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Morning Meditation
April 21, 2026
Reading: First Letter of John 2:7-17
Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment but an old commandment that you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word that you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. Whoever says, “I am in the light,” while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves a brother or sister abides in the light, and in such a person[b] there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates a brother or sister is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought on blindness.
I am writing to you, little children,
because your sins are forgiven on account of his name.
I am writing to you, fathers,
because you know him who is from the beginning.
I am writing to you, young people,
because you have conquered the evil one.
I write to you, children,
because you know the Father.
I write to you, fathers,
because you know him who is from the beginning.
I write to you, young people,
because you are strong
and the word of God abides in you,
and you have overcome the evil one.
Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world, for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God abide forever.
Meditation by Glenn Beamer
The passage from the first letter of John was the first reading at the Sunday Evensong service at which the Redeemer Choristers sang and read. Throughout this passage, John commends the church’s early believers, and by extension us today, to understand that God forgives their sins and that they are strong and God’s word abides in them.
John contrasts our fulfilment of God’s will with our ability to chose love over hate writing that whoever chooses loves abides God’s light, while those engage in hate walk in darkness. I don’t think that John implies that, whether as individuals or communities, we will never have adversaries. Rather we have choices about how to extend God’s love and choosing to extend God’s love creates healthier predicates for dealing with adversarial relationships when they occur.
Implicit in John’s commendation is the dynamic that, even when justified, anger is expensive and hate is destructive. Anger isn’t materially expensive, but it saps people’s energy and leaves them less able to engage with and rejoice in God’s natural bounty. Hate expands and even explodes anger’s expense from an individual to a community. Even when malefactors motivate legitimate and substantial political or military responses from a community, God wants that response to be what is necessary to protect ourselves we can go on living in God’s love and will. When we extend responses to be vindictive, we have gone beyond God’s will for us.
John elaborates upon the costs of anger and hate when he articulates that God’s love isn’t for those who love the world as we have built it to be, but rather for those who seek to sustain God’s earth as God would have it. Discerning this isn’t easy, but John’s point is that what we build, no matter how sophisticated or grand, will perish. God’s love for us is eternal, but John explicitly writes, “the world and its desires pass away.” We should focus on sustaining God’s gifts to us as individuals and as communities hoping that those gifts of nature and in each other will last for many millennia.
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