Why do they hate us?

On the very weekend that Hollywood has released perhaps its biggest anti-Christian movie ever, the Gospel reading in the long-determined cycle for this Saturday is John 15:18-21.

If the world hates you,
realize that it hated me first.

If you belonged to the world,
the world would love its own;
but because you do not belong to the world,
and I have chosen you out of the world,
the world hates you.

Remember the word I spoke to you,
'No slave is greater than his master.'

If they persecuted me,
they will also persecute you.

If they kept my word,
they will also keep yours.

And they will do all these things to you
on account of my name,
because they do not know
the one who sent me.

Our Lord is not paranoid: even as he spoke these words his enemies were already on the move and within 24 hours he would be dead.

Christ is not a lunatic figure summoning his followers to wreak violence upon the world and follow him into the bunker. He did not come into the world to condemn the world, but to bring salvation.

Yet Christ also sees things clearly and knows fully the enmity that the world has for him.

This brings us back to the original question: why do they hate us? Why do they hate Christ?

Answers may be found in these words of Christ:

If you belonged to the world,
the world would love its own;
but because you do not belong to the world,
and I have chosen you out of the world,
the world hates you.

....

And they will do all these things to you
on account of my name,
because they do not know
the one who sent me.

The world of which Christ speaks is not the world as created by God, but rather the self-reinventing world of man that exalts self-image over reality, pleasure over substance, and autonomy over fulfillment.

The source of the world's hate is its obsessive self-love: a love not of its true self, but of the image it tries to make of itself - a self image continuously threatened by reality.

God is the ultimate reality and thus worldly people desperately try to deprive God of any substance or to assert that God does not exist, imagining that they may then persevere in their selfish and delusional pursuits unhindered by any external reality.

This is why the world resents God, why it rejects Jesus Christ as historical and eternal, and why it tries to marginalize those who hold faithfully to God, to the person of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and to the substance of Divine Revelation.

We get in the world's way. We do not accept the world's conceits. We remind the world of the ultimate futility of what it tries to do.

That is why the world hates us.

Yet we must love the people of this world: not the selfish world of human sin, but all the people created by God.

We love the people of the world because we see beyond the layers of pretense and imaginary reinvention to the fundamental truth that people are created by God, that created reality is full of God's purposes, and that people find fulfillment only in God.

And so we love: we disregard the pretenses of the world, we hold to the truth, we speak clearly of what we know, we reach out with true charity, and we remain firmly attached to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ – the ultimate reality of the universe and the greatest fulfillment of mankind.