farther onto contrary trajectories. To the disciples at table with him he prohibited conformity, incremental and/or reckless assimilation, to the world, thereby to diminish pains of rejection imposed by anti-Christian authorities.
CHRIST HATE
To the unified instruction inscripturated as chapters 14–16, the Twelve listened intently; they sensed, without pretending to understand Jesus’s prophecies with respect to the Crucifixion and Resurrection, tremendous events and immediate dangers in the making. In these unknown regions of tension, they nevertheless applied themselves to this complex question, this seemingly contradictory divine injunction, which the Teacher claimed to be true. How could and should the gripping in the world/yet not of the world dividing-line sanctify them as the company of Christ followers? For approximately three years to gain apostolic formation, they walked about Canaan following the Messiah through the well-fed hates of Pharisees and Sadducees. Simultaneously, they were sharply aware of Roman contempt as well as Hellenist scorn for Jews. Yet, they had not made this paradoxical distinction. In that solemn hour after the Passover, however, they slowly absorbed with vexation of soul that they were not of the world. More specifically, the Twelve had crossed a line: Christ headed them as the first of the New Testament generation out of the world. This shared understanding that Jesus commissioned them the point men of the Recreation bonded that company for laborious apostolic work ahead.
The observable world Jesus identified consisted of three concentric circles, which the Teacher with prophetic instruction located as unsatisfiable acrimonies of hatred. The broadest, Hellenism, circumambient polytheistic religions and cultural forces ancient in wickedness, promised with many smiling faces a self-serving life—satisfaction, enjoyment, gratification, in short, a life pulsing with all sensual pleasures of hedonism. Hellenists had no love for the God destructive of all gods. Closer in and present everywhere, Caesarism, brute military might, frowning, on the prowl, far too prone with the cold forms of repression—occupation, tribute, and death threats. Rome’s governors had no love for an all-conquering king.19 Third, the worst, Judaism imposed the unprecedented dominance of the Oral Law. Fearsome with the wagging finger of excommunication—loneliness, hopelessness, worriedness—Judaism largely enacted arrogant powers of damnation. Together these three enemies Jesus called the world, in the Fourth Gospel the Jews the foremost. At that toxic stage in history, all Jews still constituted the Church—corrupt, treasonous, gathering momentum to kill the Lord and Savior.
For emphasis, of these open enemies the Jews exerted on Jesus and the Twelve the most censorious authority. They were the Church coming out of the Old Testament dispensation.
• Only, long before the Incarnation, they had replaced in worship the LORD God with a monotheistic deity.
• Only, they had over the intertestamentary centuries exchanged the Decalogue for the Oral Law.
• Only, they had unreasonably altered righteousness in the hope upon the Messiah for a pagan illusion of self-righteousness.
With a passion they resented the Lord Jesus for beginning the New Church in their hyper-competitive midst; therefore, he shunted them with finality off to the sidelines of history. Over some three years, Jewry’s jealousy and wrath burned hot and high—against their only Messiah.
Christ’s three chronologically immediate enemies—Hellenism, Caesarianism, and Judaism—envisioned variant kingdoms, each true to its own aspirations and ambitions. Seducing Hellenists longed for a rule culturally infiltrated with sensual pleasures. Ironclad Caesarists perceived a global power of military overmight submissive to the reigning Caesar. Outnumbered Jews dreamed of a kingdom of law starting at the time of the general resurrection of the dead, they in supreme control. Each outmoded enemy force fomented a rulership at war against the Lord Jesus and his Kingdom. Each eschatologically oriented competitor to the Christ saw the future in an eternally authoritative identity isolated from the Lord and Savior.
This world, according to the Fourth Gospel, enclosed a three-fold realm of suffocating evil, each a powerful evolution of power, which brooked no opposition from the Christ and his Kingdom. Throughout, then, in the tortuous calamities of that time Jesus testified in different ways to the world’s hatred, its detestation of, its abhorrence at his Person and work, and its reprobate refusal to believe him in the strength of the Spirit of truth. This detestation of and abhorrence at the Lord and Savior began within Jewry. John 1:10–11, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.” Hence, he prophesied, John 14:19p, “Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more.” John 14:22, “Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, ‘Lord how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” In answer, the Savior prophesied that the bad-tempered world’s enmity only increased with aging.
Therefore, with the first half of a general conditional, for instance, John 15:18a, “If the world hates you . . . ,” Jesus posited a vital part of a statement of fact—with a future emphasis. The Lord revealed this violence of resistance as a burden of existence for the Twelve, a continuous action always on the increase. In the Gospel according to John, the Apostle pointed to the gathering enmity to kill Jesus, which the Twelve witnessed from nearby. This ill intention spread wide. Earlier, John 9:22, yes, “. . . the Jews had already agreed that if any one should confess [Jesus] to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.” This stain of excommunication with or without due process forced a person into inevitable and unenviable placesof alienation. Overall, before the Acts, the Jews unloaded little evidence that they hated any of the Twelve, except they accompanied Jesus. All Jewish abhorrence before the Crucifixion tightened about the Messiah. Later, in the Acts of the Apostles, snobbery of hatred agitated with willfully blind intervention—jailing, scourging, and death.
In this conditional, a general statement of fact, Jesus said, John 15:18b, “. . . know that [Jewry] has hated me before you.” This “before you” earmarked in point of time that the world hated Jesus before the Twelve. Second, this “before you” escalated in terms of priority an unimaginable deep hatred from out of the soul of the Old Church, which enmity the Apostle documented unapologetically from the Fourth Gospel’s beginning. That is, first, the Jews refused to acknowledge and bow before him as the Lord and Savior. John 3:11, “. . . you do not receive our testimony.” Not his. Not the Father’s. Rather, they persecuted Jesus with increasing vigor, plotting to kill him. John 7:1, 30, 32, 8:40, 44–45, 59, 10:31, 33, 39, 11:50, 57; etc. Jewish determination to do him in knew no restraint. From within the narrow perimeters of Judaism, they perceived nothing of the glorious vistas of the covenant life the Lord revealed.
This must be stressed: the world, all flesh, beginning with Jewry, hated Jesus before the Twelve, not only in point of time, but more intently, out of unintelligible conviction; the antithetical world of the Jews, as well as the Caesarian and the Hellenistic, tolerated absolutely no room for the Lord of the Church, Savior. Hence, out of a limiting principle, they detested him. For his origin as the Son of God was not from below, out of any old-line civilization, and his ruling as the Holy One did not derive out of any sphere of unbelief. In every way, all flesh perceived him an intrusive alien, unwelcome, a disturber of human plans for and dreams of world conquest. He himself was in the world, but not of the world, of any sphere created by unbelievers. For instance, to Judaists on the attack he declared, John 8:23, “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world.” Later, in the great prayer that is now John 17, he spoke to the Father with a pastoral eye on the disciples, vs 14, “I have given them thy word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” As accurate descriptor, Jesus tarnished these enemies forever.
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During this extensive teaching phase, the Lord Jesus prophesied that the Twelve too had better count on this hatred. Such was the groundbreaking education of disciples soon to be apostles. In this world
