No matter how many times God tells us love isn’t earned, we don’t truly believe it. We desire a kind of glory which will never give us love.
When we desire a different glory, we find a different God.
Easter 7C | John 17:20-26
We return again to glory. The author of the gospel we call John is like a broken record, skipping back to glory. We were just moving on — zip — back to glory.
It’s almost like John thinks we’re hardheaded and need to be reminded. Glory, God’s glory, is not what we think it is.
Like this has always been the case for us. For humanity.
We just had a story about glory two weeks ago. At the Last Supper, Judas leaves and Jesus says
“Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.”
Which just doesn’t make sense. But really, we don’t want it to make sense. Because it’s the opposite of what we care about.
John speaks of the cross as a place where we’ll see glory. Jesus is going to be glorified there. Like Jesus told Nicodemus, he will be lifted up, not on a throne, but a tree. He’ll find glory there.
And we can’t. We don’t want to.
And I think we can’t and don’t want to because we want to use our definition of glory, not God’s. We’d rather find another word for it or redefine the whole gospel rather than see the word in God’s way. To actually redefine glory to mean what God offers. So we can see in the very cosmos what God sees.
Desiring Glory
From the moment humans looked outward to the divine, it has been in awe of might. Power. Incomprehensible displays of pure beauty or devastation. The divine must overpower us with such sheer force that we may be immobilized. Thrown to the ground. Awestruck.
We climb mountains and race to the ends of the earth looking for these displays in our world.
We’ve argued that our god has to be the strongest, the most ripped, muscles popping everywhere. Odin, Zeus! Stronger even than them! A God so jacked he needs a 12,000 calorie diet just to keep up such flashy flesh.
We think glory is the same as power. Because we make the goal of life into a competition. We turn our neighbors into winners and losers. And we say that some of us deserve power because we’ve earned it.
Even though we’ve got Jesus tugging at our hearts and whispering in our ears: glory isn’t earned. We shake him off. No. It’s about merit, we insist.
What we want more than almost anything is to obtain glory. We all want it because we want to be seen! We want to be recognized as the best at something. Soccer, singing, finance. We want to be members of the best church in the best city. And we want to worship the best god.
And we think that being the best at something gives us something. Like making money will fill the hole inside or achieving on the highest stage will prove our worth. We’re all children trying to win a parent’s love.
No matter how many times God tells us love isn’t earned, we never truly believe it.
John keeps trying to convince us.
From the beginning of the gospel John redefines glory.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the cosmos.
He was in the cosmos, and the cosmos came into being through him; yet the cosmos did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of humanity, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
(John 1:1-14)
The glory wasn’t in the creation of the cosmos. Glory was in the Word becoming human. Glory was revealed through the incarnate life; the very flesh.
This is what true glory looks like.
Jesus keeps sharing the vision of glory that God sees. That the powerful don’t need to be lifted up and crowned. They’re already there! Glory isn’t in feats of flamboyant power to impress or achieve greatness. We are overrun by our delusions of meritocracy.
But glory isn’t in power. As the Pastor, Debbie Blue preaches, “Glory doesn’t shine. It bleeds.” True glory is found in the cross, not the crown.
The Cosmos struggles to know God because we’re looking for a superhero. And we think we’ll find him lifting with the dudes at the gym. Or running with the billionaire CEOs and Wall Street bankers. Playing favorites on the football field or the diamond and healing only the people who get enough prayers through Facebook.
We think glory comes through power, skill, or influence. But it doesn’t. It comes through love. God loved the world so much that the Word became human and revealed God’s glory.
Even that strange little story in which that same human turned water into wine reveals to us the nature of glory. Because the glory was revealed to the disciples and the workers, not the wealthy who were drinking the wine.
We’re not wrong
Of course, we aren’t entirely wrong about glory. The word is about flashiness and authority. The problem is that we want to impose our definition of the word onto God’s desire rather than the other way around. We want to define God’s love out of a desire for God’s love. So we can get it.
But over and over, God’s love is revealed through humility rather than power. More often in dirty faces and not exclusively through the most symmetrical ones.
Love isn’t competitive and we know it.
But it’s almost like we can’t help ourselves. We think we’re on the soccer field and need to get the ball. We’ll use our elbows and berate our teammates for their bad passes. Anything to score, to win. We’ll flop or cheat, demean and talk trash.
All of our attempts to win love are naught. It’s power, control, making glory into a sport: competitive and absolute. Win, lose: achieve but don’t fail.
And the Word Made Flesh keeps finding the people we call failures and revealing God’s glory to them. And then audaciously saying you can reveal this glory, too!
“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses”
– C.S. Lewis
This is the crux of glory, that it’s nothing if it’s about power over others. If it leaves people in the gutter and plans only for winners.
God’s glory isn’t about power, but love. And that’s when we see it.
And even more incomprehensibly, we’re given that same chance. To reveal the glory of God to each other in love. So we can’t be the best at love. We can’t win at Christianity. And there’s no “right way” to follow Christ.
What we have is love, a desire for glory, and a track record of failure. Which sounds a lot like God’s favorite recipe.