John begins without a greeting, with one long sentence that holds back its main verb until the third verse. The Word comes first: 1"which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands." The suspense keeps the eye on the Word himself and leaves the speaker out of it.
The verbs climb closer, heard, seen, looked upon, touched. The Greek word for touched, *psephalao*, means to feel with the hands, to handle. Jesus used it after the resurrection when he told his frightened disciples, "Touch me, and see" (Luke 24:39). John has a reason for insisting on the senses. Teachers were saying Christ only seemed to have a body, and John answers with the testimony of a man who held him.
John says why he is telling anyone. 3"So that you too may have fellowship with us," and this fellowship runs to the Father and the Son. The Greek word is *koinonia*, a shared partnership. A believer's friendship with God and with God's people belong to one relationship. John also names a reason of his own: 4"our joy may be complete." His joy depends on whether they come in.
Then he states the message. He did not invent it. He heard it from Jesus, who said, "I am the light of the world" (John 8:12). Light carries several meanings at once. It is glory, since light is what we see by. It is truth, since light shows things as they are. And it is holiness, a purity with no shadow in it. The second half says it twice over: nothing in God is hidden, divided, or compromised.
What follows is the test of that claim, in a pattern John will use again: "If we say." 6"If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie." The "if we say" sentences seem to mimic the claims of the teachers who had left. The Greek word for walk, *peripateo*, is a Hebrew way of speaking about a whole life, the direction and habit of a person's days. John calls a gap between saying and walking a lie, and he says such a person does not 6"practice the truth." Truth in John's vocabulary is something done.
7"If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin." Walking in the light gives two results. The first is fellowship, the shared life the prologue promised. The second is cleansing, and the verb is in the present tense, a washing that keeps pace with the walking. The teachers John opposed found blood on the eternal Son unthinkable. For John it is the heart of the gospel. The light shows everything, including what is wrong with us, and the blood deals with what the light shows.
If God is light with no darkness, then the only place to meet him is where everything is seen. Ask what you have kept in the shade this week, and what it would mean to step into the light with it.
Prayer
Father of lights, in you there is no darkness at all. Thank you for sending your Son, whom the apostles heard, saw, and touched, so that we might share their fellowship and yours. Keep us walking in the light as you are in the light, and let the blood of Jesus cleanse us from all sin. In his name, amen.