Tag: glory

Epiphany – The Glory and the Light

O God, by the leading of a star, you manifested your only Son
to the peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know you now by faith,
to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face,
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
One God, now and forever. Amen.

Preface to Epiphany, Book of Common Prayer

Years ago, I went to Hawaii with a dear friend. She had been given the opportunity to stay at a house right on the beach – a beautiful place to be, especially at night. We would sit out on the lanai late at night sometimes and watch the stars. It was incredible, like nothing I had ever seen before. I don’t think I had ever been anywhere that there wasn’t some form of man-powered light. I read something while we were there about the protests against adding more hotels, restaurants, etc.…which would bring more man-made light to the island (We were staying on the big island, Hawaii). They called it light pollution.

Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience. I imagine there are places especially in the Southwest, here in the States, where you can go out into the desert and never see a man-made light. How glorious that experience is!

We see in the Scriptures how often glory is associated with light.

 Isa 60:1 – “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. “

Rev. 21:23 – ” And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.”

Heb. 1:3 – “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.”

We cannot plumb the mysteries of these scriptures (and others!) through mere study. Only through revelation will the truth go deep into our souls. Only through the manifestation of Christ to us through the Holy Spirit will we truly enter the story of God and our salvation. I became a Christian in college and had a genuine and devout faith. But ten years later, while attending my first Pastoral Care Ministries conference, I had a life-changing experience. I had faith. I knew God loved me, I knew the place of Christ’s death for me. But the only way I can describe what happened to me at that conference is that I woke up. C.S. Lewis says

It is waking that understands sleep, and not sleep that understands waking

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

As from a deep sleep I woke to the knowledge that Christ loved and died for me. In French there are two words for knowledge (as there is in Greek):  le savoir and la connaissance. The first is related to learning, scholarship… and the latter to an intimate knowledge – knowledge by experience. My knowledge of God moved from knowledge about Him to knowledge of Him.  It was epiphany.

Epiphany means manifestation, or revelation. I love this definition: “a sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something, or an intuitive grasp of reality through a simple or striking event; an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure or a revealing scene or moment” (compellingtruth.org).

Isaac Newton had an epiphany through an experience with an apple. The disciples who were with Jesus at the transfiguration had an epiphany. And look at Paul’s epiphany in Acts 9. Christ appeared to him, on his journey to have more Christians killed. Jesus revealed not only his glory, but the egregious sins he had committed against the Church. And he was made blind, in order to see. Every Christian who holds to the Scriptures as the Word of God has been changed as well.

I was having a discussion with a very good friend of mine about when she came to know Christ. And for her, it was very young. In many ways, she never knew a time when she was unaware of God’s love for her. She described sitting in church one day, as a young girl, and listening to the sermon. The children in her Sunday School class were sitting beside her and they were restless and bored. But she took the preacher’s words into her heart and cried out (silently!) – “why aren’t they hearing this”? She was captured not only by the words but by the wooing of Christ to come to Him. For her, this was one of many epiphanies throughout her life.

We had been talking about someone very close to her who had been making difficult and bad choices in her life. And I was thinking how best to pray for her. I was in the process of working on this reflection I thought – Oh Lord – she needs a revelation of You – of Your love for her, of the length to which You went to rescue her. Sometimes that’s the best prayer we can ever pray for others. They might need rescuing from the darkness of this world, or from sickness, or from evil. We may know their needs, but if it comes down to it – the prayer we all need is: “Lord reveal yourself.”  Why not take these few weeks of Epiphany and do just that. Dietrick Bonhoeffer wrote in his book Life Together – “Better to speak to God about a brother, than to a brother about God.” (Now context here is a big help – if you’re confused by this, read Life Together!)

Ask God to show you who in your life needs to come present to their loving, gracious God. And then pray – “Lord, may they (along with us) wake up from the kind of slumber that numbs, that defends against love. Lord, let your favor rest on them, your shalom peace which of course is the countenance of your grace, your love.”

I’m so grateful to theologians like Hans Urs Von Balthasar because they give birth to thoughts that I doubt would have come to me on their own. He writes: “Whatever could we say to God if he himself had not taken the first step in communicating and manifesting himself to us in his word, so that we have access to him and fellowship with him? For we have been permitted to glimpse his inner nature, to enter into it, into the inner core of eternal truth; bathed in the light which radiates upon us from God, we ourselves become light and transparent before him.”  Von Balthasar

And it’s there that we find ourselves in 2 Corinthians 3:18 – “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

All glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost! Amen.

As you reflect (no pun intended!) on the revelation of Christ to His people, take a few minutes and listen to this song by Audrey Assad.

Christmastide One – Glory in the Highest

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).

I wish I knew more about glory – or maybe it’s that I want to see what it must have been like to have been there at his birth and to see His glory. I wish I had seen Moses behind the rock, or the pillar of fire or cloud, or the ark of the covenant. And then to have seen that glory fully concentrated in Christ’s body, his very being. Very God of Very God.  

I’m reminded of something Annie Dillard wrote – “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”  (Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk) 

“The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured.”

1 Samuel 4:22

I don’t have to tell you that we live in a world utterly stripped of glory. We don’t even have words for it. Can you imagine the national grief captured by Phinehas’ wife after hearing the ark of the covenant had been captured? (and her husband and son dead). “…she said, ‘The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured.’” (1Sa 4:22 ESV) Glory, as we see it in the Old Testament is always manifested from a distance, for it is the unabated, unfiltered presence of God. Under the old dispensation, just like Moses, we would not have been able to come near it and live. This was Moses’ experience:

18 Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” 19 And he [God] said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” 21 And the LORD said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, 22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.” (Exo. 33:18-23)

And yet, shepherds and prophets from the east, and Joseph, and even Mary, especially Mary, gazed at the face of this new-born babe and lived. What would it have been like to kneel there, by the cradle, laying down all power, all wealth, all of all, to worship him and to know his glory?

The apostle John captures this poetically in the first chapter of his gospel. ” And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14). This is the incarnation – This is God made man. – C.S. Lewis called this the central miracle of all miracles. But how can we even talk about the fact that while Christ took on flesh, he remained God. It was never a blending of the two, and not an uneasy union of the two. This is how one Pilgrim preacher wrote of it:

“What a wonder that two natures infinitely distant should be more intimately united than anything in the world…That the same person should have both a glory and a grief; an infinite joy in the Deity, and an inexpressible sorrow in the humanity! That a God upon a throne should be an infant in a cradle; the thundering Creator be a weeping babe and a suffering man; the incarnation astonishes men upon earth, and angels in heaven.” (Stephen Charnook).

When we bless God for giving us the best parking space but neglect doing the hard, obedient things He has called us to, where is His glory?

The denial of the incarnation was one way the early church could identify a false prophet. In 1 John 4 John says to test the spirits by this one criterion: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God…” (1 John 4:2 ESV).

Paul echoes this thought in 1 Tim. 3:16 – “Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.”

The shepherds were given a foretaste of that glory – “and in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear” (Luke 2:8-10).

What have we done with that glory? By that I don’t mean that we can ever do anything to diminish the glory that is Christ’s. What I mean is have we banished it? Have we forgotten it? Have we become inured to even the idea of glory? When we reduce our God to be an extension of our desires and not the God we are called to by Holy Scripture to worship, what have we done? When we bless God for giving us the best parking space but neglect doing the hard, obedient things he has called us to, where is his glory?

I think we would all say, after pausing and reflecting on this – that we want the reflection of Christ to be on our faces. We want to turn our faces to Him, unveiled, transparent, (our sins, our secrets settled by the glory of the Cross) so that we can behold the glory of the Lord. And oh, don’t you want to be transformed into the image of Christ – from one degree of glory to another? (2 Cor. 3:18) Let this be the cry of our hearts, and may “light shine out of darkness, the light which has shown in our hearts… to give the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6) Amen.