A Homily for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity
I reckon that the sufferings of this present
time are
not worthy
to be compared
with
the glory which shall be revealed in us.
--Romans 8:18
Saint Paul uses a curious phrase in his letter to the Romans, which was read as today’s Epistle lesson. He writes of “the glory which shall be revealed in us,” not “the glory which shall be revealed to us.”
There is only one source of glory, and that is God the Holy Trinity. This world may seem to bestow glory, along with wealth and power and fame and popularity; but the glory of this world is just an illusion. It is vanity, and a vanity of vanities.
At our baptism we renounced (or our godparents renounced on our behalf), the vain pomp and glory of this world, along with the sinful desires of the flesh and the devil and all his works. We promised obediently to keep God’s holy will and commandments, and to walk in them all the days of our life.
It is not easy to look around and to see bad people—murderers, thieves, adulterers, mockers of god, despisers of virtue—rewarded with all the trappings of glory that this world has to bestow. It is not easy to see good people punished—trodden down, ridiculed, cast aside—while the wicked triumph.
In the seventy-third psalm, the psalmist laments the sufferings of this present time:
And yet the psalmist has faith, he perseveres in the face of all those troubles:
And it is the confidence of those words, “Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and after that receive me with glory,” that Paul seeks to instill in those who read or hear his letter.
And what is that glory with which God will receive us, and which is to be revealed in us?
In his second letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul wrote: “God, who commanded light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” God is light and is the source of all light; and the light of God shines gloriously in the face of Jesus, the light who shines in the darkness, and whom darkness cannot comprehend. And we Christians are called and charged to be the bearers of that light.
Saint John wrote, also, that “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.” Therefore we must “walk in the light, as he is in the light.”
In a sermon preached on the first Sunday after his enthronement as Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams spoke on these texts. Among other things, he said:
It’s the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. What God gives is light. The radiance and the beauty of His own being made flesh and blood through Jesus Christ. That is what God gives eternally, necessarily, from the very depth of His being. . . . The light is there, by God's grace, to light up a whole landscape. . . . But when it's God's light that's at work I may have very little sense of what's going on . . . , but I trust the God who makes the light shine out of darkness.
In this world, “[w]e are troubled on every side, yet not distressed. We are perplexed, but not in despair. We are persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed,” because we, who in baptism died and were buried with Christ, carry with us the death of Jesus, so that his life may shine forth in us. By virtue of our baptism into the new life of Jesus, it is our job in this life to reflect the glory of God that shines from the face of Jesus.
In his sermon, Archbishop Williams also said that we may not be aware of the glory of God, the light of Christ, that is reflected in our own face, but we can see that light reflected in the faces of other Christians, and we trust or hope that they seem the same light reflected in ours. But in the life of the world to come, when we see God face to face, the glory of God will shine not only on us but also through us.
Jesus Christ is God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son, and the glory of the Father, who is the source of all true glory, shines in the face of Jesus Christ as an attribute of his divine nature. But when he emptied himself, and took human flesh in the womb of the virgin Mary, that glory was concealed for awhile. The apostles Peter, James, and John saw a glimpse of it when, before the final trip to Jerusalem, they went with Jesus up Mount Tabor. There the glory of God, which had been concealed, was briefly revealed in the Transfiguration. Jesus’s garments “glistered,” his face shone like the sun. This was the glory of God shining through.
In the nineteenth century, the priest Edward Pusey, leader of the Oxford movement, in a sermon on the Transfiguration, said:
In it you may behold the end of your existence, the reward of your daily warfare and cross, the glory which shall be revealed, faintly shadowed out to you. . . . Do what he saith, hope for what he promiseth, so when he comes again, . . . you too [shall] be transfigured into that inutterable glory of his glorious Body, . . . and shine like the stars forever and ever; yea, and above the stars, for in his glory, who made the stars, God of God, light of light, inapproachable but indwelling.
As Saint John wrote: “Now are we the children of God, and it doth not appear what we shall be. But we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” And as Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians, we, beholding the glory of the Lord, shall be “changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
What has this world to compare with that? Even if we are denied whatever glory this world has to offer, we have lost nothing. Do we suffer disease, disappointment, betrayal, bereavement, injury, injustice? It is of no consequence. The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory of God that will be revealed in us.
Church
of Saint Mary Magdalene
Orange,
California
13
July 2003