We receive from him whatever we ask,
because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.
John is emphatically not saying that we earn answers to prayer by our moral efforts. In the first place, it is not the case that mere conformity with the law does anything to guarantee that we will get a new Porsche, no matter how importunely we may ask. Yet John does see a case where an individual's will could be see closely conformed to the will of God that God would grant anything that person would be moved to ask of him. We are familiar with obvious examples, people like Saint Solanus Casey, who seemed to be so good that God could not deny them anything. But like an iceberg, there is much more below the surface than above in cases this.
And his commandment is this:
we should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ,
and love one another just as he commanded us.
What we may not see when we look to the saints is that the commandment begins, not with our effort, but with our response of belief in the revelation of Jesus Christ. In his Gospel John recorded the crowd asking how to accomplish the works of God. Jesus responded, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent" (see John 6:29). When we begin our approach to the commandments with this angle we realize that they are not arbitrary or external but rather ordered toward the conditions which allow us to abide in Jesus, and he in us.
Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them
When we keep the commandments we allow Jesus himself to love others through us and open ourselves to prefer receiving the love of God, both directly and through our neighbors, to this worldly pleasures we might otherwise be tempted to prefer. Every moral act is also fundamentally relational, both between ourselves and God and ourselves and the image of God in our neighbors. It is participation in this relationship, not moral striving, that allowed the saints to walk so closely united with God.
and the way we know that he remains in us
is from the Spirit whom he gave us.
We are tempted to believe that even if we lived lives so entirely and sincerely dominated by love that our prayer life wouldn't change that much. We believe, perhaps, that our hearts are already mostly given to God and yet experience that our prayers are only seldom granted in any miraculous or extraordinary fashion. But is it not perhaps all too easy for us to prefer, not simply God's will, but his will in our way and our timing? Isn't much of what we ask, and the source of most of our disappointment, about questions of how and not of what we ask? It is only by drawing still nearer to God that we will become free enough to prefer his will, in his way, in his time, and yet still be bold and courageous enough to claim that will when the time arrives.
Beloved, do not trust every spirit
but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God,
because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
The trouble with recognizing false prophets is that they seldom only speak falsehood. They often wrap error in a candy coated shell of established truth in order to lead us on from one to the other as if the error was a natural logical consequence of the truth we know. Recognizing falsehood in the world requires similar discernment to knowing when what we are moved to ask in prayer is appropriate. In both instances we begin when something suggests itself to our minds that has an aspect of apparent goodness.
This is how you can know the Spirit of God:
every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh
belongs to God,
and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus
does not belong to God.
The principle that matters most, before we Google anything, or check Snopes, is the relationship of these potential plans or facts to the core facts of faith. Are we being told something that would seem to make the incarnation of Jesus superfluous or irrelevant? Are we being asked to desire a plan that puts the goods of this world before those of eternity? There is a place for due diligence and fact checking. But we can save ourselves a significant headache and avoid disorienting counterclaims if we keep what we know to be true as central and fundamental in our discernment.
This is the spirit of the antichrist
who, as you heard, is to come,
but in fact is already in the world.
The spirit of the antichrist is not merely the cold secularism of Soviet Russia, or similar obvious instantiations. It also comes wrapped in apparently religious packages. Yet it always prioritizes something else over and above the coming of Jesus in the flesh. It is always political before it is prayerful, and for that reason is easily misled and misleading. The principle of discernment taught by John is not merely the right way to correctly reason about such things, though it is also that. In addition, it is a method of prayer. When we are uncertain if something is true, or if something is the will of God, we can ask, "Do you acknowledge Jesus Christ come in the flesh" and see what happens in our spirit as a response. The more Jesus abides in us and we in him (following from keeping the commandments in the sense John recommends) the more the response we perceive will become a trustworthy guide. We will be able to experience peace about the spirits that do come from God and disquiet from those who do not. We will finally be able to drive off wrong spirits by referring back to Jesus himself and to his Holy Name as our constant refrain.
You belong to God, children, and you have conquered them,
for the one who is in you
is greater than the one who is in the world.
Jesus did not create a kingdom where everyone would need to be clever or intelligent to remain in his will. It is actually more those who are clever and intelligent who are at risk. Rather, his Kingdom is such that all who make their relationship with him the most fundamental thing in life, those who abide in him and he in them, are the ones who conquer.
We belong to God, and anyone who knows God listens to us,
while anyone who does not belong to God refuses to hear us.
There is a deep conformity between what the spirit of truth speaks within us and the truth we are given through the Apostolic teaching of the Church, including that of Saint John. This harmony can help us to recognize the truth, knowing that nothing can deviate from the dogmas of the faith and be a valid thought, impulse, or prophetic spirit. Thus the deposit of faith protects our subjective and internal appropriation of the faith. At the same time the faith we already have is a valid test of any new teaching we receive. It is all meant to point toward Jesus who became flesh and died for us. Anything else, anything with any other agenda, is the spirit of the antichrist.
the people who sit in darkness
have seen a great light,
on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death
light has arisen.
Jesus responded to this darkness both will a call to keep the commandments, saying, "Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand" and with miraculous healings. There was a close connection for him between the two just as there was for John. Repenting and receiving healing both made the same basic demand, that is, "Be open to my love."
The Spirit has been given to guide away from confusion as we strive to open ourselves more and more to the love of Jesus, to ever deeper repentance, to ever greater faith in his miraculous power.
He went around all of Galilee,
teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom,
and curing every disease and illness among the people.
No comments:
Post a Comment