NOTES for Jo2 1:6

It would seem that nothing is more opposite than love and law, love and dry religious prescriptions. Yet John sees the keeping of the commandments precisely as a manifestation of love. How can that be?

The answer may lie in the fact that the commandments given by God, and above all the Decalogue, form the foundation of the Torah. Yet the Torah is not reducible to legislation alone. In the time of the apostle, both in the Synagogue and in the Church, there were widespread ideas of the Torah as the inner spiritual core on which all human life was founded, both spiritual life and life in general. This spiritual core was called the inner Torah, and at its heart were relationships of love that bound a person both to neighbors and to God. But it was impossible to cultivate the inner Torah in oneself without relationships with God and with one's neighbors, and those relationships were regulated by the commandments. In this way, keeping the commandments became the expression and embodiment of love, including love of neighbor.

But in the light of Christian revelation, new shades of meaning were added to these traditional ideas. First of all, of course, this concerns the love of which the Savior Himself spoke as a "new commandment." Such love is no longer simply a relationship, as it had been before, at least as most biblical authors understand love: for them it is primarily an attitude toward another person, aimed first of all at that person's good. It also becomes the spiritual environment without which there is no Kingdom. Love becomes a kind of nature of the Kingdom, its spiritual substance, just as the natural elements become the natural substance of the untransformed world. And the form that gives this substance its quality is the relationships of love that bind all its inhabitants both to one another and to Christ. In such a situation, the inner Torah is no longer simply a person's spiritual core, but also that person's form, defining his own spiritual quality and the quality of his spiritual life in the Kingdom.

Then the apostle's words take on a new meaning: indeed, for love to become the environment of life, fully natural for a person, the inner Torah, unthinkable without the keeping of the commandments, must become his only form. Here one inevitably recalls the Savior's words that He came not to destroy the Torah but to bring it to fullness. To the fullness fit for the Kingdom.