The glory breaks through

(A sermon preached at Hilton Church of Scotland, Inverness on 12th May, 2013)

(Bible readings: Luke 9:28-36; 2 Corinthians 3:7 – 4:7)

This week my wife Lorna was preparing to lead the kids’ group at the church she attends. The lesson, according to the manual they follow, was about the Transfiguration of Jesus, one of the accounts of which we have just read.

She was puzzling over how best to communicate to young children what the Transfiguration was all about. When we thought about it, it occurred to us that the theme of the story is about seeing who Jesus really is, about seeing Jesus as he really is.

Or to put it another way, the Transfiguration is about glory breaking through.

In a sense that sums up the whole of the Bible – glory breaking through, the splendour and wonder and power of God. This theme of glory breaking through is symbolised in the appearance of the glory of God at the dedication of the worship tent which the Jewish people took with them on their travels through the wilderness and later at the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem. It’s symbolised in the appearance of the glory of God to Moses, and Elijah, to Isaiah and to Ezekiel.

And the Bible visionaries look ahead to a time of coming glory:

‘And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it.’ (Isaiah 40:5) ‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all his angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory.’ (Matthew 25:31)  A coming glory which will transform all things.

And of course at the very centre of the Bible story is the coming of that glory among us in Jesus Christ. The Transfiguration involves

• seeing the glory of God in Jesus
• Jesus identity as the Son of God is affirmed in what the disciples see, in who is present (Moses and Elijah, symbolising the fact that Jesus is the one to whom the prophets pointed) and in the authenticating voice of God
• recognising the importance of the cross as a turning point in history (‘the exodus’ which he was about to accomplish (v31) – is more than just the ‘departure’ which the word the NIV uses – in dying Christ would accomplish something more dramatic than the original exodus of the captive Jewish people from Egypt.)

So a key theme of the Bible involves glory breaking through, and never has the glory broken through more than in the coming of Jesus.

And then I was listening to the radio on Wednesday to interviews with neighbours of Ariel Castro, the man who held Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michele Knight captive in his house in Cleveland, Ohio for a decade. They spoke of their incredulity at what had happened. Castro had seemed an ordinary guy, a nice guy. He drove the school bus, for goodness sake. He joined in the neighbourhood barbies. He seemed normal.

And yet behind the front door of that man’s house, behind the pleasant façade, there was darkness. And it occurred to me that if one the Bible’s themes is the breaking through of glory, another of the Bible’s themes is the breaking-through of darkness as the reality of evil is glimpsed. And perhaps the darkness was never more evident than at the time of Jesus’ death when glory and darkness were locked in mortal combat.

We need to be on the lookout for the irrepressible glory of God which keeps breaking through. In the Transfiguration story, only three disciples were involved – Peter, John and James. Was this favouritism? Were they the only ones to see the glory? Well, no, because the glory was glimpsed in everything Jesus said and did. The words of wisdom, the self-control, the focussed rage, the patient love, the healings.  After one of his miracles it was said ‘He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.’ (John 2:11) His glory was visible to those who wanted to see it, but there’s no doubt that the mountain-top experience of Jesus’ glory was more intense than the day-by-day encounters with his uniqueness.

We read for one of the Apostle Paul’s writings – the words of a passionate mystic – and some of us question the gulf between our experience of the glory and his.  And similarly we look around us, and we are aware that some of us have more intense experiences of God than others, and we wonder if we are failing. I think the message of the Transfiguration and the Gospels as a whole is that while some of us may see the glory of God with more intensity than others, for us all if only we have eyes to see it, the glory shines through.

The glory shines through in Jesus

And if we are to have eyes to see that glory then we must read and reflect and pray about Jesus, and his words and his actions and the prophecies which he fulfilled and the prophecies which are still to be fulfilled, and we must ask the Holy Spirit to reveal the glory to us.

It’s important, if the glory is to shine through for us, that the image of Jesus we have in our minds is the image of the real Jesus who captivated his disciples. Last Saturday, I was at the Spectrum Centre watching a lunchtime play called The Gospel Inquiry, in which the playwright sought to investigate the accuracy of the gospel writers’ account of Jesus. It was obvious that Sandy Nelson had decided in advance what the outcome would be – the Jesus presented was no son of God, no worker or miracles, simply a teacher of selfless living whose message was embellished by over-enthusiastic followers. The cross was an accident – Jesus had planned to get himself arrested in order to have his views heard in the courtroom, but never to die.

There’s little glory to be seen in Sandy Nelson’s Jesus. And a Christianity where the cross is an accident, where no ‘exodus’ is accomplished, is a sad diminished thing.

But the point is this. What image of Jesus do I hold in my imagination, and what has shaped that image? Old ideas from Sunday school? Rationalistic convictions that Jesus was just a man? Fear of Jesus as a hypercritical judge? Rejection of Jesus because of the way some of his followers have treated us? An emptiness, because we fear Jesus can never be known?

‘Peter and his companions were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory.’ (Luke 9:32) What is keeping me from seeing the glory? The message of the gospel is that by God’s grace, I can shake off whatever holds me, and see the glory.

Yet I’m conscious that for some of us, that’s just stuff preachers say. We pray and struggle, and the glory seems elusive and distant, and our lives are filled with longing, rather than fulfilment, with travelling, not arrival. I often feel, personally that God is most present in my longing for him, God is most present in my sense of God’s absence. The very fact of my longing reflects the bigness of the thing longed for.

I guess if we think we have pinned God down, and understand God, then we haven’t, and in our satisfaction at understanding God, the glory departs. But in our lack of knowing, our lack of understanding, God is often present.

I came across a poem this week by the 19th century Scottish writer George Macdonald, which puts this brilliantly. It’s called Lost and found:

I missed him when the sun began to bend;

I found him not when I had lost his rim;

With many tears I went in search of him,

Climbing high mountains which did still ascend,

And gave me echoes when I called my friend;

Through cities vast and charnel-houses grim,

And high cathedrals where the light was dim,

Through books and arts and works without an end,

But found him not--the friend whom I had lost.

And yet I found him--as I found the lark,

A sound in fields I heard but could not mark;

I found him nearest when I missed him most;

I found him in my heart, a life in frost,

A light I knew not till my soul was dark.

The glory shines through in creation

Something of the glory of God is to be seen in the beauty of the world. ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.’ (Psalm 19:1)

Here’s a lovely quote from a strange, remarkable novel called The land of decoration – words put in the mouth of a child who is one of these mystical souls, like some of us are, who see things more clearly, who see ‘the oneness of all things.’

‘Faith sees other things peeping through the cracks just itching to be noticed. Every day the cracks in the world get bigger. Every day new ones appear.’

The glory shines through. Someone else who had intense vision of God in nature was the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’, he wrote in his poem God’s grandeur

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs –

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The glory shines through in the world, and we need eyes to see it. Not over-familiarity. Not the busyness which means that we see beauty without seeing it. Not the scientism which sees it merely as the result of an arbitrary process. But eyes which see something of God in thunder and rain and storm.

The universe is not God, yet God wears it as a garment, expresses God in it. Creation is God’s painting, God’s symphony, God’s drama. The glory shines through.

The glory shines through in people

Something of the glory of God is seen in men and women.  I think glimpses of God can be seen in all men and women regardless of their faith, or lack of it. In love, in joy, in care, in compassion, in art and music and zest for living something of God is seen. Some glory breaks through, as men and women say ‘Yes’ to God without actually knowing what it is they are saying ‘Yes!’  to.

But the teaching of the New Testament is that the glory of God is present in a much more powerful way in those whose eyes have been opened to Jesus. This is the Apostle Paul’s theme in the verses we read. There is a veil, he says, hiding from our hearts and minds the wonder of Jesus. But when that veil is removed, we see Jesus, and open our lives to Jesus, and seeing the glory begin, instinctively to reflect the glory. So that our lives are lives in which glory shines through.

Paul the mystic puts it powerfully, and perhaps a little intimidatingly:

‘Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.’ (2 Corinthians 3:18)

Ouch! If we have seen Jesus, then our lives, says Paul, will increasingly reflect his glory. Which comes as rather a challenge – a challenge which we shouldn’t side-step. As Jesus glory was revealed in his own life in wisdom, and grace, and tough love, and connectedness to the Father, is grace and glory seen in our lives, and if not why not?

And yet Paul’s point is that it’s not up to us to produce the glory, and lay guilt trips on ourselves because the glory is not better seen. Our job is to allow God to express something of God through us.

‘But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.’ (2 Corinthians 4:7)

That’s reassuring. We are ‘jars of clay’ – fallible, fragile, weak and yet in our hearts there is this unspeakably precious treasure of God’s Spirit. And God seeks to express Godsself through and despite our weaknesses and struggles and pain. And often glory which we ourselves are not aware of is seen by others in us, and in our lives and words.

This is a great reassurance to us in our weakness and frailty. There is treasure within. And there is also challenge – to be open to the God whose presence in us is the treasure, and to recognise our fellow Christians as bearers of a gift of unspeakable value.

And there is the challenge of being those through whom glory shines – in our homes, in our community, in our schools and workplaces – as individuals and as a church.

Gerard Manley Hopkins outs it well in his poem ‘As kingfishers catch fire.’  The first eight lines of this sonnet describe kingfishers and dragonflies, each living thing does what it does best, ‘Crying What I do is me: for that I came.’ The whole creation praises God without being conscious of it.

Humanity is different. Men and women are called to praise God knowingly. ‘What I do is me, for that I came’ suggests to us me-centred self-fulfilment, but I think Hopkins would have us read those words in the context of the understanding that ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.’

Here’s what he says about humanity:

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his going graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –

Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

The glory shines through.

What about the darkness?

But remember Cleveland, Ohio. Remember that the world is a ‘bent’ world, that there is a darkness which casts long shadows.  It’s the darkness which sets itself against the glory.

We see the shadow clearly in the horrors of Auschwitz and the twin towers and acts of terrorism; we glimpse the shadow in a hundred sad news stories very week.

But what darknesses lie behind the front doors of our own hearts, poison rubbing shoulders with the treasure? For we are all sinners.

As I thought of those women held captive in the dark by Ariel Castro I remembered Jonathan’s striking image from last Sunday morning’s sermon about how in our society children are sacrificed on the altars of pornography and materialism. The darkness has many captives.

And I remembered preparing to preach on the Sunday a few days after the London bombings in 2005, and the bigness of that atrocity, and the planning and commitment and self-sacrifice of the bombers and it all seemed so dark. And then I realised that what happened at Calvary - likewise involving planning and commitment and self-sacrifice – was an explosion of love, which sent ripples across the pool of history both forward and backward in time, an explosion of love which gives us hope even in the darkest and most painful times, that the glory will prevail.

And so we can call on God with perfect confidence that as glory overcame darkness on the cross, so glory will, day by day and moment by moment help us overcome the darkness we see in us. And we go out prayerfully into our communities believing that ‘where the Spirit of God is there is freedom,’ believing that, holding the candle high Jesus descends into dark cellars and sets the captive free. The glory is seen in dark places.

And believing that at the end of time glory will triumph, and that the prophecy of the New Jerusalem will be fulfilled whatever exactly the fulfilment will look like: ‘The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendour into it.’ (Revelation 21:23-24)

In Hopkins’ famous words the ‘immortal diamond’ which we are despite our flawed ordinariness will at that time simply be ‘immortal diamond with all the flaws removed.

He describes the coming of the glory

The Resurrection

A heart’s clarion! Away grief’s gasping | joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam | Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; | world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is | since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.