I’VE OFFICIATED MANY weddings over the years. Often, I’ve also had the privilege of helping the couple through the premarital preparation process (sometimes it’s done by others — but I do require it to be done!). After all, the two of them are going to stand together in front of their family and friends, and I’m going to ask them to make promises of faithful love to each other. Do they really understand what that promise entails in real life?

Love takes commitment — the determination to continue to act lovingly toward someone who at the moment might seem anything but lovable. Newly married couples in particular often discover all kinds of things about each other’s habits and priorities that they didn’t know about when they said “I do.” It can be something minor, like which direction you put a roll of toilet paper on the spindle. It can be something major, like finding out that one of you wants kids and the other doesn’t.

And if the bride and groom are to keep their vows, the “I do” has to become more than just words. Love in the biblical sense is not simply a feeling, nor a romantic ideal, nor a surge of hormones. Still, I wouldn’t go as far as those who insist that love isn’t an emotion, but an action. Obviously, the two people making promises of love in front of witnesses wouldn’t be there if they had no feelings toward each other! We don’t have to create a Christian definition of love that’s cut off from the way people normally use the word.

We can say it this way instead. Romantic love is only one type of love; it represents a cultural ideal that not everyone shares and isn’t applicable to every loving relationship. But genuine love must be tangible. It must be embodied or demonstrated and not just felt. It’s not enough to feel loving. It’s not enough to say “I love you,” and do nothing to show it.

And as Jesus taught, a truly godly love must go beyond doing nice things for people we like. It pushes through the boundary between us and them, between neighbor and enemy:

You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matt 5:43-48, NIV)

“Be perfect,” Jesus says, “as your heavenly Father is perfect.” To the recovering perfectionists reading this: relax. Jesus is not saying that he’s expecting you to be sinless, to never make a mistake. The word “perfect” means something more like completeness or maturity. Our destiny, in other words, is not to stay as we are; we are to grow up to be like our Father, particularly when it comes to how we love others.

So…what does all this have to do with the letters of John?

LET’S BEGIN WITH the gospel of John, and one of the best-known and most widely memorized verses in the Bible:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16, NIV)

Sin corrupts our relationship to God in a way that we are powerless to repair. And God, John says, loved us so much that he did something about it. In another well-known passage, the apostle Paul adds his voice to the conversation:

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom 5:6-8)

God’s love was demonstrated. It was tangibly embodied in Jesus — in his person, in his ministry, in his sacrifice. Now think back to the opening verse of 1 John:

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. (1 John 1:1)

Many interpreters (though by no means all) see an emphasis on eyewitness testimony here. Given the way John’s letter will deal with false belief and teaching, that makes perfect sense. The testimony of people who have known Jesus directly is a more credible source of knowledge than someone else’s clever philosophical ideas about Jesus.

John piles up the verbs as if the sheer volume of them would already make his case; what he proclaims to his readers is “that which we have heard… seen… looked at… and touched.” But for you grammarians out there, the pronouns that have been translated as “which” — as in “which we have heard,” seen, and so on — are all neuter. If they were referring directly to Jesus, the pronouns should be masculine. In other words, John seems to be referring to some-thing he has experienced and not just some-one.

One way to read this is that he’s describing not just the man Jesus but the whole truth about Jesus. That truth has two parts. On the one hand, Jesus was an undeniably flesh and blood human being: a person whose words were heard and remembered and retold; a person whose acts and miracles were seen; a person who touched those who needed to be healed, and needed to be touched by Thomas before he would believe.

On the other hand, there was also a deeper truth. This man Jesus was the embodiment of the eternal Word. This isn’t something to be seen with our physical eyes but must be more generally perceived — and indeed, the word translated here as “looked at” can mean just that.

I think we need to picture John as still being astonished by the truth behind what he’s saying. His pastoral concern to correct what people believe is deeply personal. It’s not just that he doesn’t want people to fall into error; he doesn’t want them to fall out of fellowship. And he doesn’t want them to be any less astonished than he is at the message of the gospel.

That message, as John will say later, is that God isn’t just loving; God is love. And that love isn’t an abstraction. It came into the world in the person of Jesus. The life he lived, the death he died — no demonstration of divine love could be more tangible.