Like many other Holy Fathers of the Church of Christ, Archimandrite Justin Popovich (1894-1979) was not only a great theologian, philosopher, pastor, and spiritual father, but also a great exegete of the Holy Scriptures. He experienced the Word of God as a thunderous annunciation of eternal truth and eternal life, as the Good News that the Living God reveals and bestows to living, awakened mankind. Fr. Justin first of all lived according to the Gospel, and then he preached it to others as a pastor and spiritual father, and taught it as a professor of theology in several seminaries in Serbia.
Throughout much of his life, Fr. Justin labored to compose Orthodox commentaries on the books of the New Testament. He wrote the present volume, on the Epistles of St. John the Theologian, in 1945 while staying in the age-old monasteries of the Ovcar-Kablar Gorge in Serbia. Within these pages one can sense the profound veneration that he had for the Apostle John, the "disciple whom Jesus loved" (John 21:7), and whom Christ called a "son of thunder" (cf. Mark 3:17). About the Holy Apostle and Evangelist, Fr. Justin wrote: "He is simultaneously the greatest Thunderer of New Testament Truth and the greatest Thunderer of New Testament Love... Upon encountering him, such an extraordinary Apostle, people's souls must have felt exceptional joy and exceptional elation." Such was the heavenly encounter that Venerable Fr. Justin himself, a rare Christ-lover of our age, had with the First-Enthroned Apostle of Theanthropic Love. Reading St. John's holy Epistles along with Fr. Justin's inspired commentary, the reader is drawn toward the same encounter with the Apostle of Love, and, through Him, with Christ the God-man: the God of Love and the Only Lover of Man.
