When Gorbachev and Reagan were negotiating the end of the Cold War the Soviet premier is supposed to have said: “I am doing something terrible to you. I am robbing you of your enemy.” The human tendency is to divide the world into friends and enemies, who is in and who is out. St. John’s Jesus turns all that on its head. We are on the same side since we are all children of God. Since we are all on the same side we have one obligation: to love one another. The legend is that when St. John was an old man younger Christians would come to pepper him with questions about Jesus. To all inquiries he would answer, “Little children, love one another.”
