A Reflection for Saturday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Find today’s readings here.
Jesus said to his disciples:
"If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first.
If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own;
but because you do not belong to the world,
and I have chosen you out of the world,
the world hates you.”
This passage has always been a difficult one for me, for a couple of reasons.
First, talk of hatred and division coming from Jesus doesn’t correspond well, at least in my mind, with the images of the loving shepherd who leaves the 99 to search for the lost one, or the father who welcomes back his ungrateful son, embracing him no differently than his other children.
Second, there’s an undercurrent of certain strains of U.S. Christianity that seems to revel in pointing out the ways the world “hates” Christians.
There’s the infamous “War on Christmas,” when the weeks leading up to the commemoration of the birth of Jesus are inevitably filled with complaints that society doesn’t take the religious message of the season seriously enough. There are also the fights over wedding cakes in which the most extreme voices claim victimhood at levels that don’t feel warranted.
Those examples aside, it’s not difficult for me to see that the world did indeed hate Jesus and his earliest followers. Jesus himself was executed in part for preaching a message that went against the values of his specific context, and his followers were persecuted and killed as well. But as leaders embraced Jesus and societies proclaimed themselves Christian nations, how did the interpretation of this passage change?
Of course there are signs in our society that the values of Jesus are not welcome by “the world.” I’m thinking of calls to care for the poor, which are routinely ignored by people living in fear of losing their own status or by those with disordered attachments to wealth and power.
But I often have to zoom out farther to understand the kind of hatred Jesus may have had in mind.
A report released last year by Aid to the Church in Need warned that Christians living in 18 countries faced severe violence and persecution because of their faith. In some instances, adherents of other faiths are the perpetrators, and in others, governments who believe Christians represent a threat to their own power inflict the violence.
So if the slights I’ve occasionally experienced because of my faith—usually in the form of snarky comments or rude jokes—don’t make me feel hated in the way Jesus warned, I’ll take that as a blessing. But I’ll also remember that many in the world do indeed hate his followers, and I’ll offer my prayers in solidarity.
