What did Jesus mean by 'glory'? John 17: 1-5 and other verses in John.
Merry Vole
Shipmate
17 After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:
“Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2 For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4 I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.
In another thread there was a brief discussion about whether Jesus was referring to His coming crucifixion as 'being glorified'. I think @Lamb Chopped specifically made this point.
But I had not seen it that way. I thought it was more 'eschatological'. More 'heavenly splendour' or a sort of son et lumiere at the second coming.
And why is glory/glorified mentioned so many times in John's gospel? What do Shipmates think?
“Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2 For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4 I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.
In another thread there was a brief discussion about whether Jesus was referring to His coming crucifixion as 'being glorified'. I think @Lamb Chopped specifically made this point.
But I had not seen it that way. I thought it was more 'eschatological'. More 'heavenly splendour' or a sort of son et lumiere at the second coming.
And why is glory/glorified mentioned so many times in John's gospel? What do Shipmates think?
Comments
And I don't think that (for English usage of the words) changes as you bring the atonement back in.
Paul in Phillipians 2 has a "therefore" between the death and sentences I link with glorification. Rather than "even death on a cross because God gave him the name above every other name". I think that lines up with my default thinking, a necessary step but not the thing (with respect to glorification)
But, the atonement will break any analogies. I was going to make the comparison between Usain Bolt winning the race (stressful) and being rewarded. But representing his country is arguably a reward. And maybe something was going in the heavenly realm that we don't understand that makes it glorification (aside from the centurion there doesn't seem much in the earthly realm).
That's not to say that there aren't a vast number of very similar statements that do fit (Jesus glorifying the cross, Jesus redeeming, etc...)
Or that Jesus hadn't conflated the two.
If one goes back to Jn 12:20, some Greeks approach Philip saying they wish to see Jesus. John's account doesn't say whether they find him, but Jesus then says, That's the WEB version to avoid questions about copyright, but there do not seem to be any significant differences between the various translations. Nor is there anything odd about the word rendered 'glorified'. It's the usual one.
A verse or two further on, Jesus says, and
Jesus's language in this exchange and in Jn 17 is so similar that I do not think it is possible to suggest he is not talking about the same thing. Difficult and challenging though this may be both for one's understanding of what 'glory' and 'glorified' mean and for what this implies for the picture of God's triune personality that it presents, I think it is unavoidable that the cross is not just a necessary and terrible trauma undergone to achieve a glorious goal, a way to glory. It is saying something very fundamental about what Jesus's glory, and therefore God's personality is like.
That may be difficult and may be uncomfortable. It may have been a revolutionary change in the understanding of what being glorified means. It may not have seeped through into much general understanding. I certainly have not been able to grasp it. But since that week in Jerusalem, I do not think it is possible fully to appreciate the glory of God without it.
Did Jesus mean that we are all required to be miserable ?
I wonder if He was talking about himself?
There are the ones where "glory" clearly means "praise, honor." Verses like this one:
Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has arisen among us!” and “God has visited his people!” (Luke 7:16). There are dozens of these.
There are the ones where "glory" comes closer to the "light show" someone mentioned upthread--I defined it as "light, shining, richness, beauty." And there are quite a few of these too, such as Matthew 25:31, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne." And also Matthew 24:30b, "they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory."
But then there are the weird passages, and I don't think we've caught them all yet. These are the ones where Jesus explicitly or implicitly links glory with his suffering and death on the cross. You can catch them, often, by the inclusion of the phrase "My hour has come" or similar. And the one I'd like to look at first is John 12:20-41.
It's as follows. Whether I get to comment on it tonight, though, is partly up to my health, so please feel free to dive in if you'd like.
I’m not going to try to make more textual connections to prove that Jesus himself considered the crucifixion his glory, unless anybody wants to go there. Enoch has done that already. But I want to look at a different angle—the question of just why Jesus might think that way (and God the Father, for that matter).
I think we can all agree that there is no such thing as a hidden glory. I mean, we might speak of such a thing, but only in the context of something that is eventually discovered and made known to the world, for example, the hidden glory of some great crystalline cave. It follows then that glory is public in its very nature—it is meant to be public and on display to everyone.
Now think for a moment what it would have been like if Christ had never become incarnate, never lived among us, never died to rescue us from the power of evil, in love for us and in willing obedience to the Father. What would we know of him? Certainly his heart would be no different than it is now; the Incarnation did not change his character. He has always been loving, faithful, merciful, kind, patient, steadfast, courageous, gentle, and so forth. But at least from our point of view, most of that would be potential, not actual. We know people’s hearts by what they say and do. It seems to me, then, that what the Incarnation did was to make him known—known to us, and to that cloud of invisible witnesses we don’t even know the full extent of, though it certainly includes the angels, who “long to look into these things” (1 Peter 1:12).
And of his whole lifetime, the crucifixion is where his heart is most clearly seen. It is the crucible in which his true gold was tested (Proverbs 17:3). If ever he was going to break, it would have been here. If there had been the least speck of sin—any tendency at all to put himself first, to follow his own desires instead of what we needed so desperately and what God the Father had sent him to do—well, it would have come out here. He had the means to escape. He knew what he was walking toward, years before he came to the cross. And at any point during his Passion, he had all his power as the Son of God to command and save himself—as he said to Peter, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?” (Matthew 26:53-54)
So if you follow me so far, the crucifixion is the point where it becomes obvious to the entire cosmos, visible and invisible, what Christ’s heart is “made of”—how he truly is, how he loves and obeys the Father, how much he cares about us, the extent to which he lives the great commandments, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ and ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12 and elsewhere). And we don’t just see what he’s like, we see the sheer extent of it—love beyond imagining, kindness past comparison. It blows my mind.
Nothing changes in Jesus as he hangs on that cross; but what was always there becomes visible to the whole universe through his actions. That very public shame and humiliation is at the same time his greatest glory; for it puts his character, his very heart, on full display for all heaven and earth to see. Jesus is glorified precisely in his suffering, because that is what makes him known most fully.
And given the kind of person he is, that is glory.
Sleep better tonight, I hope.
So possibly crucifixion -but I'm not convinced.
But I want to consider John 17: Jesus is talking about the glory He had before the world was made (v.5) . This is echoed in v 24 'The glory you gave me; for you loved me before the world was made'.
Jesus is focussing on His disciples, the future church, not his crucifixion.
Thus it was that I fell down the rabbit hole of kavod.
"Glory" to western church minds seems to have something to do with "light" or "radiance." No wonder: we are shaped by such readings as Luke 2:9, "and the glory of the Lord shone around them."
But in Hebrew - which it would make sense to think would be a formative influence for Jesus - glory is communicated as kavod or kabod. (Yes, the baby born under traumatic circumstances in 1 Samuel 4:19 is named i-kavod or Ichabod. His name literally means "where glory?" because the glory of God, the ark of the covenant, had been seized and taken away.)
AIUI kavod - the word translated as "glory" from Hebrew - has less to do with light and more to do with heaviness or weight. It is the palpable presence of God, the weight that presses into your consciousness. Weight in this sense also has the connotation of being worthy and important, the opposite of lightweight. The glory of God is the weightiest thing in the universe.
And I haven't even got to the translation of kavod as "liver" - the internal organ. This link is a trip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-B-D
It makes sense that the cross is glory: the palpable heavy presence of God on earth, the most worthwhile and important presence of God, and paradoxically the presence of honour in what might be regarded as shameful.
Certainly not ALL the occurrences of "glory" refer to the crucifixion, even in John. But there are several that do, which is the odd thing I was interested in.
Did you maybe want to look at others?
Can you say which verses in John are referring to crucifixion?
And it follows from perichoresis that that is what God, and so the Father and the Holy Spirit are also like.
I'll look at my list in a bit and grab a couple more. Some of these are "iffy"--you could take them either way. (And I looked at all four Gospels plus Acts, so some of that might creep in...)
Must behave and do some Work™.
Okay, this is my first full day possibly being better after whatever that illness was, so forgive me if I'm still incoherent.
I'm going to offer up John 13 for the next thing to chew on. Jesus and his disciples are at table the night before his death. The bit I'm looking at starts with Judas heading out the door to betray Jesus to his enemies. Jesus' next stop is Gethsemane, where he will pray facing death and then be arrested. So his death is definitely on his mind.
If you look at the bit in bold, clearly Jesus is using the common meaning of "glory, glorified"--and yet he's linking it incredibly closely to his death, both before and after those verses. He says, "Now is the Son of Man glorified"--what, now? At the very moment he has just consented to his own betrayal? If he were thinking of a heavenly light show, I'd expect him to say "Soon the Son of Man will be glorified"--but no, he says "now." That only makes sense to me if he's thinking of the betrayal, which he has just allowed/permitted/consented to, as the first move in his death.
He also says, "God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once"--which is putting the glory thing in the near future. So whatever he's talking about, it applies both now (at the moment of betrayal) and in the very very near future ("at once") which will be his arrest, trial, torture, and death.
Make sense?
Yes!
Er, that's it, really. Yes.
So apparently the idea of glory = death (at least in some cases) doesn't apply only to Jesus.
Maybe this is the spot to point out that this is just one more in Jesus' long list of paradoxes, where the last shall be first and the first last, the one who loses his life for Jesus's sake shall keep it for everlasting life, and the one who wants to be greatest must be slave of all. The idea of a shameful death being somebody's greatest glory fits pretty well into that. And the early church seems to have picked right up on that--Paul brags about his pains and humiliations, not the things most people would consider glorious (like visions, speaking in tongues, etc.)
In normal human thinking, it's ridiculous to brag about things like this--things that show you getting absolutely creamed, again and again, all but destroyed by your adversaries. But Paul rightly regards them as his glories, because they are things suffered in service to Christ; and the rest of the church feels the same, or why honor the martyrs? Indeed, the highest honor in the Christian church has always gone to those who lose their lives for Christ (whom Trump and his ilk would call "losers") and when we portray them in art or literature, they are always shown with the instruments of their death--crosses, saws, missing body parts, etc.)
So Jesus' attitude toward his own death and glory has bled over into his church; and this continues even today. I happen to have a martyr in the family--my mother-in-law, who died of a car bomb placed by a young man she and her husband had taken into their home on account of their Christian faith. He came to them because (he said) he was homeless and needy, and they were the leaders of the local Christian church in their city; he was actually Viet Cong. He placed the bomb in the hopes of killing the pastor, not realizing that his wife drove that van. And so we have a martyr in the family, which is not a thing you usually hope for! But having one, yes, I certainly do brag about her. Which doubtless seems odd to non-Christians. But to Christians, she has received the highest honor, and is a glory and example to our family. As for my own family, what sufferings we've gone through for Jesus' sake we treasure, for the same reason.
https://youtu.be/WgCWiPDvsDs?si=lOs55n1j6upCJH7G
Amen!!
What a brave and amazing woman, @Lamb Chopped . Across southern Africa, we have numerous martyrs revered in the same way and I am proud to have known several nuns, priests and missionaries who have died for their faith.
Well said and well done.
On the martyrdom thing, and please, as people with martyrs in the family or in your acquaintance, @Lamb Chopped and @MaryLouise, don't take the following as flippant.
One of the things that strikes me about martyrdom is the 'paradox' that the actual death part - if I can put it that way - is no different to anyone else's. Mother Maria Skobtsova and Fr Dimitry weren't surrounded by rays of light and heavenly music when they died in Nazi prison camps.
Maximilian Kolbe's death was one of so many, many, many at Auchswitz.
The 'glory' lies in the manner of it or the 'meaning' we attach to it.
That isn't to 'subjectivise' it.
Lots of people suffer. Some people suffer for Christ.
The latter does not diminish the import or significance of the former. The former does not diminish the latter.
I've been thinking about this, @Telford. On the one hand we have promises of 'life in all its fullness' (more abundantly) and the other blood, sweat and tears.
'If you don't bear a cross you won't wear a crown,' as the old Sunday school ditty had it.
I may start a new thread about about some of the 'harsher' or more hyperbolic sayings of Christ.
I think it's a both/and thing ... 😉
Lewis, discussing this whole "love/hate your family" thing, sadly remarked that, "No doubt it will feel sufficiently like hatred to them, God knows"--which is absolutely true. Put any person--parents, spouse, employer, what have you--second to God, and the first time a real conflict comes up and you choose God, you will be lambasted as the most unnatural person on earth and barely human to boot. 35 years after my husband and I accepted a divine call to serve refugees in Missouri, my parents were STILL crucifying us verbally over every holiday table, or so my sib says. Because, of course, that meant we couldn't be home for Christmas..., rotten children that we are.