Why did Christ say his people 'hated both me and my Father'?
Christ declared that his people rejected both His words and His works, and so had no excuse—but what did he really mean by saying they 'hated my Father'?
Christ declared that his people rejected both His words and His works, and so had no excuse—but what did he really mean by saying they 'hated my Father'?
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ shows that his people’s unbelief was a wilful rejection of divine evidence.
That their guilt lay not in ignorance, but in refusing His words and miracles.
Why even the leaders entrusted with sacred knowledge hardened themselves against the light.
He shows us that rejecting the truth once revealed is not merely error, but grave ingratitude and sin.
For more on this section, its place in the Gospel and the Liturgy, and the role of persecution as a “quasi-mark” of the Church, see Part I. (It has been updated since it was published.)
Hatred of the World
Passiontide, Part III
Chapter III
St. John xv. 11-27.
Story of the Gospels, § 156
Burns and Oates, London, 1892
What the Jews knew
Our Lord goes on to add that this result was to follow, on account of the ignorance of men concerning God, and concerning His having sent our Lord into the world to save men from their sins.
The Jews had some knowledge of God as the object of worship, but they were ignorant of the truth that our Lord was the promised Messias, Whom God had promised and sent. He had been abundantly predicted for them in various ways, and yet they shut their eyes to the truth, for which so many prophecies and types and the whole figurative system of the Law, and the sacrifices of the Temple, ought to have prepared them.
There was this blindness, not only on the part of the more ignorant and uneducated people, but on the part of the Scribes and Priests, to whom, our Lord says, was entrusted the key of knowledge for the benefit of their own souls and of the souls of those of whom they were the teachers and leaders. The moral reasons for this blindness our Lord had touched upon, but He passes them over in this place.
But He goes on to explain shortly the two reasons for which their treatment of Himself was inexcusable in various degrees.
What are these two reasons that their treatment was “inexcusable”?
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