Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 John · About this commentary
Face to Face
2 John 1:12-13
12 Having many things to write to you, I don’t want to do so with paper and ink, but I hope to come to you and to speak face to face, that our joy may be made full. · WEB
Paper carries truth well enough, but joy waits for a room with both people in it.
The letter admits its own limits. There is more to say, and the elder declines to say it with paper and ink — the paper is chartēs G5489, a sheet of papyrus, the New Testament's only mention of it. He prefers what the Greek calls mouth to mouth, the idiom used of God speaking plainly with Moses Numbers 12:8; the third letter closes with the same preference 3 John 1:13–14. A letter can guard a church; it cannot embrace one.
The reason given is joy — joy made full. Manuscripts differ between our joy and your joy; the fullness is the point either way. The phrase is the Lord's own John 15:11, and the first epistle's reason for writing at all 1 John 1:4. Full joy in these letters lives in fellowship, and fellowship at full strength is presence. The writer who has just forbidden one kind of visit is longing for another; the door shut in verse 10 was never the letter's last word about doors.
The close is a greeting from the children of the lady's chosen sister, and the frame locks shut — chosen at the first verse, chosen at the last, a warning held between two households of one election. One chosen family salutes another, and that is what the truth was guarded for.
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