Exhortation, Second Sunday After Epiphany

Love is blind, we like to say. John says the opposite.

John teaches that we need to test and discern and judge the spirits and prophets. Discernment means keeping your eyes open. Discernment means not believing everything that you hear, not jumping on every bandwagon that passes through town, not embracing every new idea. Discernment sometimes demands unbelief (Stott): “Do not believe every spirit” is how John begins chapter 4.

But John no sooner finishes encouraging the “hard” virtue of discernment than he exhorts us to pursue the apparently “softer” virtue, what we think is the “blind” virtue of love. Some commentators, believing that love is blind, are so puzzled that they think John wrote all the smooth words about love, but somebody else added the edges.

If we see discernment and love in conflict, we misunderstand both. John puts them side-by-side because they belong side-by-side. True discernment arises from love; true love tests and discerns. Love judges; discernment judges in love.

Wherever we need discernment, we need love; and vice versa. In disciplining children, you need insight into their desires and motives and circumstances, but you can have that insight only if you love them. When you work through a disagreement with your husband or wife, you need to judge what he or she is really saying; that requires patience, which is love. When you are thinking about a new business proposition, you need to test whether you can trust your new partner, and how far. But you need to be close enough to your partner to see him clearly.

As John says, “the one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walked in the darkness, and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.” Love isn’t blind. Hatred blinds. Love opens our eyes.