NOTES for Joh 7:1-13

What world is meant here? Certainly not peace as the opposite of war. But neither is it the world that the Lord conceived and created: He loved this world, and this world is good. Yet there is the world that we ourselves engender, the world as the sum of our proud opinions and decisions, of our wrong and loveless relations with one another: a fallen world headed toward death. It is this world that is hostile to Christ.

To understand this, we must speak, as we did yesterday, of “one’s own” and “outsiders.” Jesus is an outsider to this world because His very presence exposes the world as lying in evil. Beside Jesus, every human sin instantly becomes visible, just as in the light every dark object that had been hidden in darkness before the light came becomes visible. Jesus is light, and He is alien to the darkness enveloping this world. Our immediate reaction to what is alien is hatred, the desire not to have it nearby. But those whom Jesus addresses are “its own”; they are just as darkened by sin, they are part of the same system of relationships as the rest of the world, and the world does not reject them.

Later, when the disciples truly believe in Christ, when He establishes the New Covenant with them at the Last Supper, then they will become His “own,” and the world will hate them too. Jesus will tell them this in His final discourse (John 15:18–19), and He will pray to the Father to preserve them from evil in this world (John 17:15–16). And if we are His disciples, if we follow Him, we should expect nothing other than hatred from this world.