(Audio)
When John wrote of "what you have heard from the beginning" he referred to the truth of the good news about Jesus Christ. This Gospel revealed the possibility of a new life as sons and daughters united in Christ, together children of the same heavenly Father.
Let what you heard from the beginning remain in you.
If what you heard from the beginning remains in you,
then you will remain in the Son and in the Father.
We might be tempted to imagine that correct doctrine is not that important as long as we act virtuously, and in particular, as long as we act with love. But St. Thomas Aquinas would remind us that because our destiny exceeds our natural capacity we can't be properly ordered to it on our own. We need faith keep the truth we heard in the beginning as our guiding light. We need hope and love to strengthen our will, drawing us to pursue the things which matter most, and above all God himself who alone can satisfy.
Whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ.
Whoever denies the Father and the Son, this is the antichrist.
Because the truth is necessary to point our lives toward the last end we desire errors are dangerous, and errors on which we obstinately insist are deadly. Jesus knew that the truth was the necessary basis for us to walk in freedom and said, "you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (see John 8:32). To a prisoner, the power to destroy walls and walk where one pleased might seem to be true freedom. But Jesus realized that unless we knew what constituted the prison and what constituted the free world beyond we would always risk destroying the wrong walls and walking right back toward chains and slavery all of our own accord. As just one example, in our culture sexual license is often taken to be a form of freedom. And yet there is little that is less free than an addiction to pornography.
And this is the promise that he made us: eternal life.
One might agree that it is important to distinguish between acts that increase freedom and those that take it away while still wondering if the doctrines about Jesus and the Trinity are so essential. But they are because it is they that teach us for what purpose we were created so that we know not to settle for less. These truths teach us to hope for the mansions Jesus went to prepare for us, and allow us to store up treasure in heaven, because "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (see Matthew 6:21).
Jesus called us to abide in him. But the basis for this abiding was "the word that I have spoken to you" (see John 15:3), which reminds us of John's "what you have heard from the beginning". But we must keep that word and nourish it so that it can bear fruit in our lives. We must avoid temptations to diminish the word's absolute claim on our lives. Only when it is in first place will external observances like the commandments cease, perhaps little by little, to be burdensome and begin to feel less like limits and more like the measure of our freedom.
To see what fidelity to the Gospel looks like lived out over the course of a life we need look no further than John the Baptist. John's core truth that "I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’" defined all he said and did. He insisted, not on his own importance, but on "the one who is coming after me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie". This reality of God's word to him and his corresponding mission defined his entire life, and sufficed for to answer any question that anyone, priests, Levites, Pharisees, or anyone might put to him.
Hopefully we desire the abiding presence of Jesus in our lives that he himself desires for us. We now recognize the need for the truth in order to sustain this reality over time. But growing in this is not such much a matter of reading the works as theologians as it is of growing in familiarity with what we have already received. Let us then invite the Holy Spirit to draw us ever more deeply into the word of God and the heart of the Church, the pillar and foundation of truth (see First Timothy 3:15). He himself desires to guide us to the heart of this truth, Christ himself, the way the truth and the light (see John 14:6).
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