his own for one another in the Church antagonized the world—Hellenism, Caesarianism, and Judaism then. These restless and pernicious friendships proliferated from below, out of the world, subversive to the Christ and the Kingdom. Therefore, Jesus exhorted the men at table with him and still listening intently, to hold them in the strength of the Gospel, “This I command you, to love one another.” With that agape he instructed his own to answer the world’s hatred, in fact, to undermine and supplant every secular defining of love, i.e., the friendliness of religiosity that draws unbelievers ever deeper into sins of disobedience and concentrates unbelieving church members into colluding fellowships known for leaky conviviality. Falsifying powers of sin that draw members of the Church into the world is stronger than any one of the Church living apart from the Faith. The agapic patterns he created, the Lord taught, persisted beyond any sort of ideologically conditioned friendship.
To prevent triumphalism in the New Church and deflate airs of superiority among his own, Jesus recapitulated morally corrosive sequences of persecution coming. John 15:21, “. . . all this they will do to you on my account, because they do not know him who sent me.” Such not knowing exceeded by far disobedience to the Commandments; it emphasized the fact that the Church then worshiped a strange god, a monotheistic deity in competition with Jesus Christ himself and his Father. Therefore any persecution that starts simply with shunning humbles, and humbles again. This future for the Church in the world the Head projected for his own.
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Not that all obscure gods of the world with unity of command set out a valid excuse to hate him or the New Church. The Lord prophesied hard times coming, John 15:22–25, because all warring factions out of reprobate human nature abhorred the light shining into, penetrating their darkness to expose the religiosities and ideologies’ insecure hiding places, regardless of misleading friendships involved. Yet this seething backlash of evidence-based hatred Jesus conveyed first to the circle of disciples. He willed through the “love one another” that they stand strong with an inexpressible joy. Integrally motivated as well as morally inviolable, they thus formed the close formation of brotherhood—internally unpretentious and externally impressive—to respond to all secular hatreds tiresomely fired up to consume the almighty love of the Christ. The future for all of the Church moves through many generational shifts into perilous processes of persecution.
CHRIST HOPE
Emphatically, Jesus stressed that beginning with the Apostles his disciples were not of this world, a choice he made. He called them, commanded them, to follow him, although not by their choice. In that calling, he changed their respective wills; hence, they wanted to be with him, in his company. Dominically, therefore, he declared, “You are not of this world.” Thus, he created in his own the faith to believe him, the Lord and Savior; at the same time, he created the hope to be faithful, regardless of circumstance, safety concerns secondary. In that faith and through that hope, they belonged to him, eternally, believing and innovating the new life in the world, but never more of a world troubled by human caprice.
Over fast-moving years and decades, the Twelve experienced the world’s hatred for Jesus and themselves. As they matured in their sense of identity in Christ and for the Church, they found that all outside the Lord and Savior, as well as apart from the Church, moved to isolate, banish, and/or kill whom the Son of God/Son of Man separated in praise of the Father.
Now yet, at table, bound by the prudent voice of the Lord and reluctant to move into unknown depths of hatred, these imagers of Christ listened, internally struggling to apprehend existential insight into the—immediate—future. Slowly, they grasped the sin of human intervention into the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
The other Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, at Jesus’s last Passover celebration in all truth imaged the institution of the Lord’s Supper. John, on the other hand, wrote of the Passover. For a reason. In the original Passover, Exod 12:1–27, the LORD God revealed with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm the release of his people from out of Egyptian captivity and the start of a long journey through a “great and terrible wilderness,” Deut 1:19. So here. Jesus released his own from the restrictive hatreds of this world and started them off, though they remained in the world, on the long history of eschatological tensions in the New Church, journeying into the future of hope. The Twelve awoke thereby with growth in comprehension to the immensity of the moment.
For the Twelve to grow in the Faith Jesus declared hitherto concealed eternal depths of his love for the New Church; he had chosen the Twelve out of the world with all the powers of predestination, which he intended to certify publicly upon the Cross. Because of this Christ-given faith and hope, the disciples were no longer citizens of any hate movement such as Hellenism, Caesarianism, or Judaism. Now they were the New Church, in fact, foundation stones for the Church on which all of Christ journeyed (analogically) through the Millennium, Eph 2:20, functionally different, radically in Christ: never again to hate him, but to love the Lord Jesus and his own, all of the one Church, trusting the Savior at his word. They thereby constituted the Church, the beginning of the new world, the Recreation, or Matthew’s, 19:28, the regeneration.
Given the world’s animosity from its myriad components of religiosity, no one volunteers or opts for church membership. Entry into the faith and hope of the new and eternal life is by election only. Omnisciently and omnipotently by an act of eternity the Lord Jesus sovereignly chose his own. Because of this divinely initiated predestinarian activity, the world obstructs both election and reprobation, seeking to this day to reconstruct the Church into a social organization to mishandle her not of this world origin. John 15:16. All who hate the Christ, even if ensconced in a congregation, demand by ways of Arminianism, Semi-Pelagianism, or outright Pelagianism, to control the present and the future, which confirms the main intent of religiosity in its numerous ideological embodiments. Fearful of the Christ’s lordship, in fact, of the Son of God/Son of Man, the Judge, they insist upon total control. However, even the hatreds of the world against Jesus resurrected and ascended cannot destroy an ultimate fact: out of the darkness of hatred the almighty Lord of heaven and earth elected for himself first the Twelve whom he for every generation since bonded and bound as the initial manifestation of the New Testament Church.
Day after day, seven per week, the disciples experienced the world’s hostile reception centered on Jesus Christ; therein they knew experientially external and internal pressures to conform: let Jesus go his own way, and they then assimilate into Judaism. Except for the overriding power of predestination, they had every opportunity to entomb themselves in a friendship with high-minded Christ haters and there through escape multiplying pains of persecution.
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Since that timely teaching session, the New Church in every day consciously suffers from similar malice and spite: constant crowding to accommodate to the world, unclench pains of shunning, evade mockeries of hate, and prove Christianity’s irrelevancy. Instead of Judaism, Caesarianism, or Hellenism, revolts against the Church stem from, for instance, secularism, post-modern relativism, and capitalism’s covetousness. Disorders of the day slowly grind stronger against all of the Church to assimilate other, all-penetrating moral values and economic comforts, in this manner suppress and turn the rush of history into the visions of any number of ideologies. Each ideology, even fear of climate change, laden with the dull momentum of religiosity, presents itself with cheery faces, illusions of friendship, and inscrutable hopes of self-fulfillment.
Through revolving doors of numerous ideological promises for friendship agapic weariness, if not collapse, sets in; love for the Christ fades and vitiated neighbor love moves to the edges, with the result that . . .
• Fast-spreading Roman Catholicism strips away conviction with respect to the legitimacy of the Reformation.
• Reformed brokenness impairs works of rightful ecumenicity.
• Persistent secularism with its hatred for Christianity degenerates integrity to speak out and stand
