The Glory of God Manifest
Fifth Sunday of Easter Scripture Readings
From their description of the moment of the Resurrection onward, all the Christian Scriptures become focused on the incarnation of the Risen Christ in the community of his followers: the Church. In our first reading, Paul and Barnabas are seen traveling throughout Asia Minor, proclaiming the gospel and leaving behind them communities of believers who are committed to manifesting the Risen Christ in their midst. As the letter to the Hebrews [4:12] explains, “The word of God is living and active.” They’ve experienced in their communities the workings of the Holy Spirit, convincing them that Jesus is not dead, but alive and dwelling among them. Their trust in God and the gospel comes not from a learned set of doctrines or dogmas, not from catechism definitions, but from personal experience of the power of God in the Risen Christ.
Their experience is mirrored for us in the second reading today, where we find the proclamation, “Behold, I make all things new.” Christianity was never intended to be a religion like other religions. They had stories of how the gods had interacted with humans in the long-ago past. They had priests and oracles to give them instructions as to what to do or not do and to warn them about things yet to come. Some of them had seers who would be possessed by the gods and channel them. None of those other religions had the experience of God becoming one of them and who transformed the community of believers in his own image. If we understand the physical universe as God’s creation—his revelation of himself to conscious beings in understandable terms—then the revelation of the Resurrection and the gift of the power of the Spirit of God himself to us, his creatures, can only be seen as a new creation. The universe and our understanding of it as a place of futility and the meaningless cycles of life and death has passed away and been replaced by Immanuel—God with us. That fact, in itself, is the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth.
The passage from Revelation goes on to speak of a new Jerusalem coming into the midst of us. What does that imply? Jerusalem has been called the Holy City because that’s where Yahweh God took up residence in the Temple. People of faith went to the Temple to find God in his dwelling place. So, what is this passage saying when it speaks of a “new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven”? The rest of the passage explains that the community of believers—the Church—has become God’s dwelling place, God’s Temple. It’s a Temple made up of hearts and minds rather than of stones and mortar. Indeed, the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. It’s little more than a huge pile of sacred stones now. There’s no use going there to find God’s dwelling. Now, if we want to find God, we need only look to one another. If we can’t find God there in others, then we can’t find God at all.
Our gospel passage begins with Judas’s departure. Poor, sad Judas. People misunderstand what happened there. They think it was a one-off and that there was some sort of diabolical possession, where the devil made Judas do what he did. They never think of it as a common attitude that infects us all. A few verses earlier, John reported that Jesus dipped a morsel of unleavened bread and handed it to Judas. The passage continues, saying, “As soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him.” [John 13:30] Remember that the satan was the prosecuting attorney in a court of law, in other words, the accuser. It seems that Judas was afraid of the pushback coming from the Jewish officials, and rather than trusting that his master knew what he was doing, he figured he could fix things on his own, using his own intelligence and his own wiles. When Jesus told him, “What you are about to do, do quickly,” [John 13:27] he probably assumed that Jesus approved. Judas’s sin was, as it always is, self-reliance. The tragedy was that had Judas trusted Jesus as Peter did, Jesus would certainly have forgiven him. But he couldn’t muster even that much trust.
When Judas was gone, setting in motion the whole mystery of humankind’s redemption, John reports that Jesus announced that now, the Son of Man is glorified. What is this “glory” Jesus speaks of? It hearkens back to the glory of the Lord that filled Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem at its consecration where “The priests could not enter into the Temple because the glory of the Lord had filled the Lord’s Temple.” [2 Chronicles 7:2] Yet, the glory that was manifest in Jesus didn’t inspire that kind of fear. On the contrary, the glory Jesus spoke of, the same that glorified God, was their unconditional and undying love. That love was the glory that shone through his suffering, death, and Resurrection. The glory of God is the love of Jesus.
Just as the glory of God filled the Temple built of stone and mortar in the city of Jerusalem, the glory of God manifested in the unconditional and undying love of Jesus filled the new Temple in the new Jerusalem, namely, the community of the faithful, the Church. The commandment Jesus gave to his disciples at the Last Supper was foundational for the Church. God’s presence in the Church would be manifest in the love of his followers for one another with the same intensity that Jesus showed, or not at all. The glory of God in Christ’s Church isn’t in its buildings, its possessions, its leaders, or their accomplishments. The glory of God is in the Church only to the extent that women and men believers love as Jesus loved. That’s the power of the Church—the only power the Church has. That’s what drew all of Asia Minor to Paul and Barnabas. That’s the new heaven and the new earth. That’s the glory of the Son of Man in our midst.
Love doesn’t fear pain. Love doesn’t fear death. Love understands that the only path to Resurrection leads through the cross. We turn to Saint Paul’s eloquent exposition on love as we meditate on this essential element of Christian life. He writes to the Corinthians [1 Corinthians 13:4-8] “Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, is not inflated, is not rude, does not seek its own interests, is not quick-tempered, does not brood over injury, does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” Whoever calls themselves Christians but rejects this love manifested in the death, Resurrection, and glorification of Christ commits a sacrilege because they pretend to be disciples but betray the Lord more maliciously than Judas ever did. Posting the Ten Commandments in schoolrooms, public buildings, and parks won’t help them at all. My friends, we can’t be like them. Let’s never put limits or conditions on our love for one another, for that is what Our Lord commanded us to do, and that’s the only commandment we need concern ourselves with. All the other commandments are mere footnotes.
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