Hated by the World

     Long centuries of the ascendancy of Christendom may have obscured it, but the Christian faith is meant to be countercultural. So countercultural, in fact, that Jesus can go so far as to predict that the world will hate his disciples, just as it hates him. “If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own,” he tells them. “Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world—therefore the world hates you” (v. 19). A cheery sentiment for the final night Jesus will spend with his disciples.

     That’s the setting of these verses from John 15: Jesus’s farewell discourse to his disciples just hours before he is handed over to the authorities to be crucified. He and his crew are about to find out just how true is this description of the world’s hatred. But for John there is more going on here, and it has to do with a German theological term, sitz im leben.

     The English translation of sitz im leben is “situation in life,” and it refers to the context in which the composer of a book, verse, or passage writes. Because none of the gospels are journalistic, eyewitness accounts, there is a gap between the time and place of the stories’ action and the time and place of the writing. In the case of John, that gap is sixty years or longer. So it’s important when reading the gospels to bear in mind not only the action of the narrative but also the context of the writer. As I talked about in a sermon a couple of weeks ago, John is famous for letting his own circumstances intrude upon his story of Jesus, so that it is sometimes hard to tell which events, if any, are purely based in Jesus’s days (the late twenties and early thirties) and which are a thinly veiled account of the concerns of John’s community around the turn of the second century.

     Take this passage from John 15. One can make a solid case that the world does indeed hate Jesus, but it may be that John and his compatriots are also having their own experience of the world’s hatred six or seven decades later.

     In a larger sense, however, faithful disciples of Jesus in every age have, do, and will find themselves at odds with the world, especially when we define “world” as the Domination System. Violence, domination, cutthroat competition, hierarchical arrangements—these all characterize the way much of the world operates. If you have ever heard the expression, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” you have heard a good description of the Domination System.

     Jesus, in his entire ministry and approach to life, bucked this system at every turn. The communities he established—communities that later evolved into the church—offered an alternative to the way of the world. Cooperation, sharing, servant leadership, and a commitment to nonviolence were at the core of these communities, and when it is at its best the church still reflects these principles and practices. Too often, however, the church has been held captive by the culture, and too often we have had a Stockholm-Syndrome relationship with our captors. But when we have been truly faithful to our countercultural Leader, we have held firm to Jesus’s way and borne the brunt of the Domination System’s fury. We have been hated by the world.

     The question each of us, and each of the faith communities to which we belong, must ask is this: does the world—the Domination System—hate us? Are we living so faithfully as disciples of Jesus that we incur the same kind of wrath that he did? Is the world uncomfortable when we are around? If our answers to these questions are “no,” then we need to ask ourselves a follow-up question: “Why not?”