Christ is risen!
Truly He is risen!
These things I command you, that you love one another. If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also. (John 15:17-20)
Christ gave us a realistic picture of what it means to choose to be His disciple. First, we have to have a sense of belonging to an entity in which we are united to other believers in a bond of love for one another. Second, we will not belong to “the world” but rather will discover that as the world hated our Lord Jesus, so the world will also hate us. Though we should note that Christ doesn’t tell us that our response to the world should be one of hatred for or fear of the people who belong to the world. We in fact are to love those people as well, even if they make us their enemies.
In the early Church document, “The Martyrs of Lyon”, we read how the first Christians actually saw this playing out in their lives. The document says:
The adversary hurdled down in full force – a prelude indeed to his final coming of which we can be sure. He left nothing undone to train and prepare his forces against the servants of God. Consequently, we were not only shut out of houses, out of the baths and the public square, but also forbidden to appear in any public place whatsoever. . . .
[“The world” responded to the first Christians by trying to contain them. The description in the document is similar to what happened in more recent times to the Jews when the Nazis rose to power in Germany: they were excluded from public places and their homes were taken away from them and they were “outlawed.” How did the early Christians respond to this discrimination and abuse?]
As the battle closed about them, these endured all manner of insult and punishment, deeming these sufferings insignificant as they hastened towards Christ, thus demonstrating ‘the suffering of the present to be as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed to us‘ (Romans 8:18).
One Christian man “was only too glad to lay down his life for his fellow Christians (cf. 1 John 3:16), for he was and is a true disciple of Christ, ‘following the Lamb wherever he goes’ (Revelation 14:4 ).”
What is more, the joy of martyrdom, the hope of what had been promised them – in their love for Christ and through the Spirit of the Father – all this lightened their burden of suffering for the confessors. (Charles Kannengiesser, EARLY CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY, pp 39, 40, 44)
One of the Christians responded philosophically when asked why he was not trying to avoid martyrdom. He said, while even if he avoided martyrdom this time, he like every human being would have to die eventually – no one escapes death. So, at least as a martyr his death would also have some meaning. Nowhere in the document do the persecuted Christians ever threaten their persecutors or even wish death upon them. They do not demand revenge or threaten to fight back, no stand my ground thinking as they do not wish to kill anyone. They show no “hatred” for the world which hated them, rather they despised all that the world has to offer, choosing instead to value life in the Kingdom which is to come. The world’s treatment of them never led them to kill, seek vengeance, to threaten or curse their opponents. They trusted that God would be merciful to them and that God would deal with the world as God saw fit, which is related to the mystery of Christ dying for the sins of the world and to take away the sin of the world – a world which Christ so loved (John 3:16), yet was not of (John 8:23, 17:16). It is the mystery of God’s love which we are to share with one another, and with those who hate us. We are in the world but not of it, we are to have Christ not the world determine how we relate to or respond to the world.
Fraternized 