Love and Danger

“This is love, that we walk according to His commandments—For many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist” (II John 6,7)

Does it strike you as strange that the writer, St. John, would go from the meaning of love to the warning against deceivers, and antichrists? Yet it makes sense. The church or any church he is writing to being filled with love for God and one another will have a tendency to gentleness. That tender affection will tend to open itself to those who are not sensitive, but use such affection to exploit the kind-hearted Christians. An old Russian saying puts it succinctly: Act like a lamb and you’ll find a wolf close by. This is the same brief letter where we find the beautiful phrase that’s sometimes called the eleventh commandment: “a new commandment—which we have had from the beginning; that we love one another” (6).

What would a parish look like if it obeyed that commandment literally? For one, it would reflect the love among one another of an ideal family. When one or several are absent on a Sunday, all would do more than wonder. They would subtly and sensitively find out where the missing were and the reasons for their absence. And those who planned to be away would inform at least a few of their absence.

The sick, the afflicted and the emotionally wounded would ask for the prayers of the whole parish, and they in turn would lift up to the loving Lord the names of those in need. A truly concerned and loving parish would pray not only for the more conventional requirements for prayer such as illness, bereavement and job loss, but for what is too often considered private matters: Illnesses that come from bodily injury, like alcoholism and drug addiction, or the traumas of depression, loss of faith, or various injurious and anti-social afflictions such as obsessions—greed, lust, problems with the law and the like.

Love for one another would include the economic welfare of the brothers and sisters in Christ and the effect their plight has on their families. Is somebody out of work, having financial difficulties, or in some way adversely affecting their family members? What, if anything, can the parish do to alleviate their problem? Or do they prefer to solve their dilemma without outside interference? The ideal parish is ready to do either.

Lest it be thought that this vision of a parish be little more than another platonic ideal that is fine in theory but impractical if not impossible to realize, we recognize the challenges of putting it into effect. It’s more likely to come about in relatively small church communities, even more so among mission churches that come together around a common predicament, the need for and development of a parish community and therefore who will from the start bond into a fellowship. Still, larger parishes do somehow form clusters of like-minded people and groups. They also can and often do work out the problems their members fall into, and so act as extended families.

The other unpleasant part, keeping out the deceivers and antichrists who would enter and destroy the integrity and purity of faith in Orthodoxy—that sordid business is often left to the priest. Our Orthodox Church in America is so divergent and disparate, spread over this vast continent, that the antichrist afflicts us in random ways. The intense proselytism of sectarians in Alaska is different from the ongoing attraction of the world’s vices in the West, the South and elsewhere. The challenges of wandering Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses in the former steel mill and coal mining regions is not the same as the appeal of Scientology elsewhere. Love as the writer of the epistle of John warns, cannot be ignorant of those who would abuse it in offering a different savior than Jesus Christ.