4 May 2024 John 15:18-21
How do we hate Jesus?
We hate Him the same way people have always hated Him. We find Him inconvenient.
The crowds who thronged around Jesus wanted Him to heal them, to provide food for them. They knew perfectly well what His signs and wonders meant, viz., that He was the Messiah, that God was really present to them in Him. They wanted the food and the healing, but they didn’t want that. When He insisted that they pay attention to His teaching and not just the signs He performed, they wanted to throw Him off a cliff, or they walked away discouraged or disgusted, or they shouted, “Crucify him!”
He didn’t do what they wanted. That’s how the crowds hated Him.
The Romans were no different. They found Him inconvenient, too. The Roman Empire of those days – of any days, really – had no real interest in religion. People could worship poached eggs or unicorns as far as the Romans were concerned, as long as they didn’t interfere with business or politics. Their own imperial cult was nothing more than the cynical attempt to give a veneer of religious legitimacy to the diminishment of freedom and the reality of military dictatorship. It is no accident that the first human deified by the Romans was also the first one they called “Dictator for Life,” Julius Caesar. By the days of Claudius a century later everyone knew it was the army who made emperors, and unmade them. That is why Jesus was such a threat to them. He had real power. He could deliver what He talked about, He was what he talked about – the Love of God, the Power of God, the Way to God, God right in front of them. Pontius Pilate had an inkling of that when he said he could find no crime in Jesus, and tried to get the crowd to choose Jesus over Barabbas. But the crowd, like the Romans, found Jesus inconvenient, and Pilate caved.
They hated Him because he was inconvenient. We hate Him for the same reason.
Jesus doesn’t just have real power. He is real power. He is the one who makes possible all the things we say we value – Love, Freedom, Science, Justice, Rights, Dignity, Honor, Virtue. But we don’t want to give Him any credit for that. We want to say that in fact all those things exist independentof Him, in spite of Him. And so we see in our time an explosion of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, suicides, homicides, anti-Semitism being chanted by mobs of the young at some of the most distinguished universities in the world, enabled by privately funded provocateurs who are for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the Brown Shirts of the 1930s. The cognitive dissonance between what we say we value, and what many think about Jesus has become nearly unbearable.
The great weakness of the recent cultural and political earthquakes is that they have undermined the institutions of faith, family, and community, and left only rubble behind. The void is painful and unendurable. The solution, therefore, must be to rebuild the structures of human meaning, and the institutions that give that meaning concrete form. This requires the language of hope, and rejecting the language of mere negation and resentment. It is not a surprise, therefore, that the name of Jesus is being whispered again, for the language of hope doesn’t start with provocateurs who are only looking for their cut of power. It starts with prophets, voices crying in the wilderness who don’t care about worldly power, who know that if they seek heaven first, they will get earth thrown in. Every institution that has ever lifted us up, and increased Love, Freedom, Science, Justice, Rights and the rest of the things we truly value has begun with the same voices.
And the name that is common to them all is Jesus.
We have had the wrong idea about convenience long enough. We have listened to the wrong voices long enough. We have hated Him long enough. It is time to start whispering His name again.
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