Our Lord here prepares His hearers for what is coming by putting it in
the gentle form of an hypothesis. The frequency with which 'If' occurs
in this section is very remarkable. He will not startle them by the
bare, naked statement which they, in that hour of depression and
agitation, were so little able to endure, but He puts it in the shape
of a 'suppose that,' not because there is any doubt, but in order to
alleviate the pain of the impression which He desires to make. He says,
'If the world hates,' not 'if the world hate'; and the tense of the
original shows that, whilst the form of the statement is hypothetical,
the substance of it is prophetic.
Jesus points to two things, as you will observe, which make this
hostility inevitable. 'If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me
before it hated you.' And again, 'If ye were of the world, the world
would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have
chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.' The very
language carries with it the implication of necessary and continual
antagonism. For what is 'the world,' in this context, but the aggregate
of men, who have no share in the love and life that flow from Jesus
Christ? Necessarily they constitute a unity, whatever diversities there
may be amongst them, and necessarily, that unity in its banded phalanx
is in antagonism, in some measure, to those who constitute the other
unity, which holds by Christ, and has been drawn by Him from 'out of
the world.'
If we share Christ's life, we must, necessarily, in some measure, share
His fate. It is the typical example of what the world thinks of, and
does to, goodness. And all who have 'the Spirit of life which was in
Jesus Christ' for the animating principle of their lives, will, just in
the measure in which they possess it, come under the same influences
which carried Him to the Cross. In a world like this, it is impossible
for a man to 'love righteousness and hate iniquity,' and to order his
life accordingly, without treading on somebody's corns; being a rebuke
to the opposite course of conduct, either interfering with men's
self-complacency or with their interests. From the beginning the blind
world has repaid goodness by antagonism and contempt.
And then our Lord touches another, and yet closely-connected, cause
when He speaks of His selecting the Apostles, and drawing them out of
the world, as a reason for the world's hostility. There are two groups,
and the fundamental principles that underlie each are in deadly
antagonism. In the measure in which you and I are Christians we are in
direct opposition to all the maxims which rule the world and make it a
world. What we believe to be precious it regards as of no account. What
we believe to be fundamental truth it passes by as of little
importance. Much which we feel to be wrong it regards as good. Our
jewels are its tinsel, and its jewels are our tinsel. We and it stand
in diametrical opposition of thought about God, about self, about duty,
about life, about death, about the future; and that opposition goes
right down to the bottom of things. However it may be covered over,
there is a gulf, as in some of those American canons: the towering
cliffs may be very near--only a yard or two seems to separate them; but
they go down for thousands and thousands of feet, and never are any
nearer each other, and between them at the bottom a black, sullen river
flows. 'If ye were of the world, the world would love its own.' If it
loves you, it is because ye are of it.