NOTES for Joh 15:17-16:2
Jesus often warned His followers that they would face rejection in the world, even persecution. And He sees the reason for this not in religious or other disagreements with the majority, but in the very essence of Christianity. For He brought the Kingdom into the world, and He wants His followers to be not adherents of some new teaching—religious, ethical, political, or otherwise—but inhabitants of the Kingdom. He certainly understands very well that the world will always reject such people: they will remain strangers to it until the end of time, until its complete transfiguration. But what can the Church set against the world? Jesus Himself points to the means: love. Of course, love—not as an emotion, but as a way of relating—is itself foreign to the fallen world. It is illogical and serves no practical purpose, for to love is to wish one's neighbor well and strive to make that person's life better, expecting nothing in return. Not only a cynic but even an ordinary pragmatist will say that living this way is unreasonable and impractical: love must at least be mutually beneficial to be at all acceptable to the fallen world. Yet by definition it cannot be so. And Jesus speaks of love not only as a relationship between people, but as the spiritual environment that constitutes the nature of the Kingdom. If ordinary human love, when it is genuine, usually provokes mockery and distrust, the love of the Kingdom can provoke outright hatred. This is hardly surprising: the fallen world preserves the illusion not only of stability but even of immovability largely because its adherents have managed to convince, if not everyone, then a great many people that there is no alternative to the existing state of affairs. When people appear who can offer such an alternative, the natural desire of those who support the existing order is to destroy that alternative—along with the One who brought the Kingdom into the world and those who bear witness to the alternative today.