John, Vol 3: The Farewell Discourses by Adrienne von Speyr

Author:Adrienne von Speyr [von Speyr, Adrienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898701111
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2012-03-30T06:00:00+00:00

THE WORLD’S HATE (I)

15:18. If the world hates you, know that it hated me before you.

It is not unconditionally said that the world hates the disciples, only that the world hates the Lord, and that if it hates the disciples it hated the Lord first and will meet him in this hate. What the world hates about him, and what it will find hateful in his disciples, is one thing above all: his Spirit. It hates this Spirit because it has nothing in common with it, does not recognize itself in this Spirit and cannot make use of him for the enhancement of its own spirit. This hate of the world for the Lord is a primal hate: it already hated him even before he came to the world, before he appeared visibly, before the world could confront him in words and deeds. It hates him as expectation and promise, long before he is there. It knows that his coming will challenge it and that this challenge will call for something it is not willing to give, namely, the surrender of its own standpoint so that he may transform it, according to the will of the Father and in a sense that is beyond its grasp, but whose direction is clearly indicated by God in his promise. The world, having more or less admitted the Father’s position, being more or less prepared to accept his law and not openly to resist it, believes it has gone as far as it could. To let itself be led beyond this into something new—something that will always remain new—that is beyond its ken. By accepting the law—and even in actually infringing it!—it feels it has come halfway, since it designates and acknowledges sin against the law to be just that and hence stresses the positive side of law. What more can the lawgiver want! But what the Lord brings will not let itself be fit into any particular law, or into any elucidation of a particular law. It must be lived and experienced, and to this end it must be accepted over and over again. It must be transformed in the person from a word into a life, into something that accompanies and guides him at every step and that soon bodes to become more important than the person’s own ego. It can never be monitored because it is never concluded. A person may know the point in his life when it began, the direction of the path that has been taken, but beyond that it loses itself somehow in concepts such as faith, love and hope, which while they all signify something concrete, as soon as they are accepted by someone, reveal their innermost essence in an ever-intensifying and forward-pointing movement, and thus are not exactly the same today as they were yesterday. The power that indwells them is life itself, the life of the Lord, which transcends the life of the individual and to a certain degree depersonalizes it, in order

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