1 John 1:1-4 reads:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched–this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our/your joy complete.
We see from these verses that the proclamation of the word of life creates community, or effects koinonia. Many simply translate this word as ‘fellowship’ or ‘community,’ but it is difficult to translate. This one word acts as a window through which we can view how the early Christians understood themselves, what their self-concept was. According to Raymond Brown, “It involves both the dynamic esprit de corps (life/spirit of the body) that brings people together and the togetherness that is produced by that spirit” (170). Communion springs from commonality. Brown observes that the same concept in the Gospel of John is communicated with reference to being “one” (John 17:11,21,22,23). Brown then suggests that, both in the Gospel and in the letter, these references to communion and oneness “may be attempts to render into Greek a notion like the Hebrew yahad, ‘oneness, unity, community,’ which is the self-designation of the Qumran Community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls” (170). In a sense, then, John is using a community that in his day was visible, well-known and well-respected as a sort of terminological illustration of what his readers are to envision for themselves.
As the author proceeds in verse 4, he places the first person plural pronoun hemeis at the end of the clause for emphasis. He does not want his readers to think that only he intended for them to join communion, but rather that while “physically, he and he alone is going to write,…at the start he wants to make it clear that what he writes bears more than personal authorization—it is Community tradition from the Community tradition-bearers” (172). In other words, John does not want to be put on a pedestal as the one who can call others to faith; rather, he wants them to see that they are joining a community of faith, a league of believers who also attest to the truthfulness of what John himself is saying and writing. There is safety in numbers—so we can feel our doubt, feel our questions and uncertainties, and then feel the reality of the community we are a part of. We don’t just join one leader who is making overtly confident claims about some Jesus fellow, but we enter into a community tradition and accept the multitude of voices that invite us into community through the proclamation of the word of life.
And the glorious result of a growing communion is named here: joy. For who? The community of faith. The community is blessed by the very fact that it is a community—koinonia creates chara, which creates more koinonia. The effects of community and joy are reciprocal. As Brown says, “The fulfillment of joy, then, would be the growth and flowering of the gift received earlier—a growth achieved through living in koinonia with God, Christ, and other Johannine believers” (174). In fact, it seems that communion and its resultant joy are the very reasons the author has sat down to write at all. The author and “other tradition-bearers already have communion with the Father and the Son through the revelation of life they have received (v. 3)” (175). His goal is to expand the boundaries of this already-existing communion, perhaps drawing on the tradition of John 17 where Jesus “distinguishes between his immediate disciples and ‘those who believe in me through their word’ (17:20) and where he prays ‘that they may share in my joy to the full’ (17:13). For John the second generation of Johannine Christians who had never met Jesus face-to-face could enter into this full joy, but they “could not bypass those who had seen, heard, and felt.” In other words, community and joy are a package deal. If we lack joy in our walk with Christ, we ought to do a community-check on our lives.
