The Hostility of the World
John 15:17-27

The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude, Apostles

            On this feast of St. Simon and Jude we want to study the words of Jesus from John chapter 15. He spoke these words only a few hours away from the agony of Gethsemene and death on the cross. The Lord tells His disciples that He will depart from the world. They will remain. What should they expect after He leaves? Ease in Zion? Peaches and cream? Hardly. Jesus warns them that shortly they would experience the world’s persecution and hatred. But before discussing that persecution, He gives them a command. “These things I command you that you love one another.” In other words, “You are about to feel plenty of hatred from the world; from each other you need mutual love and support.” Why? It is difficult to endure persecution. Few people have the courage. That is why the love and support of others is so necessary.
           
            This principle holds across the board. Soldiers benefit from the support of their comrades, baseball players from each other. The Church Militant is composed of Christian soldiers who love one another as they go forward into battle, the cross of Jesus going on before. No army can triumph, no team can win when the followers are divided and fighting among themselves. The siege of Jerusalem is an example of a divided house that fell. The siege took place from A.D. 66 to 70, lasting three and a half years. It was a disaster for the Jews. The Roman armies left not even one stone standing on top of another; the resisters they slew, the survivors they enslaved. Josephus, the Jewish Historian, concluded that the demise of Israel was due just as much from factions within the walls of the city as from the Roman legions without. 

The point is this: a church will experience ups and downs, good times and bad. Love is the glue that keeps everything together, draws people in, and helps us endure persecution. You and I experience ups and downs individually. We need the love of the brethren to uphold us. Let us love one another as Jesus commanded us to do.

Notice also that Jesus commands this love. The disciples must love one another, whether they felt like it or not. This runs counter to the modern understanding of love. Nowadays, some people think love should flow naturally. It goes something like this: “Don’t love out of duty. That would be phony. Rather, love a person only when you feel like it, only if it rises up spontaneously from your heart.”

The Bible rejects this notion. C. S. Lewis put it well. He wrote: “The role for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.” [Close quote.] Consequently, love is a command. We should love out of obedience to Christ and in submission to His authority.

            Let’s move on to the hatred of the world Jesus discusses. Reading John 15:18-21. [Read them.]

            Someone once said that the God-hating person would like to lash out at God, but he can’t, so he lashes out at the followers of God. The same principle applies to Jesus. The Lord says, “If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you.” During His passion Jesus took the brunt of the world’s scorn, malice, and venom, and we can expect the same. We should be surprised when the world is friendly to us. What is the world? Who is the world? It has different meanings in the Bible. Here it means the realm of evil, the society of wicked people; the population that opposes God.

            “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you… If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you.” The prediction of Jesus came true. The disciples faced opposition from antagonistic synagogues in the first century, and the Church struggled for survival. Stephen was stoned. James was run through with a sword (Acts 7:58-60; 12:2-3). Many of the first Christians were Jews, but others became the primary persecutors of the Church. (By the way, when the Church gained the upper hand after Constantine, the tables were turned, and the Church began to persecute the Jews. This is an ugly chapter in our history.) Nevertheless, in the century after Christ the hostility came from the Jewish leaders. About the same time, to compound the problem, the Roman authorities too began to hound the Church. In July of A.D. 64 a fire burned up one-half of Rome. The emperor Nero blamed it on the Christians. (Incidentally, St. John wrote the book of Revelation about this time and designated Nero “666,” and “the Beast”.) The fire was the excuse Nero was looking for to torment the followers of Jesus. Many were arrested and executed in a most horrible manner. Three or four years later Peter and Paul were executed in Rome. Hence, the “Beast,” Nero, set in motion what Jesus foretold, “If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you.” For the next 250 years ten more waves of persecution broke over the Church.

            Let’s mention the martyrdom of Simon and Jude, since this is their feast day. The most familiar symbol of Simon is a book with a fish on top, representing that he was a great fisher of men, a gifted evangelist. One tradition claims Simon traveled to Britain. The Romans of Britain condemned his preaching, and crucified him in A.D. 61. Jude Thaddeus, the other apostle we commemorate today, was probably the son of James the Great. Luke 6:6 suggests this. If true, Jesus thus had a father-son duo with Him among the original Twelve. Tradition reveals that Jude Thaddeus traveled to Armenia to evangelize there. Next, he voyaged with Simon to various lands. They sailed long and far. That is why the emblem of St. Jude depicts a sailboat. Finally Jude came to Damascus, Syria, where he suffered martyrdom.

            So we can see from Simon and Jude the fulfillment of Jesus’ words that His disciples would endure conflict and persecution. This theme of the hostility of the world generates some tough questions. Does this develop an unhealthy worldview of suspicion? Should the Church be a cocoon from the world? What about the Church’s mission to be salt? In short, how should the Church reckon with the world? In the 50s a theologian named Richard Niebuhr wrote a book on the subject called Christ and Culture. It became something of a classic. Taking into account Church history and the denominations familiar to him, Niebuhr pointed out how different groups either separate themselves from the world, or integrate fully with its environment.

On the outer extremes one finds “world-embracing” churches and “world-rejecting” churches, and various gradations in between. The “world-embracing” communities are usually the older mainline churches that are members of the National Council of Churches. They often see the Church’s mission in terms of discovering what God is doing in the world and catching up with it. If abortion is popular, follow it; feminism becomes the fashion, adopt it; evolution gains the ascendancy, embrace it, and so on. According to the “world-embracing” view the world provides the agenda; the Church follows.

            Groups in the middle are “world-suspecting.” They are cautious about the world, believe that it suffers from the curse of sin, and see the church as a refuge. Many evangelical groups identify themselves here. The Reformed Episcopal Church fits more or less in this grouping. We participate in politics and social life and enjoy what is beautiful in the arts and what is helpful in the sciences but we do so with care. We are suspicious of the world leading us somewhere we shouldn’t be. We therefore separate the wheat from the chaff.

            Lastly, some churches are “world-rejecting.” These communities see nothing to be gained dabbling in the world. They reject it. They are frightened to the point of paranoia of the defiling influence of the world. There is nothing good in it. They disengage entirely from public life. In our century some fundamentalist and Pentecostal circles fit this mold. So do Anabaptist assemblies like the Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish. Such groups have formed a worldview based on experiences of conflict. Feeling marginalized and powerless, they separate themselves for the sake of self-preservation.

So the Church has run the gamut from world-embracing, to world-suspecting, to world-rejecting. What position does our passage from John favor? It seems to tilt toward the world-rejecting view. “You are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” That being said, we are never to take one passage of Scripture to the exclusion of everything else. Such verses need to be balanced against other teachings in the Bible. Scripture also says that God loves the world and sent His only-begotten Son to redeem it. We are told to go out into the world and evangelize it. The task of the Church is nothing less than world conquest, the baptism of the nations. As soon as we isolate ourselves from the world, the Gospel shoves us back into it.

What about the Christians in Pakistan, China, or North Korea? They face acute hostility from the world, even martyrdom. For them, the words of Jesus are appropriate, “You are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” Let’s keep this passage close at hand just in case tyrannous people take over America and set up some kind of anti-Christian totalitarianism. In that scenario, a world-rejecting perspective will again make sense.

This is not to say that American believers are exempt from persecution. We do suffer a little. There are a percentage of people in the U.S. who hate Christianity. Why do they reject it? There are several things we could point out. [Culled from the Application Commentary. p. 316.]

A.        Christian morality contradicts the immorality of those who do not follow Jesus. Christian ethics clash with non-Christian ethics. It would be tedious to review all the ways scorn is heaped upon our views of abortion, creation, education, child-rearing, sex limited to a man and woman in marriage, and so on. Like Jesus, we follow God’s law. The world rejected the way Jesus lived, and they will reject the way we live, if we live like Jesus.
           
B.         Moreover, the world resents the fact that Christians submit to the ultimate authority of God. Followers of the Lord Jesus are under the authority of God, and those authorities that God ordains. Why does Kim Jung Il of North Korea slaughter Christians? He feels threatened by people who see loyalty to God on a higher level than loyalty to his deified state. That allegiance to God threatens him. That kind of freedom upsets him. There is freedom in bowing to Almighty God, “whose service is perfect freedom.”

C         What else drives non-Christians crazy? Christians believe in absolutes. Moral absolutes rise up in majesty over the relativistic mush that dominates the thinking of humanism. The world loathes divine unchanging standards of right and wrong. They want a squishy morality that can bend and change to every whim of sinful man. They detest the idea that they will one day stand before the Judge of mankind and be accountable to Him for all the things they did and the way they lived. 

            For these reasons and more Jesus taught us to expect rejection. Rejection may be difficult to take, but if we never experience it, we may be hiding our Christianity from others, denying the faith we claim as central in our lives. [p. 317.]

            Presently, suspicion of the world is prudent; a degree of separation is necessary. Southern California culture is degenerate in a dozen ways. On the one hand God sets the Church apart from the world to make her holy and help each of us grow in Christlikeness. On the other hand, God wants the Church to go back into the world and baptize the nations. You and I go to the world as salt to preserve; leaven to enrich, and light to guide. That means we must be salt in the world, not rotten meat. When Satan and his demons control a country like they do North Korea or Cuba we will resort to a world-rejecting perspective. One day Jesus is coming again, and He will liberate the world from the curse of sin. He will judge the nations and inaugurate the New Heavens and New Earth. Then, we shall embrace the world without suspicion.

Let us pray.

Return to Sermons