Followers of Christ want to be like Christ.
And Jesus promised that if you want to be like him, you will be treated and viewed as he was.
It occurred to me recently that there may be an implicit premise in some forms of Christian cultural engagement that believes we can do an end-run around this clear promise of Jesus:
“You will be hated by all for my name’s sake. . . . A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. . . . If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household.” (Matt. 10:22, 24-25)
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. 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 15:18-19)
By God’s grace we will win some to Christ. Some who are both “in” and “of” the world will be called by Christ to remain “in” but “not of”—to be transformed and not conformed to the world. We seek to be salt and light so that some who are worldly will become those of whom the world is not worthy. But I don’t see a way around Jesus’s promise that at the end of the day, being hated is part of what it means to follow and look like Jesus.
For another angle on this theme, see John Piper’s recent meditation on 1 John 3:1, including this observation: “If the world rejected Jesus, the perfect manifestation of love, then there are times it will reject us, precisely because our message and manner are getting close to Christ’s.”
