Covenant Essays - T. Hoogsteen

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      All unbelievers looking at and listening to Jesus confess from the heart, while balancing on the precipice of condemnation, that he is not of this world; therefore the hate. This hatred raises antagonism and breeds resentment. Because neither he nor his disciples were identifiable with any of the world’s currents, though unquestionably in the world, the Lord and Savior summoned this occasion to place his own on guard. Earlier, Matt 18:7, he had warned his own, “For it is necessary that temptations come . . .” to bond with one of the spiritualties of this earth. This he declared to test all of the Church.

      CHRIST LOVE

      Through the parable of the vine, the Lord, Gethsemane-bound, summoned his own to abide in him and bear fruit. Both activities, abiding in him and bearing fruit, made the living branches different from all who sought life in the world, which the Father cut off for burning in eternal fires. Therefore, the Lord and Savior commanded his own to bear much fruit, John 13:34, that is, love for one another, not in terms of secular friendships, but in the agapic way. Powerfully, then, he addressed the interactive foundation stones of the New Church with the deep rhythms of the love commandment. John 15:12–17,

      This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. This I command you, to love one another.

      With apostolic force John interposed the living source of the Twelve’s love, the Lord and Savior himself. John 13:1, “Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” That love infused the disciples with accountability for one another, through which they demonstrated that they loved the Lord and Savior above all. In this faith-demonstrative love for the Lord and Savior as well as for one another, they kept the commandments. John 14:15–17, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” This the Lord reaffirmed. John 15:10, a general conditional, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” These commandments, of course, constitute the entirety of the Decalogue, which comprehends the boundless substance of love. All aspiring branches of the vine, which abide in Christ and bear abundant fruit, the Father prunes to make them bear more. By this pruning, the Father cuts away all submissions to religiosity. On the other hand, every branch susceptible to the excitable temptations of any current ideology, the Father cuts away and relegates to the eternal fires of damnation, forcibly expelled to the common inheritance for unbelievers.

      To demonstrate this love? Christ Jesus placed his own first; beginning with the disciples as the foundation of the Church, he sacrificed his life for his own on the Cross, bearing the punishment for their guilt accrued by breaking the Commandments. The disciples demonstrated this love for the Christ by hearing and obeying him only. Thus, they, toiling out of sight, deployed the power of salvation within them. As well, beginning with the disciples, all living church members love one another. With primary care, unostentatiously, they place each other first in the witness to love the Lord Jesus above all and neighbors in Christ as themselves. The gracious strength of this love Jesus revealed in the sin-shattering prayer that is John 17, vs 12, “While I was with them, I kept them in thy name, which thou hast given me; I have guarded them, and none of them is lost but the son of perdition, that the scripture might be fulfilled.” Christ alone, by his power and authority as the Son of God/Son of Man, holds the Church together throughout the ages. Even though she is in the world, through dominically imparted love she is not of the world.

      This love of Christ for his own, this love of his own for him, and this love of his own for one another in the Church antagonized the world—Hellenism, Caesarianism, and Judaism then. These restless and pernicious friendships proliferated from below, out of the world, subversive to the Christ and the Kingdom. Therefore, Jesus exhorted the men at table with him and still listening intently, to hold them in the strength of the Gospel, “This I command you, to love one another.” With that agape he instructed his own to answer the world’s hatred, in fact, to undermine and supplant every secular defining of love, i.e., the friendliness of religiosity that draws unbelievers ever deeper into sins of disobedience and concentrates unbelieving church members into colluding fellowships known for leaky conviviality. Falsifying powers of sin that draw members of the Church into the world is stronger than any one of the Church living apart from the Faith. The agapic patterns he created, the Lord taught, persisted beyond any sort of ideologically conditioned friendship.

      To prevent triumphalism in the New Church and deflate airs of superiority among his own, Jesus recapitulated morally corrosive sequences of persecution coming. John 15:21, “. . . all this they will do to you on my account, because they do not know him who sent me.” Such not knowing exceeded by far disobedience to the Commandments; it emphasized the fact that the Church then worshiped a strange god, a monotheistic deity in competition with Jesus Christ himself and his Father. Therefore any persecution that starts simply with shunning humbles, and humbles again. This future for the Church in the world the Head projected for his own.

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      Not that all obscure gods of the world with unity of command set out a valid excuse to hate him or the New Church. The Lord prophesied hard times coming, John 15:22–25, because all warring factions out of reprobate human nature abhorred the light shining into, penetrating their darkness to expose the religiosities and ideologies’ insecure hiding places, regardless of misleading friendships involved. Yet this seething backlash of evidence-based hatred Jesus conveyed first to the circle of disciples. He willed through the “love one another” that they stand strong with an inexpressible joy. Integrally motivated as well as morally inviolable, they thus formed the close formation of brotherhood—internally unpretentious and externally impressive—to respond to all secular hatreds tiresomely fired up to consume the almighty love of the Christ. The future for all of the Church moves through many generational shifts into perilous processes of persecution.

      CHRIST HOPE

      Emphatically, Jesus stressed that beginning with the Apostles his disciples were not of this world, a choice he made. He called them, commanded them, to follow him, although not by their choice. In that calling, he changed their respective wills; hence, they wanted to be with him, in his company. Dominically, therefore, he declared, “You are not of this world.” Thus, he created in his own the faith to believe him, the Lord and Savior; at the same time, he created the hope to be faithful, regardless of circumstance, safety concerns secondary. In that faith and through that hope, they belonged to him, eternally, believing and innovating the new life in the world, but never more of a world troubled by human caprice.

      Over fast-moving years and decades, the Twelve experienced the world’s hatred for Jesus and themselves. As they matured in their sense of identity in Christ and for the Church, they found that all outside the Lord and Savior, as well as apart from the Church, moved to isolate, banish, and/or kill whom the Son of God/Son of Man separated in praise of the Father.

      Now yet, at table, bound by the prudent voice of the Lord and reluctant to move into unknown depths of hatred, these imagers of Christ listened, internally struggling to apprehend existential insight into the—immediate—future. Slowly, they grasped the sin of human intervention into the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

      The other Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, at Jesus’s last Passover celebration in all truth imaged the institution of the Lord’s Supper. John, on the other hand, wrote of the Passover. For a reason. In the original Passover, Exod 12:1–27, the LORD God revealed with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm the release of his people from out of Egyptian captivity and the start of a long journey through a “great and terrible

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