The life of Jesus Christ and the history of his Church seem to be divided by a natural distance in time. While we have the Gospels and we know about certain moments from the life of Christ, there does not seem to be any works about Christ while he was on earth. When the Church becomes something very clear in history, there is already a familiarity with the Gospel and the traditions that came from the earliest Church fathers. This clear distinction between the life of Christ and the age of the Church has caused plenty of rifts within Christianity; the only way in which we can truly understand the fullness of Christ’s Church as he desired it to be is through someone or something that marks a clear connection between the figure of Jesus and the Church. God knew this, and very deliberately made sure that there would be a connection for us to learn about the establishment and foundation of the Church. He chose John, the beloved Apostle and evangelist, to be the one who connects the time of Christ to the age of the Church.

John was most likely a very young man, perhaps even a boy, when he was called by Christ to become one of his followers along with his brother James. John was present at all of the most significant moments during the ministry of Christ so that he could provide trustworthy eyewitness accounts. He also became the caretaker of Mary after the death of Christ, so that he could learn from her who Christ was away from the crowds and away from his followers. Most importantly, John was the only Apostle who was not martyred; instead, he wrote his works around 60-70 years after the crucifixion, just as Christ had prophesied to Peter after the Resurrection. All of these details tell us that John was not only someone whose account of the story of Jesus is accurate, but also someone who had the time to formulate deep theological analysis and reflection on what he saw in a way that no one else in history could possibly do. As a result, his Gospel is the most rich and substantive of the four, not because it is jam-packed with anecdotes from the life of Christ, but because it takes the few stories and details within it and expounds the most meaningful and instructive elements about them. In John’s Gospel, we have the earliest expression of “Church”: theological insights from one with tremendous authority, who became the living embodiment of the transition from the age of the Apostles to the age of Apostolic succession.

John’s presentation and personification of the continuity of the Church from the time of Christ is not just in his writing, but in the main message that he tried to convey in his life. He begins his Gospel by identifying the Son of God as the Word of God, present from the very beginning of time. As we read in this passage, he reiterates this concept in the beginning of his first epistle. In his Gospel, he tried to establish the divinity of Christ, that Jesus was the full expression of God who became flesh for us. But in his epistle, his message now applies to the Church to whom he was addressing: if the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us, then God has enabled us to proclaim the same Word with our own lips as Christians. What John saw and heard in person during the life of Christ, he proclaimed to the ones who joined immediately after. They passed on the Word of God to every subsequent generation of the Church; these are not mere stories or oral history, but the actual fullness of God that was present from the very beginning. We have John to thank for uniting the Church as we know it explicitly to the life of Christ.

Throughout our lives, we slowly grow from being completely dependent on those who raise us to being responsible for raising others. It’s a process that can only be learned by experience, and we will most likely form others in the very same way we were formed ourselves. There are no rules as to when this happens, and being responsible for the formation of others is not limited to parenthood; Formation is a community act, and we all participate in it. Still, we must be prepared when we take on that transition from being formed to forming others.

In John’s letter that we hear in this passage, he addresses three groups of people: children, fathers, and young men. With each address, John is trying to reach all stages of this formation process so that we may be aware of what stage we are in. Children are those who are in the earliest stage of the process of formation, completely dependent and eager to learn. As children of God, we are continually in this process throughout our lives of learning, making mistakes, trying harder, and doing our best to please our Father. Fathers, representatives of the stage of parenthood, have completely the basics of formation. They have been formed as best as they can and are now ready to form those for whom they are responsible. As Christians in a post-Christian world, we may find ourselves in this position; we have the Truth and a basic understanding of the Truth, so it is our responsibility to impart the Truth onto others. Young men are represented by the words of John as those who are on the frontlines of a battle. All wars, past and present, were fought with the manpower of young men, used for their confidence, energy, and sense of duty. We are fighting a great spiritual war now for the soul of humanity, and we are called as Christians to enter into the fight like those in youth. But we should take great solace in the fact that this is not a war of violence or bloodshed; it is a war between good and evil, and through our goodness, we conquer the Evil One. 

At some point in each one of our lives, we will be called to start forming others. Some of us were formed properly by our parents, guardians and communities, while some have suffered by those who were responsible for forming them. But despite our individual pasts, as we come together as a community through a shared focus on Christ in his Word and in his Body, we are all given a special weapon to move from spiritual childhood, succeed in spiritual youth, and enter into spiritual adulthood - God’s love. He will always be our Father, and we will always be His children. The best way we can be formed and form others is by using His love throughout this life-long process. 

Humans are gifted with the inherent identity of being created in the image and likeness of God. If we understand that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, we will understand that there is a glimpse of these attributes in every individual who participates in human nature. Although we are not omniscient, we are blessed with a powerful rationality not seen in any other part of creation. Although we are not omnipotent, we have the power to control our own actions through free will. Although we are not omnipresent, we are present in our place and time so that we may contribute to God’s plan for humanity. Rationality, power, and presence are all things perfected in God, but which we are allowed to experience by being created in His image and likeness.

Still, we do have limitations that not only keep us from participating in these attributes fully, but also cloud our minds by a false perception of the world around us. Our rationality may not be as perfect as God’s, but it is still powerful enough that we may consider ourselves more intelligent or wise than we actually are. We may not be as powerful as God, but when we do tap into the limited power we can attain by our free will, we may sometimes abuse it at the expense of others. Our presence and individual contribution to the trajectory of humanity may even cause us to seek after an immortality of reputation that is a direct affront to the purpose of why God placed us where we are. In all of these examples, we see how being made in the image and likeness of God can be disordered by our own doing. But there is no greater lie than the one that tells us either that we do not need God or that there is no God. Both lies have the same foundation - humanity is the pinnacle of all life, and we got to that point by ourselves. It is a lie that has been told from our very first sin and is even (and perhaps even especially) seen in the present day.

John says something that should frighten us in his first epistle: we are on the lookout for the antichrist, but there are actually many antichrists. The Truth was revealed to humanity in its entirety through the person of Jesus Christ. Through Christ, we understood the Truth of God’s omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, and we also learned how we are to use our own knowledge, power, and presence. Anything that speaks to the contrary, and anything that rejects Christ, is a falsehood. If Christ is the Truth,  the “antichrist” is falsehood, and the “antichrists” are all these lies that sow doubt in the Truth. The Truth has been revealed to you - embrace it. But instead of listening to these lies as a means to test whether Christ is the Truth, trust that God instilled in us the proper knowledge, power, and presence to distinguish the lies from the Truth.

Since the time of Christ, the Church has grown very slowly into what she is today with the fullness of her current hierarchy, the riches of art and architecture, the great saints and leaders who served the people of God, and especially the development of all of the doctrines and dogmas. To be part of the Church is to conform yourself to her, not for the Church to conform herself to you. Many cannot accept this demand; our own free will enables us to make decisions for ourselves based on our desires, and because we are individuals, we will occasionally desire to do things that are not in conformity with the Church. To be a faithful Catholic is to exercise a certain sense of humility - even if you were the wisest and most experienced human being on the planet, your wisdom and experience pales in comparison to the wisdom and experience of the Church that has developed from the very beginning under the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. When we are not in conformity with the Church on certain matters, it is us and our individual desires and free will that are in the wrong.

This can be particularly difficult to accept when the representatives of the Church, who are themselves flawed human beings with their own individual free wills, do not live out the Spirit of the Church. There have been plenty of figures within the Church’s history who have held the Truth in their teachings and beliefs, but did not implement the Truth in their actions and behavior towards others. On the other hand, there are certain figures who behaved with kindness and apparent good-will, but who did not hold the Truth in their teachings or their beliefs. When these two types of people came against one another, it seemed to be more appropriate to follow the apparent good-will of those in the wrong rather than the apparent bitterness of those who had the Truth. This is precisely the reason why the Church has struggled with heresies since the very beginning; heresy and lies, like sin, cannot tempt us to move away from the Truth of the Church and the Truth of God unless we find it appealing. For those who originated heresies and schism, they could have been the most benevolent and kind people in history, but they all lacked the necessary humility to conform themselves to something greater than their individual free will. Unfortunately, this humility is the one thing that is absolutely necessary for us to understand our relationship with God.

We are all very familiar with the concept of the “Antichrist” that will come at the end of time, as it was explained and prophesied in the book of Revelation. But in this passage from the first letter of John, he makes an astute point that we ought to remind ourselves often: we are all expecting the one antichrist, but there have already been many antichrists, from the age of John to even the present age. The behavior of these “antichrists” is to appear good, honest, kind, and appealing, else no one would follow them. The best way to do this is to exploit the free will and the individuality of those in the Church. The antichrists will say you do not need guidance from the Church, you do not need to conform yourself to Her, you can do all you want on your own, including creating your own doctrine, defining your own morality, and “following your conscience.” We have been warned of these people from the very beginning. We have also been warned that they may even come from within the Church. There is only one way to protect yourself from this threat: stay faithful to the Church in everything, from her doctrines to her tradition to her authority, even when you do not want to. Simply put, exercise humility before God and His Heavenly Bride.

In life, we are given a choice in matters both large and small: we can live according to what is true and suffer because of it, or we can live according to what is false and be content with it. Within every human heart, there is an intrinsic understanding that the existence of objective truth is not only real, but is good enough to desire. No one actually wants to be lied to, and everyone wants to know the truth about the world around them. Unfortunately, many of us have spent our entire lives faced with the realization that the truth often hurts and makes life more difficult to live; many might tell you that they would rather know the truth and be hurt than be lied to and remain content, but our lifestyles and our cultures do not attest to such an answer. We are often liars who know that the truth exists but are too afraid to live according to it.

We know that no matter how difficult it is, it is entirely possible to conform ourselves to the truth and to live only according to what is true. Our examples and role models for such a life can be found in the saints; unfortunately, the one thing that all saints have in common is that they suffered greatly for their love of Christ and his Church. When God created us as human beings, He instilled within us a singular purpose for which all of us were designed: we were created to be saints. However, the allure of sin and the work of Satan actively prevent us from living up to the standard for which we were created. The world offers us a way out of the suffering that is necessary and just as atonement for Original Sin, the sins of our parents, and our own individual personal sin. Instead of responsibility and consequence, the world offers us distractions, instant gratification, lies that make us feel good, and support from those who do not want the best for us but merely do what is most expedient for themselves. We are surrounded by selfishness, the root cause of any and all sin. When we attempt to overcome sin by living selflessly, not just toward our neighbor but toward God in active participation of Church life, we are cast aside by society as archaic, bizarre, delusional, or brainwashed. The world does not recognize us when we are faithful to the Church because the state of the world now does not recognize love. It did not recognize love when it manifested as the person of Jesus Christ; instead, it abused him and sent him to his death simply because it misidentified him through falsehoods. 

In the Church, we are children of God, and children behave according to the way that they were taught by their parents. If we are truly models of Christ, we will not sin. We will choose truth over falsehoods, which means we choose suffering over comfort. We choose a demanding but meaningful life over an easy but empty existence. This is not as simple as merely stating that we are Christian; it is a choice we have to make on a daily basis. As John tells us in this epistle, if we choose to live in Christ, we will not sin. If we choose to sin, we cannot live in Christ. What are you choosing for yourself? Are you taking the path of least resistance because it is easier to avoid awkward moments with the world around you? Are you going along with what the world is offering you at this specific moment in time so that you won’t have to stand out? Are you humbly offering to make sacrifices or to have a few people hate you so that you can live according to the Truth? Life as a Catholic is not easy, but it is the most meaningful form of existence. It is also the only way we can live up to what God created us to be - saints of His Church.

The first twelve chapters of Genesis, the very beginning of Scripture, gives us an account of the very beginning of humanity’s relationship with God as the pinnacle of creation. The most important moment that sets up the story of Salvation History is the fall of human beings at the beginning with the choice of Adam and Eve to sin against God. Their decision, to eat from a tree that they were told not to eat from, was a simple act of disobedience, but was a sin nonetheless. It introduced all other sins, especially those of pride, envy, gluttony, and the other deadly sins. In the modern age, when so many have left organized religion and no longer accept objective morality, blasphemy and sins against God are considered meaningless acts. Even in this age of relativism, though, there does still seem for the most part to be an acknowledgment of the intrinsic evil of taking an innocent life. If you were to ask individuals today what the most evil thing someone could do is, murder would be a popular choice. This great act of evil was the next sin chosen after the fall of humanity, when Adam and Eve’s son Cain murdered his brother Abel.

Because it is part of those first twelve chapters of Genesis, which we refer to as Primeval History, we can’t necessarily treat the biblical account of Cain and Abel as a historical event. However, we can see the deep theological symbolism in this story; Cain’s offering of grain is not accepted by God while Abel’s offering of choice meat is, Cain is warned against envy and sin by God, Cain murders his brother out of that envy, and he is forced to wander the land as punishment. Abel was a holy and just man because he offered to God the best of his flock. He was murdered as an innocent person out of the internal envy of another. From this story, we are introduced to types and prefigurements of the person Jesus Christ; it is fitting, then, that in the Roman Canon during Mass, the priest speaks to God and says, “Be pleased to look upon these offerings…and to accept them, as once you were pleased to accept the gifts of your servant Abel the just.” Both in the person of Abel and in his offering, we see Christ and what he had to offer - humanity’s response was to put him to death. God knew of Abel’s murder because He tells Cain that Abel’s blood cries out from the earth, but Psalm 100 instead says: “let all the earth cry out to God with joy.” The earth soaked with the blood of Christ’s sacrifice does not cry out like it did when it was soaked with the blood of Abel. Now, the earth celebrates with joy because the blood of Christ is our salvation.

We consider the story of Cain and Abel because it is a deeply human story. All of us have been tempted by envy of others, anger for their successes and disappointment of our failures. However, we must also consider the words of God to Cain - why should we be envious or disappointed? If we act justly, we will be accepted, but if not, sin lies in wait for us, though we can control it. John tells us in this epistle that the world hates us because we do not let sin control us. But there is always hope for us, and there is even hope in those who may hate us for the faith we proclaim: something as simple as the acknowledgment of the sin of murder indicates that God has bestowed a recognition of both righteousness and wickedness within each heart. The fulfillment of the story of human history is our salvation. It is also the fulfillment of the story of each individual. The expression of our salvation is love, and “the way we came to know love was that he laid down his life for us.” 

Human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. We were given this truth from the very beginning of our creation, instructed in it through the Scriptures, and placed it at the forefront of our minds when reminding ourselves of the inherent dignity of all people. What does this mean? Does it mean that God looks like us, that He shares our features, that He sees the world the same way we do, that He communicates just as we can? Clearly not - God is wholly indescribable to us as mere human beings. However, the “image and likeness” we all have is one simple thing: love. God is Love. The capacity and ability to love or to be ordered to love is uniquely divine, and God has determined to share this divine attribute with us as His creation so that we may love Him in return.

If we could encapsulate everything we know about God into a single phrase, it would be the one taken from this passage from the first letter of John: God is love. This may sound simple or trite, but to the early Christian community, this meant everything, mainly because they were primary witnesses to the perfect act of love in the death of Christ. Humans unfortunately have such a basic misunderstanding of the concept of love whenever we misconstrue it as a movement of the heart, an emotion, or a drive to feel good in the presence of others. In reality, love is an action, a firm resolve to do everything in your power to will the good of another person for no other reason than an appreciation for them as an individual. Love is not contingent on one’s personality, one’s beauty, one’s merit, or any other exterior characteristic; love is contingent on recognizing the inherent dignity of another person, even with all their flaws in full effect. In other words, to love is to recognize the image and likeness of God in another person. John knew love. In his Gospel, he always refers to himself as the “beloved” because he understood that Christ willed his good for no other reason than the fact that he was made in the image and likeness of God. He was one of His own. One of the loveliest stories of ancient Christianity is shared to us by St. Jerome, who claimed that as the bishop, the Apostle John would say Mass for his community - breaking bread, reading the Scriptures, and opening up the Scriptures through his homilies. Jerome claims that in his old age, John’s homilies were the same every single time they gathered together for Mass. He would rise up before his congregation and simply say “Love one another as Christ loved you.” For us Christians, this simple homily is enough to drive us to model Christ within our own lives through love.

Christ reiterates in the Gospel a crucial addendum to this message: “Remain in my love.” Love one another as Christ loved us. To love is to assimilate with the other; when we empathize with our neighbors, when we accept them in their entirety, with all of their flaws and their imperfections, and we love them regardless, we assimilate with them. We know them intimately, and we can begin to recognize the intricate details of what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God. God assimilated with us out of love when He became man. We assimilate with God when we consume the Eucharist. To love is to unify, to be made one, to be made holy. Love is the only way we can taste divinity in this life, and love is all that will be found in the next life. All of the Law, all of the Prophets, all of Christ’s miracles and messages and movements were driven by one simple rule for us to follow: love one another as he loves us. 

When we read from the Apostle John’s first letter, we realize just how often he speaks about love in his discourses on what it means to be a Christian and how to live as a Christian in an un-Christian world. John wrote this letter before Christianity spread throughout the world hoping that the small Christ-centered communities he knew of would be fortified in their faith. Today, as we try to navigate our Christian faith in a post-Christian society, the words found in this letter are especially pertinent to us. Just as it was for the early Christians, we also need to have a narrow focus when prioritizing our faith: everything leads to love. The only way we spend the rest of our lives satisfied with our work on earth is if we do everything with love.

What was it about John that made him understand this most important virtue so well? There are plenty of letters and writings in the New Testament, some from the most important figures of Christianity, but none capture the importance or necessity of love quite as well as John. Although we can’t pry ourselves into his mind while he lived, we can infer certain things about the way he wrote and what he wrote. As he came to know the historical person of Jesus, John began to see what love was. In Jesus’ works and teachings, John came to realize just how much God loved us, and he desired deeply to reciprocate that love with his entire being. John’s letter is very much about the love needed in the Church, but his Gospel is about the love that Jesus had for his followers: the love that taught John how to love. His Gospel contains far fewer stories than the others, but they are much more theologically rich because John tried to express the love of God he discovered within the text.

Perhaps the best example of this is John’s account of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the Bread of Life discourse that followed. This same story is found in the other Gospels as well, including the Gospel of Mark. Mark ends his depiction of the story with a very interesting but unclear detail: Jesus’ followers did not understand the miracle, and in fact, it caused their hearts to be hardened. How could a miracle that expressed so clearly Christ’s love for us result in his followers’ hearts being hardened? John explains it in the Bread of Life discourse: he is offering his own flesh and blood for us, which forces us to face the uncomfortable reality of our debt to God. It can be difficult to face this truth, and that in turn might even cause us to become resentful and hardened. But those who stuck with Jesus even after the Bread of Life discourse, including John, teach us how we can repay God for what He has given us: we must love.

John’s Gospel frequently refers to “the beloved disciple,” an otherwise unnamed follower of Christ who is present at the most important moments of Christ’s ministry and is one of his most faithful followers. Most readers of scripture assume that the identity of the beloved disciple is John himself, while some others maintain that he must be referring to someone else, since it is strange to not only avoid speaking in first person, but also not to identify this person. However, we can safely assume that John was the beloved disciple mentioned in his Gospel for a few reasons, and from that, we can understand why it is important for us as Christians. 

As we see while reflecting on his letters, John speaks at length about love. He very clearly understood God’s love for us in a way that other followers of Christ could not see as clearly. Only when we properly understand how much we are loved can we model that type of love to those around us. Since John so clearly recognized divine love and could articulate its necessity in the way we act so poignantly, we can deduce that he realized just how much he was loved by God in the person of Jesus Christ, which is why he refers to himself as Jesus’ “beloved disciple.” Additionally, love flourishes in humility and dies in pride; by refraining from mentioning his own name, John overcomes the pride of being one of Jesus’ most trusted followers and instead humbly mentions himself without drawing attention to himself. In this way, John is a truly admirable person who we should model ourselves after. In his letters, he gives us a glimpse into how members of the church have already modeled themselves after him: he begins his address to the Church in these letters by calling them “beloved,” just as he called himself in his Gospel. 

By referring to members of the Church as “beloved”, John is trying to show us that God loves us just as much as he loved John and the other Apostles who were chosen for significant roles. While Jesus was active in his ministry, John recognized that he was important to Jesus because he was called by him. This opened up the opportunity to learn how much he was loved. After Christ’s mission was fulfilled in his death and resurrection, he showed to the world through his Apostles that he has called every single one of us, which subsequently makes us “beloved” just as John was. As we hear Jesus say in the Gospel the words, “Today, [it] is fulfilled…”, we recognize that he has opened our eyes to how much he loves us. In his sacrifice, and in the Eucharist, we can fully recognize just as John did that we are beloved. 

The renewal of the human person through the Sacrament of Baptism is the most significant moment one can go through in their entire existence. It is more important than any other moment because it marks you for the rest of eternity as uniquely and wonderfully belonging to God. Many of us received this greatest gift long before we could even possibly remember it, but some of us have been blessed to have chosen baptism for ourselves; to undergo the Sacrament with full awareness and full personal consent must be a profoundly intimate experience with God. Baptism makes us a new person; for those who remember their baptism, they recognize this new identity as something that gradually came to be and was solidified in the sacramental rite. For those who do not remember their baptism, they were set apart from the very beginning to be a radically new individual than who they were born as. Simply put, baptism brings us back to the persons we were created to be.

John the Apostle had a unique relationship with baptism. As someone who grew up in the age before Jesus’ public ministry, he must have known well the ministry of John the Baptist; after all, he wrote extensively on him. But John was doing a purely ceremonial baptism that conferred no grace beside the symbol of what was to come. Eventually, after Christ, baptism became the one act that enabled the faithful to begin the process of joining themselves to the Church and to Christ. John the Apostle would have baptized many. He also wrote a unique encounter in his own Gospel between Jesus and a Pharisee named Nicodemus in which Jesus teaches Nicodemus that in order to inherit the kingdom of God, one must be “born again.” Confused, Nicodemus claims this is not possible for any human being, but Christ reaffirms and clarifies his statement - one must be born again in the Spirit. All Christians understand this to mean Baptism. John also wrote an account of the crucifixion of Jesus, when immediately after handing his mother over to John, Jesus breathed his last and was pierced in the side. From that piercing, blood and water spilled forth. This single moment is unspeakably important - this is the moment when the Church, the body of Christ, the community of believers, was “born again.” This was when the Church was conceived mystically and perfectly, united without fault or flaw with Her Heavenly Bridegroom. This moment was made manifest through the elements of blood and water. 

Even when not baptized by water as an act of the will, some in the Church’s past have been given the opportunity to be baptized by their blood, shed for proclaiming the name of Christ. Blood and water are truly the means by which we are born again and can begin the process of inheriting the Kingdom of Heaven as participants in Christ. But John speaks in this passage of a third element: the Spirit. It is the Spirit that actually bestows the grace of baptism upon us. John was there in the upper-room at Pentecost when the Spirit descended upon him. On the cross, the Church was conceived, but on Pentecost, the Church was born into the world. The Apostles now worked through the Spirit to baptize thousands of others that night with water. When we are born-again, or born of the Spirit, we are brought into the body of Christ and we share in his holiness. This is only possible through the Spirit, who works through the elements of blood or water. This was the greatest moment of your existence because its effects will last long after your earthly death. Spirit, blood, and water - elements that enable you to overcome sin and death through the saving power of Jesus Christ.