Scripture Reference: John 15:12-25
The man who is speaking the words in our reference scriptures will be dead and buried approximately twenty-four hours later. He is preparing a small circle of His followers to be ready to live without Him. He warns them that in their future life they will be partakers of the same conflict about to claim His life.
“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 also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me” (John 15:20-21).
So the reason for the hostility is “not knowing.” This does not mean simple ignorance or lack of information. It means lack of acknowledgement. They do not recognize who sent Jesus.
“If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin” (John 15:22).
Who is this “they”? These verses name no one. They don’t name the Jews nor the Romans. The rejection Jesus describes is broader than that. He says it comes from “the world.”
“If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:19).
What then is this “world” whose hatred is to be expected? It does not mean the globe. It does not mean God’s good creation. It does not mean the rocks and streams and animal life. It does not mean “all the people.”
The Greek word cosmos which is used here might best be translated “the system.” It points to the way things fit together: to the networking, the organizing; to the way that God’s refractory creation, God’s rebellious creatures stick together for evil. Human solidarity is a good thing, but once solidarity has become nationalism, racism, collective selfishness, it is not. Human rationality is a good thing, but when it has been harnessed to destruction, it is not.
God made his creatures capable of organization through solidarity. When we use those capacities for evil, they still work. What is wrong with our world is not simply a matter of isolated individual ignorance or isolated evil will. It is not just that I am a sinner and you another, she a sinner, and they sinners, and it all adds up. The whole world is worse than the sum of its parts.
This is a first sobering truth about the task facing the move toward peace and peacemaking. What killed Jesus was a world. The men who joined in executing Jesus were the mere instruments of larger forces. This is what the apostle Paul meant when he wrote:
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).
It all goes together. For instance what the late President Eisenhower once coined as “the military-industrial complex” is far more complex than that. It is not only the Pentagon and the owners of industry. It is not only also the banks, university researchers, labor organizers, political parties . . . it is all of us.
The “challenge of peace” is not, then, just a matter of fixing or fine-tuning a system of which the other parts are working well. We are not trying merely to correct one mistake in an otherwise adequate culture. We are dealing, rather, with an evil that is representative and prototypical. When you cut across a piece of wood you find a pattern of lines or circles that we call “the grain.” The grain is not only at the end of the wood; it runs all the way through the log. You see it at the extremity where the cutting exposed it.
To Be Continued
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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