glorified
I’ll admit that the word doesn’t do much for me. Not like it does for a lot of other people of faith.
Perhaps I hear it like jargon, like a churchy word people throw out there to express devotion, and in a secondary sense, defense for their own largesse.
Like, the glory of God comes from their greatness, their power, their untouchable awesomeness. And we, like LeFou to Jesus’s Gaston, ride the coattails to the relative greatness of association.
There is something selfish and destructive in the way much of Christianity speaks of glory and the reign of God. It is troublesome because of how dangerous it is to real people and because it reveals a fundamental divorce from the observable and relatable character of God.
When Jesus speaks of God being glorified in him, and his being glorified in the disciples, I sense Jesus is highlighting a very different dynamic. That the beauty of God is revealed in the beautiful things people do.
Here we can think of the language of God being known in the fruit, knowing that the fruit grows as the natural outcome of the work. And, in the same way, remember that God also plants the seed and provides the growth process that transforms seed into plant into the bearer of fruit.
And because Jesus’s images are so rich, we can see our place in the seed and the plant and the fruit; our work in the growing and the watering and in the harvesting. The image places us, not as the ones who benefit from greatness, but participants in growth, health, and a joyous life.
And this is further pushed by Jesus’s own relational rhetoric.
The work God gives his disciples is to be in relationship. So when he speaks of a relationship with God and the disciples, it is both command and description, like action and doctrine. In much the same way doing something good for someone else can feel good for oneself.
This is how we can see God glorified in the work of loving. In loving God and loving our neighbors. Because God is in them and in us and shines through when we give it the chance to be seen.
In this, the vision of glory changes into a thing of beauty, not power. Like the pearl of great price, its preciousness is not about commerce but devotion. And our own place in the glory is not fame or money or any of the western hallmarks of success. It is to be the vehicle of revealed beauty.
Think about the joy of the friend you make sitting in Starbucks, chatting about the Whitney Houston song that comes on the radio. Let him go off for a minute, riffing about that time of life, seeing her sing the national anthem. How nobody can top that performance. When he fell in love with his country. And even, when it turned to tragedy and an early death, we can still know and feel and remember.
Beauty, man. For all the things we obsess about, Jesus is pointing us toward seeing beauty in each other and revealing that to the world.