How can we see glory ? Can I suggest that it is rather like asking if we can see light; for though we can see what light illuminates, light in itself cannot be seen. You can hear and see me speaking this Homily at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMy3_LzqYEw&t=328s
The point is that I can see you because of light, but I cannot see the light between you and me, or I wouldn’t be able to see you. If I could see the light, it would blind me, as indeed we can be rendered blind if we look directly at the sun. Of course, we can in a way see worldly glory. A football team ecstatically celebrating winning the Cup, with their Captain holding it, as they leap up and down in joy whilst their supporters roar their approval. A brilliant piece of music that is so magnificent that it moves us beyond words. A magical dawn or dusk when the sky goes crimson, orange and gold. But in a way we cannot see the glory, we can only see the thing that is glorious, not the glory itself, for that is something we see with our mind rather than with our eyes.
So when Jesus in our Gospel today (John 17:20-26) speaks to his disciples about glory, when he says to God the Father “I have given them the glory you gave to me,” we have to realise that he is speaking of something that is beyond our human understanding. St Gregory of Nyssa, writing in the 4th Century, is in no doubt that the glory Jesus is talking about is another name for God, God as Holy Spirit. He writes : He gave this glory to his disciples when he said to them: Receive the Holy Spirit.” But Gregory goes on from this, because he wants to remind us that this glory is one with Jesus eternally. We hear it in the beginning of St John’s Gospel don’t we? That Jesus as the Word “was with God. He was in the beginning with God” (1:1) and then a little later “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” and here it comes, “We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” And Gregory of Nyssa continues, “Although he had always possessed it, even before the world existed, he himself received this glory when he put on human nature.” But then he links it to what we are now celebrating as he writes “Then, when his human nature had been glorified by the Spirit, the glory of the Spirit was passed on to all his kin, beginning with his disciples.”
So when we speak of Jesus at the Ascension passing into glory, it might be more correct to say, that at the Ascension the full glory of Jesus is revealed, for otherwise it might seem that his glory is going somewhere else, whilst we know otherwise. Thus, although they had already seen his glory, at the Transfiguration and in all his Resurrection appearances, now they know, even though they cannot see it, that this glory has been passed on to them to pass on to us; and so in the Ascension,, and in Pentecost that follows next Sunday, we too despite all our limitations, are now part of the glory of God, of the glory that is God.
But in our Gospel, Jesus takes this further, for he says “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, so that they may always see the glory you have given me”. Again, we might think that this is talking about the glory that we will have with Jesus after we die; but although it is that, it is also something that we are given now. What we have to do is to see, to realise, in our ordinary lives, his presence with us, his Holy Spirit working within us, so that we are with him where he is in heaven, even though we are still very much still on earth. This is because Jesus teaches us that through him heaven and earth are actually in the same place; or as St Augustine puts it “While in heaven he is also with us; and we while on earth are with him. He is here with us by his divinity, his power and his love. We cannot be in heaven, as he is on earth, by divinity, but in him, we can be there by love.”
Our problem is however that we cannot see his presence, his glory, in the way we would like to see it. We would like to see God with complete certainty wouldn’t we, and when we can’t we want to know why. The answer as far as I can give it, is that although we will see his glory when we die, when we no longer have physical bodies, when our physical body has been transformed into a spiritual body; whilst we are here on earth with physical bodies, then seeing the fullness of God’s glory, if it were possible, would actually destroy our identity. We would no longer be able to make free decisions, we would be overwhelmed by his power, and become like a robot. But if we are to love God and to show love to others, then we cannot be like a robot, we have to love because we freely choose to love, for if love is compelled, then it is not love.
I think we forget that what we Christians claim for Jesus and thus for ourselves is utterly remarkable, that God, although entirely other and completely separate and different from us, can and has become one with us in and through Jesus. And further that because of this, heaven is not some far away existence that we cannot touch but that we might get to when we die if we really try hard, but that heaven and the glory of heaven that is the glory of God has come close to us and chosen to live in us despite our worldliness and our many failings. This is what shocked the holy people faced with Stephen’s claim in our 1st Reading. (Acts 7:55-60) He says that he “Can see heaven thrown open” and that in that glory he can see the human man Jesus in glory. This is utterly shocking to them and they stone him to death for it. But in a strange way it is actually equally shocking to many people today, especially some people who say they do not believe in God, because the God they want to not believe in is a God far away working on us and the world as it were by remote control. The idea that the things the best of them think important like love and peace and joy are actually experience of God with us is something they utterly reject. “Oh no” they say these things are just the great things about us humans, they have nothing to do with God. But of course they mean nothing to do with the far away God, that they reject. But we proclaim the God of Jesus and he brings God’s glory right into the midst of our and their their human lives. If only they could see!
Comments