Face to Face
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. 13 The children of your chosen sister greet you. Amen.
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.
settled What this mark means