Saturday after Epiphany, January, 9, 2021

1 John 5:14-21

Beloved: We have this confidence in him that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in regard to whatever we ask, we know that what we have asked him for is ours. If anyone sees his brother sinning, if the sin is not deadly, he should pray to God and he will give him life. This is only for those whose sin is not deadly. There is such a thing as deadly sin, about which I do not say that you should pray. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not deadly. We know that anyone begotten by God does not sin; but the one begotten by God he protects, and the Evil One cannot touch him. We know that we belong to God, and the whole world is under the power of the Evil One. We also know that the Son of God has come and has given us discernment to know the one who is true. And we are in the one who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Children, be on your guard against idols.

Earlier in his First Letter, from which this reading is taken, St. John taught that the Son of God took on a human nature in his Incarnation, which the Apostle followed by instructing his hearers, baptized in the Lord, on how they ought to act towards one another.  He now concludes his First Letter by speaking on prayer.

“We have this confidence in him that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.”  John says, “if we ask anything according to his will.”  We ought to conform ourselves to his will so that what we ask is in accord with it, and then we ask for the grace to act according to his will.  In our prayers of petition, we do two things: we ask for what we or others need in order to carry out God’s will, and we pray for the grace to use well what he gives us.  We may pray for a cure for our illness and expect the Lord to heal us instantly, but his answer to our prayer may be a medicine or treatment.  We cannot very well dictate to God how we want him to answer our prayers; we receive his answer gratefully, and conform our will to his in this instance.  “And if we know that he hears us in regard to whatever we ask, we know that what we have asked him for is ours.”  John is remembering here how the Lord told him and the other Apostles: “Whatsoever you shall ask the Father in my name, that will I do” (John 14, 13).  The Lord knows all that we need and will ask for, yet he wills for us to participate in our being helped so that we know that everything comes from him.

“If anyone sees his brother sinning, if the sin is not deadly, he should pray to God and he will give him life.”  Here, John encourages us to pray for one another’s forgiveness and conversion.  He desires us to assist one another in our prayers so that we might be saved together.  Religion is not a matter of private piety, but of members in communion with each other and with the Lord engaging in worship, and part of that worship is in helping a fellow member of the Body of Christ attain perfection so as to perfectly offer adoration to God.  The “life” that the faltering member receives as a result of the prayer made for him is the grace to fully recognize what he has done, to feel true contrition, and to repent.  “This is only for those whose sin is not deadly.”  That is, for one who has committed a venial sin.  A way to distinguish venial from mortal sin is to know that mortal sin is committed with malice, and the action is designed to cause someone serious harm.  “There is such a thing as deadly sin, about which I do not say that you should pray.”  John teaches us the gravity of mortal sin in this way: it is so terrible that not even prayer can help.  Still, we ought to pray for one who commits this kind of sin, and John does not forbid it.  “All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not deadly.”  As an example of venial versus mortal sin, a woman tells her son not to eat anything before dinner and the child eats a piece of bread anyway.  The mortal sin would be if the child ate an entire loaf of bread so that no one else could have any.  

“We know that anyone begotten by God does not sin; but the one begotten by God he protects.”  This verse has been misinterpreted.  John is saying that a baptized Christian has rejected sin, and that sin is unbecoming to him, not that he is unable to sin.  It is the same as saying, A member of my family does not do that.  God protects his children with his grace from committing sin, though a person can refuse his protection and go and commit a sin.  “The Evil One cannot touch him.”  The devil can tempt one who is baptized but he has no power over him unless the person gives it to him.

“The Son of God has come and has given us discernment to know the one who is true.”  This verse should read: The Son of God has given us understanding that we may know the true one.  The lectionary version sounds as though we are given the power to sort through a number of claims until we find which one “is true”, but John means to say that we have been given the grace to know the true one, the Son of God, Jesus Christ.  “And we are in the one who is true.”  Again, literally the Greek says, “the true one”.  The difference between the lectionary version and the literal is that the former implies that Christ is one of many claimants to be true, and he is in fact the one who is.  The latter indicates that Christ is the truth.  He is true to himself, to the Father, and to us.  Because he is true, we can trust him to lead us to eternal life.  John tells us that we are in “the true one”.  He is the Vine and we are the branches, and so we have life in him.   “Jesus Christ”.  John named the Lord both by his personal name and by his title, “Christ”, that is, “the Anointed”, in order to reaffirm that Jesus is God-made-man, in a final contradiction to the Gnostics: “He is the true God and eternal life.”

“Children, be on your guard against idols.”  Coming at the very end of the epistle, this warning seems abrupt as well as unrelated to what has gone before.  But having established the divinity of Jesus Christ, John warns his hearers against the worship of anything else claiming divinity.  For a Gentile Christian, the habits of a lifetime did not die easily, and temples, statues, and references to the pagan gods could not be avoided.  John urges his hearers to take active steps to keep away from them, not merely to turn aside when they came across them.  This advice helps anyone who has become accustomed to certain sins.  Active avoidance leads to success; expecting to resist when already assailed leads to doom.