² “They will make you outcasts from the synagogue, but an hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think that he is offering service to God.”

Persecution will run extreme, Jesus warns His disciples in the comfort and culinary enjoyment of the Passover meal; a meal ironically designed to be an annual reminder of God’s gracious redemption of His people from slavery in Egypt. Yet, here was Jesus, the promised “seed” of the covenant promise to Abraham (Gal 3:16), telling these few faithful, fellow Jews, that there will be unprecedented difficulties ahead. To be “outcasts from the synagogue” was tantamount to being excommunicated from Jewish life and society! For a Jew, things don’t get lower than that. That would be a sign of complete separation from God, abandonment to the Gentile world, and being placed outside of the covenant of God with His people.

What is worse yet, the ones casting them out would do it seemingly as an act of fidelity to God, even of pleasing God. They would be doing it with a sense and confidence of moral and spiritual superiority. They would do everything they could to make these followers of Jesus feel like they were abandoning Moses and the Law, the very life-blood of every Jew and the basis for their relationship with God.

Yes, Jesus readies them, persecution will be worse than they could possibly imagine. And indeed, that time did come. Shortly after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the harassment began first with threatening (Acts 4:21), then imprisonment (Acts 5:18) and flogging (Acts 5:40). Peter and John, most likely remembering Jesus’ words from the Upper Room, rejoiced that “they had been considered worthy to suffer for His name” (Acts 5:41). Jesus’ preparation and the work of the Holy Spirit turned out to be quite effective.

Persecution got worse, however. Stephen, who himself was not in the Upper Room before the cross, had surely heard all about it, and was emboldened to witness bravely for Christ. In faith, he died by stoning, the Jews’ punishment for blasphemers (Acts 7:58-60). In his death, he remarkably responded as Jesus did on the cross, when he cried out with his last breath, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them!” (Acts 7:60, cp. Luke 23:34).

We take it, on the example of Christ with His disciples, that the best preparation for persecution is to study this Upper Room discourse, as though it were Jesus speaking directly to us, the readers. It is His words that are life and wisdom and strength and power. Mark it well, as followers of Christ, we will be persecuted. The goal is not to avoid it, but to give God glory in the midst of it.

Lord, thank You for preparing me for persecution by Your prophetic words.