2 John 1:10 Confusing! Please explain

[Liguori]

Can someone provide a Saint or church authority’s commentary on this verse? I am confused by it because Jesus welcomes “sinners” and dines with them. This may be due to the fact that by that point they had repented. Regardless, how are we supposed take obey this command? Is it something that was only for the early Christians?

 

[John_Martin]

Well, Jesus did not welcome those who denied his being: Satan said, “If you’re the Messiah, then do something to prove it.”
“Begone, Satan, …”
And St. Peter tried to re-define Jesus’s person by blocking the road to Jerusalem, the road to crucifixion and betrayal, and Jesus did not accept this, did not welcome Peter changing his identity away from being the crucified sacrifice; “Get back in line behind me, you Satan.”

We follow “behind” our apostolic superiors and ignore the “opinions” of those who seek to lead us astray by contradicting our Catholic teachers.

St.Matthew, a tax collector and sinner, was welcomed by Jesus, but Matthew never tried to say Jesus was not the Messiah, never tried to lead you or anyone else to think Jesus was not the Son of God.

2 John was talking about lying teachers seeking to trick you.

 

[TMC]

Can someone provide a Saint or church authority’s commentary on this verse? I am confused by it because Jesus welcomes “sinners” and dines with them. This may be due to the fact that by that point they had repented. Regardless, how are we supposed take obey this command? Is it something that was only for the early Christians?

2 John was written specifically to counter a rift in the Johannine community. While it is not 100% clear what the issue was, it appears that some members of this community had fallen into an early heresy - likely a form of docetism. The Johannine letters all appear to address this rift (although not everyone agrees about that). So the author is specifically exhorting the reader(s) not to entertain the false teachings. He is not saying that no Christians should hang out with sinners.

 

[po18guy]

??? Do you mean 2 John 10? It is so short there are no chapters. As to eating with sinners, that was addressed in Luke 15:1-3

The Parable of the Lost Sheep
Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So he told them this parable:

 

[Bithynian]

Adding onto the very good points raised by others, it’s important to note that the ‘elect lady’ is in all likelihood not a specific person, but simply the congregation: in Greek, the word for church ekklesia is feminine. In addition, John uses the second person plural pronoun (y’all) throughout.

When ‘house’ is referenced in v 10, this - in the context of false teachers - pertains to churches given that early Christians largely assembled in each other’s homes rather than separate buildings.

 

[CRM_Brother]

This verse can, indeed, be confusing if you are unaware of the history surrounding the place and time of the letter.

John was writing against a specific heresy which had taken route in some regions in the early Church. This heresy was Docetism. John, throughout his life and most notably within his Gospel, wrote vehemently against this heresy which found its roots in pagan mysticism and gnosticism. Docetism believed that Jesus did not really walk the earth. The person we knew as Jesus was supposedly just an illusion to make God more relatable to man and to impart some of his secret wisdom to a select few of his followers.

In 2 John 1:10, he is referring to those he mentioned in v. 7, those who reject that Jesus came to earth in the flesh. If they deny this, then they deny the Eucharist, his Passion and Resurrection. Those who professed these beliefs were literally ‘antichristoi’ or ‘those who are against Christ’. They denied his very existence as a person.

These people were not the sinners who accepted Christ into their homes. These Docetists were sinners who not only had rejected Jesus from their homes but also went to other’s homes to take Jesus’s place with them.