Context No. 465 of 4322 · 2 John
Context · Reflection
2 John 1:1-6: in context
1The elder, to the chosen lady and her children, whom I love in truth, and not I only, but also all those who know the truth, 2for the truth’s sake, which remains in us, and it will be with us forever: 3Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us, from God the Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love. 4I rejoice greatly that I have found some of your children walking in truth, even as we have been commanded by the Father. 5Now I beg you, dear lady, not as though I wrote to you a new commandment, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another. 6This is love, that we should walk according to his commandments. This is the commandment, even as you heard from the beginning, that you should walk in it.
This short letter is soaked in two words that we tend to keep in separate rooms: truth and love. The elder writes to a woman and her children whom he loves, he says, in truth, and adds that all who know the truth love them too, for the sake of the truth that abides in us. He wishes them grace, mercy, and peace, in truth and love. Over and over, the two are welded together. He does not love in spite of the truth or alongside it; he loves in it. In John's mind, truth and love are not rivals to be balanced but two sides of one thing. Love without truth collapses into sentimentality, and truth without love hardens into cruelty, and he will not let them come apart.
Then he gives a definition of love that is startling in how concrete it is. He tells the lady he is not writing a new command but the old one, from the beginning: that we love one another. And then he defines that love in a way we might not expect. This is love, he says, that we walk according to his commandments. And this is the commandment, that you walk in it. Read that circle carefully. Love is defined as walking in obedience to God's commands, and the central command is to love one another. In other words, love is not primarily a warm feeling I have toward people. It is a walk, something I do, obedience carried out with my feet. And that obedience takes its concrete shape as love for the people around me. Love is walked, not merely felt.
That definition presses hard on the way I usually think about love. I tend to treat it as an emotion, a fondness or affection that either wells up or does not. John treats it as a walk of obedience, a matter of actually doing what God commands, which is to love one another in concrete ways. So the real question is not whether I feel loving, but whether I am walking in it. Is my love a feeling I sometimes have, or is it, as John defines it, a walk I am actually doing, obeying God by loving the people in front of me in real, concrete ways?