The Heart of the Gospel

The Second Sunday after Easter, Year B
1 John 1:1-2:2
The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez-Hobbs

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 

This is the heart of the Gospel. If you asked someone to pick one verse of the Bible to sum the whole thing up, most people would probably pick John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. If you asked me, though, I’d pick 1 John 2:1, the verse I just quoted from our epistle this morning.

The author of 1 John wrote this book, which isn’t, technically, a letter, sometime between the end of the first century and the beginning of the second.He’s writing as the first generation of Christians—the apostles and others who had actually seen Jesus—were dying, and this book is addressed to people who had never met Jesus Christ, people like us. He’s eager to assure them that Jesus was a real person, and more than just a person, but God Incarnate, the Word of Life. He wants this new generation of Christians to know that he met Jesus, saw him, heard him, touched him. But more than that, he wants them to know what it means to be a Christian. And so he says, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 

The Christian life is lived between those two poles: between pursuing holiness and receiving forgiveness when we fall short. It may seem strange to talk of sin during Eastertide, after all, in our worship services, we don’t include a confession of sin during the Great Fifty Days of Easter because during this season we are celebrating that, by his death, Christ has destroyed death and broken sin’s power over us. Christ has put away all our sins, so to help us remember this, we take fifty days to omit confession. But Eastertide is the time when we dwell on the deep truths of the Christian faith, and the author of 1 John is talking about what it means to be saved.

For John, being saved is not something that happens at one instant in time—at baptism or when we accept Christ as our Lord and savior. Salvation is a process, a way of life. It means walking in the light of God, just as Jesus walked in the light. John gives us three clues as to what this looks like. First, we cannot claim to follow Jesus while walking in darkness. We have to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. We actually have to be pursuing holiness, attempting as best we can to live as Jesus lived. Second, we are lying to ourselves if we claim to be sinless. Pursuing holiness does not mean that we have to be perfect, but it does mean that we have to be honest with ourselves. Third, if we claim to be sinless, we make God a liar. The Gospel, the Good News of God in Christ, is the story of how God saved us from slavery to sin. If we claim to be sinless, we’re essentially saying that we don’t need saving, which God says we do.

These three clues about salvation boil down to what John says in 1 John 2:1: I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.  But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. That’s also, for the record, what we say in our Baptismal Covenant. We’re asked: Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? And we say: I will, with God’s help.

That’s refreshingly honest to me. Our promise isn’t that we are going to do this on our own. It presumes that we’re going to need God’s help even to repent. But it also presumes that God will always give us that help. That presumption is based on 1 John’s promise.  The sense of the Greek that the author actually wrote is when someone sins, not if. When we fall short, because we will, Christ will intercede for us, and not for us alone, but for the whole world. In fact, Christ is already interceding for us, because in Christ sin has been done away with. My sins, your sins, the sins we haven’t even committed yet. It’s all gone, done away with by Christ once for all upon the hard wood of the cross.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to an atheist acquaintance about Christianity. It was right after Ash Wednesday, and he remarked that he couldn’t understand why Christians loved groveling in our sin, our sense of being unworthy. He saw it as perversely neurotic. I told him that I didn’t see it that way. I still done. I find Christianity refreshingly honest, because it makes it okay for me to admit that I am not perfect. There aren’t that many places in our culture today where you can say that. We’re driven by performance. We’re told that you have to get things right. We judge one another harshly. In Jesus Christ, I find the courage I need to admit that I fall short. I find grace as Jesus picks me up when I stumble. I find the strength I need to admit that I am not perfect, and that is okay.

The Gospel is the opposite of moralism. The reason we can’t claim to be sinless is because that is another form of walking in  darkness. When we claim to be perfect, we are claiming to be God, because only God is perfect. There is freedom in admitting that we are not God. There is freedom in admitting our imperfection. That is what the Gospel is about. This is why Jesus calls it a message of release to the captives. We are held captive by our own need to be perfect.

Pursue holiness. Strive to be like Jesus. Receive forgiveness when you inevitably fall short. Begin anew. Practice resurrection, preparing for the day when everything shall be made new by God, including us. That is the Gospel.

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

Amen.