Why Does the World Hate Jesus?

Video: Kev0612

This week, I sat down in the evening to watch tv for a bit, and my son ( I will blame it on him) turned to the Colbert Report. As I have seen Colbert do in the past, he was mocking Jesus and Moses, and he particularly seems to like to ridicule Jesus, belief in Jesus, and the Word of God. He's a very funny, albeit caustic man, but as a believer in the Redeemer, I can not listen to it: it enrages me, and the station was turned. This week, though, when the world celebrates Passover and Easter, and on this day, Good Friday, I have to ask exactly WHY the world hates, mocks and ridicules Jesus Christ, or in Hebrew, Yeshua Ha Meschiach.

Who Jesus Was, and What He was Like

For years, before beginning, I must admit, I did the same, before I became a believer. I mocked everything to do with religion, and Jesus, and churchgoers, with disdain and curt remarks, and I remember having a good laugh when a student put me on her 'prayer list' at the back of a class journal in Personal Growth. So did some others she had listed there. Jesus and prayer, God and Heaven were no longer very real to me at all, for I had fallen prey to the 'universified pride' which so besets almost everyone on college campuses today, including ascribing all religious thought and experience, as did William James, to some sort of 'altered state of consciousness' or archetype 'shared by all cultures'.

When I was young, I had a picture of "The Good Shepherd", a wall tapestry, hanging on my wall, a tender though catholicized rendition of Jesus holding a lamb and a shepherd's crook, tending his flock. My mother dutifully took us to church every Sunday, we attended to every ritual, but I knew very little of God or the Messiah, His Son, though even then I got the impression he was well, good. Someone you could pray to and ask for things you didn't have, but like many children, my understanding was very limited. In the arrogance of my teen and college years, I stopped believing altogether, and though we were not allowed to stay home on Sunday till 16, fell prey to what we considered at the time a more 'sophisticated' view of life, so all in all, Darwin and Descartes had done their work, as had the NEA.

I remember though in college when my husband came home from a class, on religion and myths of the world, that he commented on the Professor noting that he was a Christian. I was fascinated that a man who taught Comparative Religions would believe in Jesus, and asked him to ask the Prof why. The response was less than satisfactory, he said, 'because it makes the most sense'. I did not ask many more questions after that. Most of the 'christians' I ran into back then wanted to know if I was 'saved' and where I went to church, and give me the 'Four Spiritual Laws' from Campus Crusade. They never told me though about Jesus and why they believed in Him.

Now, after 24 years of being a believer, and that long daily in the Word, I have a much better idea of who Jesus is, the journey of which started when Jesus asked Peter

Whom Say Ye That I Am?

And Peter rightly replied, the Son of God, or Son of the Blessed. He was not about terrorizing people with rules and laws, but about healing and love, teaching them as the first of those 'rules and laws' or commandments. He was neither the schwarzenegger like tradesman that the Baptists portray going around telling people off, nor the wispy ivory soap boy floating on air that liberalism portrays, but the incarnation of real, genuine love, the Love of God, and His very real power which cannot be ignored then or now.

He was kind to children, and considered them every bit as important as the adults who stood by, once even telling his disciples to 'back off' and suffer the little children to come unto him. He was about Life, caring to the death for one goal: Life forever, in peace and joy for all. He was able to foretell the future, and He 'knew what was in a man'. He was wise, and would commit himself to no man. Exhausted and weary in the human body He chose to bear, he prayed, healed and taught the children of Israel till their was nothing left of human strength. He was Sovereign over the elements which were His: Galilee waves braced his footsteps, and
figs dried up at his touch on command, and mere bread for a meal was no match for the Bread from Heaven.

He defended the weak and powerless, and the only people he was enraged at were the false religious leaders of the day, who used God's Word as the product of merchandise they made it, till in defense of the poor, the weak, the widow and infirm, he marched into the Temple to take it back from those who were not appointed by God but by man, who had purchased their positions from Rome. He knew they were robbing widows blind while making pretenses of long prayers. Hmm.

He could see things as they really are: his trumpeting was of the Woman who gave all that she had, pennies into the Temple offering, or of the woman of 'ill repute' (Vatican legend calls her a prostitute, not the Bible), who poured out the only precious thing she had in life, a perfumed oil, for His anointing to the only ministry which will be trumpeted in heaven.

He was zealous for independence from Rome, but even more from sin and the oppression of false religion: He announced his ministry in the Synagogue, reading Isaiah 61. He laid aside all earthly possessions to bring about the love and Salvation of God even if it meant brutal beatings and ripping flesh, and dying on a 'shameful' Cross meant by Rome for rebel slaves. He was slave to all and Master of All. The Branch, and High Priest, the King from a Kingdom Pilate could not name, and near the end of His ministry, he even raised the dead, sitting down to eat with the recovering fellow a week later.

The Way Leaders Saw Him

The way the leaders of the day saw him then was not unlike now. At first they merely ridiculed him. Romans were not too worried about him unti his strength and followers grew, and then they saw Him as a threat to the authority of Rome, and the charges in the end, which did not prosper, though His death did for a moment, were Sedition. Pilate's main concern was whether He was a King. Pilate himself could not deny it, fixated on this powerful man.

When He healed the blind man, the sure sign of Messiah, the Religious 'mob' of the day laughed and noted that nothing good and no prophet ever came out of 'Galilee', even though they did not know the Word well enough to know that several had including Elijah and Jonah. When that set of good ole boys saw Lazarus alive again after Jesus called him back from 4 days in the grave, their first impulse was to kill Lazarus again so that Jesus would not get 'credit'. While it is never spoken of in the Bible, I suspect that the day after the Sermon on the Mount, it was probably preached under every name on the Sanhedrin. When they saw His following of the poor, the lame, the blind, deaf and dumb, and even a couple of Priests from the Sanhedrin in the shadows come to Him to learn and receive the kind of Life that lasts forever, their impulse was to put Him to death, for as they said it, "better that one man die for the good of the nation". Death and money were always their solution to a problem and in the end, they themselves declared , in order to get thier way that "they had no king, but caesar". Hardly a Jewish position. Hardly in a time when 70 young zealots gave their lives, burned to death for the great crime of tearing an eagle insignia off the Temple walls.

Rather than not love us, even for a moment, rather than not complete the thing God had given Him to do, which only He could do, rather than see us die never knowing the Love of God, or risk being separated from that love forever, rather than leaving us no way out of the infection of sin on this earth which has been both ours and the earth's demise, He willingly surrendered His life, body, wellbeing, and future to become the Sacrifice of Centuries, the Blood atonement, which would renounce any claim the enemy of all souls had on us. Unbelief no doubt creeps in, because we cannot see the divine war, but as C.S. Lewis once remarked, " I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. "C. S. Lewis

Why The World hates Jesus

The World hates Jesus, first and foremost, because they do not know Him, and because He challenges, even His very being, every assumption we have about the world and life. Comedians see Him as fodder for jokes: a buffoon who is not real, who in their eyes could not have walked on water because it is not within their understanding of things beyond the mundane. Their cruelty though, I could never understand, it comes with a sharp edge of hatred. Of the world leaders of religions, none is made fun of so much as Jesus. This makes little sense that the Prince of Peace would be so disdained, while Ghandi only rarely is poked at, even though in his youth he beat his wife, and almost started a war with muslims, or Buddha, who sat under a tree till worms encased his skull, or Mohammed, who led one bloody takeover after another. I suspect it is more often the case that they consider Jesus one and the same with the meddling, legalistic finger pointers, churchgoers who are often without Christ, who tell everybody off and point to their faults. In Christ is no condemnation.

The Jews hate Christ, well, no the Jews have the most remarkable love -hate relationship of centuries. He's too Jewish and too good to hate full out: but so much barbaric cruelty and killings have been done in His name by those who claimed Him, but could not have been his, that they leave Him both in disdain and as an unfinished question. He was referred to for centuries as 'that man'. He scares some of the Tolerance folks to death because He declared He was the "Way, the Truth and the Life and no man comes to the Father but by me". They walk around all day when they hear that bumfuzzled. They've invented another kind of love, a 'philia' love in which all men are brothers, but most know that "never was it true this side of Jordan'.

Academics hate Him because He requires faith as the substance of things not seen, and they want operational definitions, observations and predictions and 'known quantities. They have intellect and research, human reason which produces changing theories every five years, but no concept of faith, or willingness to entertain that the world could not possibly in its complex tapestry been produced by anything such as a Creator. The world made from 'nothing' by 'accident' is a far greater leap of faith, that believing in a Creator, whose evidence is ever apparent and declared. They do not understand how Blaise Pascal, and Farenheit, Da Vinci or Newton could have believed in Jesus, the Lord and Savior, in all their brilliance because they deal in a different economy of belief.

Theologians and complacent churchgoers also seem to hate him, because He does not fit their models and attributes. Liberal Theologians want him to be a do-gooder, social protester, a Martyr for the cause of good works, and He will not let them stay at that. Conservatives and religionists hate HIm because they do not want a God who is flesh and blood and comes down off the walls of their churches, to require an indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who requires their real and not just religious lives.

Politicians do not want the real Messiah: He still has power and so do His believers, and it does not fit with any networking or finagling they can attend to: they can't beat Him out of his position. Psychologists hate Him because to them He is a figment of imagination, a coping mechanism, an affront to their 'scientism'. Physicians are afraid they might not be needed if He is real and still heals. Kings and Potentates, Heads and Secretaries of State, are threatened by a power still so very real, as promised that just doesn't fit into the 21st century.

Carnal people despise Him because they fear the loss of their destructive lifestyles, which they are not really happy in, but its all they know, and loss is too threatening for change. The list of sins in the Old and New Testament eventually meet us with one of our own, so sinners, escape him for as long as they can fearing change, or run to Him as fast as they can, yearning for healing and peace.

Big Corporations hate his guts because He starts worldwide movements which threaten their overthrow, although that is their balliwick indeed. Mainline religions cannot take the idea that the head of the Church is Him and not the State because even Evangelicals just want to fit in.

And so hatred it is, not just reluctance. We still mock him on our airways and internet videos. Jokes abound, hardening hearts and separating from the one holy one in the World who was willing to give us all we would ever need, the one who even comedians and Web potentates run to in secret, in the dark, when their whole lives are gone by the world they trusted in. We all take a last breath, one escapes in a rattle at the end from our lungs, but for many, the one called Comforter, Healer, Almighty God, Prince of Peace and Everlasting Father is never known or called up.

The World Hates Jesus because they cannot see Him, and they are blind to the only Love that was ever real. No joking.