Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, June 23, 2024
by Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: The proclamation of Jesus Christ is what completes our joy. In him, we have come to experience God who is for us, and sharing this good news with others is its culmination.
Did you know that typos existed before keyboards? It’s true! We even have typos from before we had, well, typeface! Ancient scribes might not have been prone to hit the wrong key, but the act of copying texts by candlelight for hours at a time led to a whole host of problems. This led to the problem of encountering a text with a possible error and wondering whether or not making a correction was warranted, or if “fixing” the text would break it. Talk about a conundrum!
There are lots of examples where such scribal decisions created divergent text traditions, and we encounter one here in 1 John 1. In the NRSV, verse 1:4 reads, “We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.” Some ancient sources for this passage from 1 John render it “your joy” rather than “our joy,” a mistake as easy to make in Koine Greek as it is in English. We can see why some bleary eyed medieval scribe might have thought the choice of “your” was a mistake. After all, isn’t the purpose of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ to complete the joy of others? How could sharing this news be something which completed the author’s own joy instead?
While the translators of the NRSV had to make a choice as to which textual variant to follow, there is something true about both ways of rendering this passage. It is true that sharing the good news of Jesus Christ is meant to bring joy to others, there is a way in which our own joy would not be complete if we did not share this news also. Think of a moment in your life when you encountered something that was truly wonderful, not just for yourself but for others also. How much fuller was your joy when you shared that news with others? When I was a graduate student and learned that a student organization was putting on an event with free food for anyone who came, it was my right, my duty, and my joy to text everyone I knew with the glad tidings of where they were going to get their dinner tonight. Something would have been missing if I had kept that news to myself, and I certainly couldn’t have faced my roommates if they learned I’d held out on them.
The author of 1 John makes it clear that this is the sort of situation we find ourselves in. For Jesus “is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the world” (2:2). The good news we have been given is not only for us but for all creation. Joy—both the world’s and ours—finds its completion when all have heard of God’s love and received the good news that they too are children of God.
