NOTES for Ин 15:20-21
Speaking about the inevitability of the persecutions awaiting Christians, Jesus at the same time clearly defines their cause. His words make it clear that these persecutions cannot be called religious, just as Christianity cannot be called a religion. After all, Jesus says nothing about any new religion. He speaks about a new life. About the life of the Kingdom that He brought into the world. And about the fact that this new life is incompatible with the life of the world in its present state. If the matter were religion, conflict perhaps could have been avoided.
Every religion usually has some measure of adaptability. All religions, in one way or another and to some degree, have adapted and still adapt to the demands of this world, and religions that have grown on Christian soil are no exception. But no one has ever managed to adapt the life of the Kingdom to the life of this world. Not in any form of this world: not secular, not religious. It is no accident that Judaism, which became the religious environment and, to a certain degree, the religious form in which the early Christian Church existed, did not accept Christianity.
What in Judaism went beyond the strictly religious framework - the tradition of living Revelation, the teaching about the inner Torah and the living Torah - was accepted and assimilated by Christianity, though some of it was later lost. But Judaism as a religion never became an organic part of Christian life. And the issue here is not newly converted Gentiles, but the fact that Christianity as new life did not fit within any religious framework. Not even within the framework that was part of the soil that had grown it. And the religiosity that grew on the soil of historical Christianity also proved too narrow for Christian life.
It is no accident that Christian history has so often seen cases when Christian righteous people, or saints as they are called in some churches, who sought the fullness of the life of the Kingdom and found it, were persecuted precisely by religious people and religious authorities, now Christian ones. Religion is part of this world, and when it meets the Kingdom and its life, that feature of religion will inevitably show itself. That is why Jesus speaks about the inevitability of persecutions. Until the end of time. Until the full triumph of the Kingdom. And until the full transformation of the very nature of this world.