An important question for any culture: what are the abiding values among us? What do we work for? What do we sacrifice ourselves for? Countless societies have insisted upon religion as being able to reveal what is ultimately significant: “There’s glory out there! How you live now impacts eternity.” We are unable to appeal to this now.
To God be the glory- is this irrelevant? I would suggest that it is central to our society’s crisis. There is no way for us to decide what is of lasting worth; we’re caught up in a sea of hesitation. Humans yearn for glory and often live in increasing anxiety: “Do I matter to anyone? What have I really accomplished?” We are desperately afraid of inconsequentiality. This is the stuff of daily living- it can be seen everywhere, from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets. Yet when we fail to live up to others’ standards or even our own, where do we look?
This is sucking the life out of us; we’re worried sick! And perhaps for good reason; the doctrine of hell has to do with being cast out, of Jesus saying: I never knew you. To be perpetually ignored- to be peripheral- there is no greater horror than that. We crave to be substantial, everlasting.
Have you ever stood before the mountains or the sea? Such bodies are so massive that one begins to feel, comparatively, quite small. Have you ever felt the glory of the sun? It is dazzling in its beauty, the source of light, inescapably hot and dangerous- present, yet somehow untouchable- humbling. A similar effect happens when our minds venture into the realm of God’s glory. He is holy, loving and strong beyond comparison. All other beauties are derived from him. Beside him all other wisdom is idiocy, all other goodness is filthy rags and wickedness, all other purities are squalor and all other grandeur is garbage- all the stars in the universe are like a dewdrop falling off a leaf.
Something profound happens when we cease to treat God lightly, when we wake up to reality and grasp the magnitude of who he is- what he did for us. We see the Son of Man lifted up- the quintessence- the full sun-blaze of glory. Never has there been such a fusion of justice and mercy; the explosion was so great that it shook the most mighty being in the universe. Jesus on the cross is at once formidable, intense, terrible and agonizing; the weight of sin, the wrath of God on his head! Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani.
To lose a spouse or a mother or a son is an enormous loss; Christ’s was infinite. In the most ghastly yet radically real way, Jesus came to the place where he was without God. He got what we deserved; he was absolutely disregarded, overlooked. We know how much this hurts even in a social setting; the cosmic loneliness he faced was far greater- Christ the Outcast, our hells upon his back, piercing right into his heart where unfathomable joy once dwelled.
To meditate on this is to see that it is without a doubt the greatest thing about you. You are redeemed. In John 17 Jesus says that Jesus has given us the same glory that the Father gave him. 2 Corinthians boldly states that God has “made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” In Galatians 6 Paul exclaims: “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The more we glorify God, the more we ourselves will encounter glory. We are awash in Christ’s glory; we now have before us the difficult journey of consciousness- of daily defying the world and taking in spiritual truths the way we would gulp down water in the heat of the desert.
No comments:
Post a Comment