “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit” (4:13). Recall Christ’s various statements in the Farewell Discourse that he, we, the Father and the Spirit either love, abide in, or abide in the love of each other!
Of course, the letter is clear that God is the source of love: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (4:10; see also 4:19 and Romans 5:5-8, another famous Spirit-love passage!). Yet, on the other side of Christ’s death and resurrection, we are empowered to love God in a new way: “So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (4:16).
We know our mutual abiding with God by the manifestation of the love command and by the gift of the Spirit; the identity of God, and therefore the content of abiding, can be understood as love. Confession of Christ’s embodiment is the mark of the Spirit of God (4:2); Christ’s embodiment is proof of God’s love (4:9-10), and our love must also be embodied (4:21). This letter passionately proclaims a Christ-theology of divine sonship and atoning sacrifice, with ethics to match. Meanwhile, it gently implies a Spirit-theology of abiding love.
This letter doesn’t try—if you’ll excuse one more Sound of Music reference—to “catch a cloud and pin it down.” Instead, it points out a constellation and invites us to stargaze. It offers a deeply comforting perspective to a fractured, wavering, abandoned church: the divine Spirit of love, though ungraspable, remains.
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