John 15:25Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

When many wondered why the Jews did not believe, he cited the prophets, who long before foretold this and gave the reason for their unbelief, namely, their malice and pride. What then? If they did not keep Your word, and therefore will not keep ours; if they persecuted You, and therefore will persecute us; if they saw such signs as no one else performed; if they heard such words as no one had spoken, and gained no benefit; if they hate Your Father, and together with Him also You, then tell us, why did You cast us into their midst? How can we be worthy of faith? And who among our own people will listen to us?

Let some defender of Jewish unbelief tell us what cause of enmity anyone could have. What among the things done by Christ is worthy of hatred or hostility? Is it that He rescued us from death and corruption? Is it that He freed us from the devil’s cruel tyranny, destroyed the dominion of sin, and raised slaves to sonship with God? Is it that, through love for mankind and mercy, He showed as righteous those slain by sins? Is it that He made us partakers of the Holy Spirit and of the divine Nature, granted us the very dwelling place of the holy Angels, and made heaven accessible to men? Is it just, then, that He who became for us the giver and preparer of such blessings should be hated? Should He not rather be blessed with unceasing doxologies and receive from us continual thanksgiving? But nothing, I think, will incline the hard Jew to desire to think what he ought to think. For he “hated without cause” Him whom, on the contrary, he ought to have loved with his whole soul and crowned with the honors of obedient hearing. Yet here also the Lord showed Himself not ignorant of the wickedness of the Jews, but as having foretold and foreknown that it would be. Nevertheless, He showed meekness and longsuffering. Even with such a lawless disposition in them, He offered them the word that called them to salvation. He also confirmed the confession of faith in Him by miracles, in case anyone should prove good and grateful. By this too He gives the disciples a profitable lesson. They are to offer the saving teaching with longsuffering even to those who try to injure them. In this very thing they are to follow the virtue that first shone forth in Him Himself. For if there is anything good, it is first in Christ, and from Him every good thing comes to us.

Therefore He Himself was doing them, even when some man of God once did something similar. Certainly He can do all things through Himself in Himself, but no one can do anything without Him. For Christ with the Father and the Holy Spirit is not three Gods, but one God. Of Him it is written, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things!” (Ps 71:18). Therefore no one else did such works among the Jews, because every other man who did such things did them by His working in him. But He Himself did these things without any participation on their part.

Christ came to earth and did everything on His part for the salvation of men. If men hated Him, they hated Him without cause. It is their own fault that they did not recognize in Him the Messiah, the Savior of the world. This did not take place against the will of the saving God. God foresaw it, foretold it through the mouth of the prophet, and thereby gave men a warning.

Those who speak this way evidently consider Jesus Christ only a man, and one capable of deliberately performing deeds not called for by necessity. They suppose He did them for the sole purpose of exalting Himself in the eyes of the Jews by fulfilling the prophecies.

This opinion cannot be accepted, if only because Jesus Christ cannot be acknowledged as only a man. Moreover, even those who deny His divinity acknowledge Him to be the most perfect man in moral terms. Such a Man, of course, is incapable of falsifying events and thereby deceiving people.

But even if Jesus Christ were only a man, and capable of such acts, how could He force other people, in most cases His enemies, to do what He needed for the prophecies to be fulfilled in Himself?

How could He force them not only to do what they did, but even to say what they actually said, and what fully agrees with what the Prophets foretold? If one ascribes to Jesus Christ such power that He could make people speak and think as He wished, then one must thereby acknowledge Him as almighty, that is, as the God-man.

And we conceive of God only as the highest Truth, Goodness, and Love. Suspicion of falsifying events does not agree with these conceptions. Therefore it must be acknowledged that all the events of the life of Jesus Christ occurred through the free action of many different causes upon the circumstances that produced them.

The prophecies of the Prophets, of course, cannot be considered the cause by which the events occurred. Therefore these events did not occur because the Prophets had foretold them.

Rather, by a special inspiration from above, the Prophets foresaw long beforehand that these events would occur. Therefore they expressed this foreknowledge in the form of prediction or prophecy.

But here we approach another question. If, it is said, everything that happened had to happen, and if it was so appointed by God, then what guilt belongs to those who, in that case, must be acknowledged as blind instruments of the divine will?

Concerning this, it must be noted that God endowed men with reason and freedom of will. Men act in everything voluntarily, as they find necessary. If their will is often constrained, it is constrained only by circumstances or by the will of others.

It happens that circumstances, or the will of other people, sometimes place a man in such a difficult position that he acts badly against his own desire. Yet still he himself decides how to act: according to his own desire, or under pressure from forces alien to him.

Even in such cases he still acts according to his own will, for the choice belongs to him. If we recognize that a weak-willed man, who did not endure the struggle and resolved to commit an evil deed, deserves compassion and consideration for his situation, and if we show him mercy and even forgive him, nevertheless we do not deny his responsibility before God.

We do not deny it for this reason alone: we acknowledge man to be a rational and free being. We know from the teaching of Jesus Christ that we are responsible before God for our deeds.

If we must give an answer to Him, this again is only because it depends on our free choice to arrange our life according to His will or contrary to His will.

If we could not act voluntarily, according to our own choice, then we would bear no responsibility at all. To hold us answerable in such a case would be manifest injustice.

Therefore, acknowledging God as absolutely just, and acknowledging that in the future life He will render to each man according to his deeds, we must also acknowledge as contrary to the concept of God the opinion that everything in human life occurs according to a predetermination composed beforehand by God.

God does not predetermine in advance what must happen to people in the future. Yet He also does not remove Himself from guiding, in certain cases, both nations and individual persons.

By His omniscience God knows beforehand everything that will happen to men, and how they will use the reason and freedom of will granted to them. Therefore there is nothing astonishing if He inspires chosen men, that is, the best men, with the prophetic gift of foreseeing future events.

Thus all the crimes of the Jews against their Messiah, Jesus Christ, were committed not because God commanded it, but because criminal Jews themselves willed it and used circumstances favorably arranged for this purpose.

God, of course, could have averted these crimes if this had been His will. But He did not avert them, and they occurred. They occurred, as has been said, not because the Prophets foretold them. On the contrary, the Prophets foretold them only because they truly would occur.

The words to which the Savior points are read in Ps 68:5. This is one of David’s prophetic psalms, in which the destiny of the Messiah is prefigured (Jn 2:17). Lord Jesus, grant us the spirit of patience and love when the hatred of the world rises against us. Preserve in us warm faith in Thy name and love for our brethren. Amen.

“Every scribe instructed concerning the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old.” Here the matter lies in the human will. What will a man bring out? The old man, corrupt through lusts (Eph 4:22), or the new man (Eph 4:24; Col 3:10), pleasing to God by faith and love, who for love’s sake does “whatever” the Lord commands (above, 15:14)?

But none of us can deny this on the ground of ignorance, for “their proclamation has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world” (Ps 18:5; cf. Rom 10:18 and following).

“They hated Me without a cause,” says the Lord in verse 25, citing the words of Psalm 68:5. Here we may also recall other similar words spoken by the God-inspired king, to whom the Lord gave the wisdom of a prophet and the mouth of a sweet singer.

In Psalm 34, which under the image of David depicts the suffering and persecuted image of the Messiah, the Prophet cries out: “those who hate Me wrongfully” (v. 19). Earlier he says, “Without cause they hid for Me their pit, their net; without cause they dug it for My soul” (v. 7).

The Lord’s words are highly significant: “that the word written in their law might be fulfilled,” en to nomo auton. By this word the Lord forever separates the New Testament Church from the Old Testament one. For the Spirit of God departed from the latter, and the letters of the Law became dead without His life-giving influence.

The same words are eternal and life-giving, but they are received in the living Church of Christ by grace, which acts in the souls of believers and therefore sanctifies them by the Holy Spirit.

“Their law,” says the Lord of the Law understood in the Jewish sense, is no longer the Law of God. It is a field sown with good seed, but dried up and choked. It is not watered by the dew of grace, and is therefore barren.

But when a Jew became a believer, the life-giving power of God again made the seeds of the Law grow in his soul into good ears of grain. They did not become tares, into which unbelief transformed the good seed, the word of God.

Before the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, an incorrect and unclear understanding of the words of the Covenant depended partly, of course, on the fact that the time had not yet come for those words to be explained.

But first, we have seen how low the Jewish people had fallen morally in the person of its intelligentsia. They had become incapable of understanding the words of God written in the Law.

Second, the words of life, righteousness, and love had been spoken to them, and they rejected them by an evil will. Therefore an impassable abyss opened between their law and the Law of God. The words of the Law remained the same, but their meaning for the Jew and for the Christian was utterly different.

The Jews could not contain the spirit of love with which all the words of God are filled, both before the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection and after His glorious Resurrection. Therefore their house was left to them desolate, until some of them cried out with faith: “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord” (Mt 23:38-39).