Why is There So Much Hatred for Jesus?

Why is There So Much Hatred for Jesus?

The rain over the low, rolling hills of southwestern Virginia had stopped just before dawn, leaving the asphalt of the church parking lot black and gleaming under the solitary yellow sodium light.

Inside his parked truck, Sean Ryan sat in the dark, the engine ticking quietly as it cooled. He looked at the digital clock on the dashboard: 4:18 AM. May 2026. To his left, the silhouette of St. Jude’s Catholic Church rose like a silent fortress against the graying sky. Sean was a man who had spent his youth in the jagged, dust-choked valleys of Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL, a life measured in target packages, perimeter security, and the hard reality of physical force. Now, he hosted a podcast that had become a confessional for warriors, whistleblowers, and seekers. But this morning, he wasn’t looking for a story. He was looking for an anchor.

The door of the rectory clicked open. A tall, broad-shouldered figure stepped out into the chill morning air, wearing a simple black cassock that rustled softly against his combat boots. Father Martin didn’t look like a bureaucrat of the soul. He had the thick wrists of a laborer and eyes that had spent decades looking into the deepest, darkest corners of human suffering.

Sean rolled down his window. “You’re right on time, Father.”

Father Martin paused, a faint, warm smile breaking through his weathered face. “If you don’t protect the morning, Sean, the world will steal it from you by noon. Come on inside. The heat is just kicking on.”

They walked through the side door of the church, their boots echoing on the flagstone floor. The air inside smelled of beeswax, lemon oil, and the cold, lingering presence of stone. Father Martin led Sean toward the small chapel behind the main altar, where a single golden vessel—the monstrance—sat illuminated by a pair of candles.

“I get here at 5:30 every single day,” Father Martin whispered, his voice low and reverent as he genuflected. “From then until eight, the world is locked out. The sun goes up, and the phone starts. Somebody is dying in the hospital down in Columbia—thirty miles south, the only emergency room for three counties. At least twice a week, I’m in my truck by mid-morning to give the Last Rites. People show up at the rectory doors unannounced, broken, suffering. Some believe they are under spiritual attack; some just need a human being to look them in the eye so they don’t pull a trigger. If I don’t fill up on Him first… if I don’t spend these hours letting His power take over… then by noon, I’m nothing but a glorified social worker. And a social worker cannot fight the dark.”

Sean sat in the back pew, his large hands resting on his knees. He watched the priest kneel before the altar, completely motionless, disappearing into the silence. For over a year now, since leaving the institutional church of his childhood and drifting through the wilderness of modern life, Sean had been picking through the fragments of his faith like a man sorting through the ruins of a burned-out safehouse. He had started a small Bible study at his home with three other families—close friends who met every Thursday night to read the text without the filtering of institutional politics.

Looking at the golden vessel on the altar, Sean felt the first heavy logs of a long-dormant fire begin to shift in his chest.

The Living Stones

By 10:00 AM, the studio lights inside Sean’s recording trailer were humming with a low, imperceptible vibration. The space was tight, designed for intimacy and absolute focus. Across the wide wooden table, Father Martin sat beneath the directional microphone, his large hands folded calmly over a yellow legal pad.

“We had a question come in from our Patreon community, Father,” Sean said, leaning forward, his index finger tracing the edge of his tablet. “It’s from a guy named Al, one of our oldest supporters. He wanted me to ask you about that exact phrase you used this morning—protect your mornings. But it leads into something deeper that I’ve been wrestling with in our home Bible study.”

Sean paused, clearing his throat, his eyes dropping to the table for a split second before meeting the priest’s gaze. “The guy who leads our study is a former pastor. He actually got ran out of his last church because he stood up in the pulpit and told the board that the ministry shouldn’t be focused on money, real estate, or church budgets—it should be focused on the Word. And the thing he said that stuck in my head, something I never heard growing up in the old brick-and-mortar parishes, is that the Church isn’t a building. It’s not mortar and stone. It is the living body of believers in Jesus Christ. What’s your take on that, as a priest who lives inside a brick-and-mortar institution?”

“He’s absolutely right,” Father Martin said without a moment’s hesitation. His voice was rich, carrying the weight of a man who had studied history not as a collection of dates, but as a map of human survival. “Think about the beginning, Sean. Jesus chose twelve men—mostly fishermen, tax collectors, guys who weren’t particularly qualified on paper. He gives them a mission that should have been impossible: go out and make disciples of all nations. Then Pentecost happens. The Holy Spirit—the exact same fire that led Jesus through His thirty-three years on earth—is poured into these men. And then the hammer falls.”

The priest leaned forward, his elbows resting on the table. “The authorities in Jerusalem and the empire in Rome didn’t want this new movement. They wanted it crushed. The first thirty-two or thirty-three popes? Every single one of them was martyred. In those days, if the community came to you and said, ‘We’ve elected you Bishop of Rome,’ it wasn’t a promotion. It was a death warrant. It meant you were the next public figure on the hit list.”

“So how do you build a church under those conditions?” Sean asked.

“You don’t,” Father Martin replied cleanly. “You couldn’t build a brick-and-mortar church. It would be a massive red flag saying, ‘Here is where we worship, come and kill us.’ For the first three to four hundred years, the Church existed entirely in people’s homes, in hidden rooms, in the catacombs. But they were still celebrating the Mass exactly the way Jesus did at the Last Supper. They took the bread, they took the wine, they prayed the prayers of consecration, and that sacrament gave them the supernatural grease to go out into the coliseums and die for the name of Christ. The blood of those martyrs became the seed of everything that followed.”

“It wasn’t until Constantine put the cross on his battle flags and declared Christianity the religion of the empire that the stones were laid,” the priest continued, gesturing toward the wall. “Suddenly, the state protected them, so they built magnificent cathedrals. But if you go to parts of the Middle East right now—into underground networks in strictly controlled areas—the Church is still just four families sitting in a basement in the dark, passing a piece of bread. The architecture is a luxury; the body of believers is the reality.”

The Middleman and the Family Business

Sean leaned back, his mind tracking the line between the historical underground and his own modern skepticism. “It’s funny you mention the sacrament, because that’s where some of my friends hit a wall. In our world, we talk about cutting out the middleman. We don’t want a gatekeeper between us and God. And when I look at the old system… it feels like the priest is positioned as this necessary middleman. No priest, no Eucharist. No priest, no confession.”

Father Martin let out a soft, deep chuckle that had no mockery in it. “I know exactly what you mean, Sean. I am a middleman. I’m the ultimate middleman. But if you look at the scriptural record, God has always used them. Look at Moses. Moses spent half his life on his knees on a mountain, interceding for a people who were constantly turning their backs on the Creator. Every time God was ready to wash His hands of them, Moses stood in the breach and pleaded for their protection.”

“Does God need a middleman?” Father Martin asked rhetorically, his eyes narrowing with intensity. “Of course not. He’s the Almighty. He can do whatever He wants with a single thought. But what He has revealed to us—especially through His Son—is that He is a Family Guy. The Trinity itself is a family—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—existing in a state of perfect, self-contained, overflowing love before anything was ever created. He didn’t need to make us. He was completely content. But because that love was so magnificent, He wanted children. So He built a stage for them—the universe. And He put everything under the domain of man.”

The priest’s voice dropped into a lower, more dramatic cadence. “That is the real reason Lucifer rebelled, Sean. The ancient tradition tells us that before the material universe was formed, God created all the angels in a single, blazing moment of pure spirit. They were incredibly intelligent, beautiful, and powerful beings. But God revealed his ultimate plan to them: that a person of the Trinity—the divine Word—would eventually take on human flesh. A material body. To the high angels, human beings were lower creatures, clunky hybrids of dirt and soul. Lucifer looked at that plan and was filled with such disgust and pride that he said, Non serviam—I will not serve. He took a third of the luminaries, a third of the stars of heaven, down with him in his fall.”

“Yet Jesus went through with it anyway,” Father Martin said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “He took on that human flesh. He died, He rose, and when He ascended back to the right hand of the Father, He didn’t shed His humanity like an old coat. Right now, on the ultimate throne of the universe, there is a physical human body sitting there. One of us is on the throne. That’s how much He loves the design.”

Ignorance and Apathy

Sean sat in silence for a long moment, the imagery of the cosmic rebellion hanging heavy in the small trailer. He adjusted his headphones, his face tightening as he reached the question that had been burning in his gut for months.

“If that’s the story, Father… if that’s the level of sacrifice we’re talking about… I don’t get it,” Sean said, his voice raw with a sudden, authentic frustration. “I’ve prayed about this, I’ve pondered it for months. Why is Jesus so hated? Why is He so fundamentally misunderstood by the modern culture? He never did anything wrong. He healed the sick, He fed the hungry, He told people to love their neighbors. Why is there such a visceral, aggressive hatred for this specific man?”

Father Martin looked down at his legal pad, his fingers turning a pen over and over. When he looked up, his eyes were clear and direct.

“I think it boils down to two distinct categories, Sean: ignorance and apathy. I go to conferences all over the country, and I’ll ask the crowd, ‘Do you know the difference between ignorance and apathy?’ And without fail, some guy in the back will yell out, ‘I don’t know and I don’t care!’ And I’ll say, ‘Exactly. That’s it.'”

The priest’s face grew grave. “Ignorance is ‘I don’t know.’ Apathy is ‘I don’t care.’ And right now, as our world barrels toward the precipice of Hell, those two categories are growing exponentially. People look at the modern landscape and they say, ‘I’m a none. I don’t participate in religion.’ They think that by checking that box, they’re protecting themselves, like they’re staying neutral in a war. But Jesus was very clear: ‘If you are not with me, you are against me.’ There is no neutral high ground.”

“Do you think the elites—the people running the cultural institutions—are threatened by Him?” Sean asked.

“Definitively,” Father Martin said. “Every earthly authority is threatened by a higher power that doesn’t answer to them. Look at how the other global systems handle Him. The Muslim world doesn’t hate Jesus—they respect Him as a great prophet. But to neutralize Him, they have to deny who He actually claimed to be. They say He was just a man. But Jesus explicitly said He was the Son of God. So He’s either a liar, a lunatic, or He’s exactly who He said He was. A great prophet doesn’t lie about being God. The modern intellectual tries to smooth over the edges to make Him safe, but you can’t make Him safe. He forces a choice.”

The Great Return

The afternoon sun had begun its descent, casting long, sharp shadows through the windows of the recording studio. The technical crew behind the cameras remained completely still, caught in the gravity of the exchange.

Sean looked at the small Bible on his desk, then back at the priest who spent his mornings in the dark before facing the brokenness of the county. He felt the weight of his own journey—from the structure of his childhood, through the black ink of his military years, to the quiet Thursday nights in his living room with his friends. The search wasn’t over, but the coordinates had shifted.

“It’s about ownership, isn’t it?” Sean said softly, his voice carrying the finality of a man who had reached a conclusion. “If He made us out of love, we owe Him something. Like a vase with a personality thanking the potter who shaped the clay.”

“Exactly,” Father Martin said, his eyes warm with the satisfaction of a teacher whose student had crossed the line into understanding. “We belong to the design. And the morning is where we remember that before the day tries to make us forget.”

Sean turned his face toward the main camera lens, his expression solid, grounding, and completely stripped of any commercial pretense. The red light remained steady, capturing a moment that felt less like a media production and more like a marker on a long, historic trail.

“Well, no matter where you’re watching or listening to the Shawn Ryan Show from today,” Sean said into the microphone, his cadence matching the rhythm of the old warriors he interviewed. “If you got anything out of this talk at all—anything—please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this episode everywhere you possibly can. The world is getting loud, and people need to hear this. If you’re feeling extra generous, head over to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review. Let’s keep the lines open.”

Father Martin gathered his yellow pad, the black fabric of his cassock catching the late light as he stood. Outside, the bells of St. Jude’s were about to strike the evening hour, their clear, bronze tones ready to roll down into the valley, calling the living stones back to the circle before the dark came down.