Hated (part 2)

Hated? Hate was not an uncommon disposition in those days. Israel was hated by a variety of people. In turn, Israel offered hate in return---one can think of the attitude and disgust engendered against the Samaritans in this regard. The hate for and from Israel would center on Israel’s claims to be the special and chosen people of the covenant God, and thus stem from the exclusivist positions derived from their understanding of that claim. Perhaps Jesus’ mention of this hatred because of Him was a way of communicating to His disciples that they must continue on with some of the exclusive practices being carried on by the wider citizenry of Israel? Of course, in consideration of Jesus’ wide-open practices in the area of table-fellowship, in which He welcomed all and sundry to break bread with Him in defiance of custom and societal norms, we can dismiss such thinking almost immediately. Thus the high-mindedness with which Israel looked upon themselves, and was the reason for which they disassociated from the rest of the world, and therefore became the grounds for mutual hatred, was precluded by Jesus’ active and oft-repeated example.

Yet at the same time Jesus spoke of His disciples being hated. So how would these disciples have responded to this? How would they have heard this? To uncover the answer it will be necessary to look into Israel’s history, and especially the history by which Israel saw itself supremely defined. We must always, always, always remember that even though Jesus was unique in a number of ways, His teaching and His mission were firmly grounded within Judaism and the history of Israel. If it was too unique, He could never have found an audience, and would have been dismissed as a heathen, outside of the realm of the covenant people, and probably overly influenced by the pagan religions by which Israel was surrounded and to which they had so often succumbed in their past. While remembering the grounding of Jesus’ teaching within historical Judaism and Israel, we also do very well to remember that those that heard, and those that would later record His life and teaching, so as to pass it on in both oral and written form, heard what He had to say within the same historically-rooted context. They did so while also speaking and writing of Jesus in the light of the Resurrection and what that Resurrection implied for Him, for Israel, for the world, and for the ultimate eschatological purposes of Israel’s God.

Before we move on to the uncovering of the answer that will enable us to get a more firm and far less anachronistic grip on what such words from Jesus implied, it must be said that this pronouncement concerning hatred was not isolated. Jesus spoke of being hated on more than one occasion. While Mark has Jesus speaking of being hated in association with His pronouncements concerning the end of the age, in the wake of His kingly entry into Jerusalem and His “cleansing” of the Temple, Matthew has Jesus first speaking of being hated much earlier. Now, just as Matthew records a sermon on the mount, whereas Luke records a sermon on the plain, it is quite likely that Jesus’ message was repetitive in nature, as we bear in mind the oral-history-oriented community to which He spoke. So in regards to the hating, Matthew has Jesus speaking of such things in association with His sending of the twelve “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (10:6). It is in this context that Jesus says “you will be hated by everyone because of My name” (10:22a), while adding, as He did at the time of Mark’s record, “But the one who endures to the end will be saved” (10:22b).

Progressing on to the Gospel of Luke as we are on the lookout for hate, we land in the sixth chapter, where we find Jesus speaking of such things during the aforementioned sermon on the plain. Here, He is speaking to a wider audience than just His disciples, but the general theme remains unchanged. Jesus says, “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you and insult you and reject you as evil on account of the Son of Man!” (6:22) Interestingly, Jesus here speaks of being excluded, which should certainly have reminded His hearers (and us) of the exclusive practices referenced earlier, though in a way that informs His hearers (and us) that separating exclusions within the “kingdom of God” (6:20) should themselves be excluded. Later, Jesus will add the difficult demand to “Love your enemies,” and to “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (6:27b-28). For those of us that live in a Christianized western world, we see this as a relatively easy thing to do, as we so rarely experience real hatred. In fact, we tend to create dummies and bogeyman, and point to them as those that hate us because of the name of Jesus, when such is generally not the case. In so doing, we find a convenient excuse to isolate ourselves from the world around us, in a Gospel and Resurrection and kingdom of redemption denying way, clustering together within the four walls of our church buildings like some modern-day Qumran community awaiting God’s judgment to fall from heaven on these pretend enemies in a way that will vindicate our self-decided holiness. However, in Jesus’ day, with this overt reference to the Romans, such thinking was radical, especially if Jesus was the Messiah that was supposed to be raised up and ordained to drive the Romans from their land.

Finally, in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, we find an extended discourse on being hated, beginning with “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated Me first” (15:18). John positions this discourse within what is generally referred to as Jesus’ “parting words” to His disciples, thereby placing it, in chronological sequence, after the record of Mark. That, of course, simply points to the fact that Jesus said the same things multiple times, rather than a faulty memory or a merely fictitious construction. Regardless of placement, it makes the point that the disciples of Jesus heard these things as something of a regular topic, and did so into an atmosphere that was highly charged with ideas of revolution, with that revolution and its victory, though it would be through their Messiah, coming at the hands of the very same God that had once saved His people out of Egypt, and Who had, according to the prophets, promised to do the same thing again.