Glory!
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
May 18, 2025—Easter 5C
Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35
In the very midst of human frailty and failing, Jesus declares the glory of God breaking through. The door has hardly shut behind Judas, going to conspire with the authorities in Jesus’ arrest, and Jesus proclaims not that the Son of Man has been betrayed, but that he has been glorified. And not just him, but in him, God has been glorified. And indeed, not just has been glorified, but will be glorified.
The glory is past, it is present, it is future. It is now and not yet. Because this is the eternal breaking into time, which tends to turn our ability to express it as inside out as our brains when we to try to understand it. How do we understand this: facing into betrayal, denial, and execution, Jesus proclaims glory. How on earth can that be, and what does glory even mean if it is so?
Certainly not triumph in any way that we generally expect it to be. Not golden crowns, or shining light, or sounding trumpets. Or, at least, not just those things. They might announce glory. Call attention to glory. But they themselves are not glory.
But the cross isn’t exactly glory either. The betrayal, the mockery of a trial, the torture and the death: definitely not glory. The glory only comes with the resurrection, when self-sacrifice is shown to have vanquished violence, forgiveness healed shame, and life declared eternal victory over death. Transforming what we thought we knew about the ways of the world.
And therein lies the glory: in the transformation. In what happens when the eternal reality of God breaks into our temporal world, our fragile world, our mortal world. And what was old is made new, what was dying is given life, what was hopeless is suddenly filled with possibility, and our souls cry out “Glory!”
We hear it in today’s passage from Revelation, that vision of what it would like if the eternity of God broke fully across our temporal world. Written in the midst of terrible earthly turmoil and persecution, Revelation assures us that none of this violence, none of this domination, none of this suffering is God’s eternal desire. God’s desire, God’s intention, is to transform heaven and earth (or, in fact, to remove the separation between heaven and earth completely). God’s desire, God’s intention, God’s very essence, is “To make all things new.” (Rev 21:5)
And our souls cry out, “Glory!”
But one might ask, if that is God’s desire, why does God not move directly to this vision from Revelation? If this temporal world has decline and death baked in, and such a terrible tendency toward things like betrayal, injustice and persecution, why not let the curtain fall? Why allow these “signs of ending all around us” to repeat over and over and over, throughout the millennia, rather than bringing it to the eternal conclusion?
To a great extent, I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t know why each generation can look to the signs and say, “Here they are, and it must be now, it will be now!” and yet it is not.
Except I think there’s something in there about the nature of glory. Of the glory of God that is all the more noticeable when it breaks into a world like ours. Crashing in. Sneaking in. Stopping us in our tracks. In wonder, as we breathe it in.
Something broken has been mended. Glory. Something twisted has been set right. Glory. Something that seemed dead beyond any whisper of hope has somehow brought forth life (glory) and we see it, and are ourselves transformed. GLORY.
When the eternal breaks through into the temporal, making things new, that glory might itself be enough to justify the continued absurdity of this mortal existence. But I would argue that there are more things than this, to make it a worthwhile endeavor. Because there are things inherent to our temporal world that are not inherent to the eternal. As Sam Wells suggests: the eternal is what allows things to be made new, but the temporal is what allows new things to come into being.[1]
It is on THIS plane of earth and spirit and matter that things become. God brought us into being here, and ever since, God’s creatures have created, have pro-created, have adapted and changed, and made so many things. And surely, if the glory of the eternal is to refresh, restore, and resurrect, then the glory of the temporal rests in this capacity to be born and to die, and in between, to make new things.
Which brings us to the fact that one of the amazing things about baptizing a baby, is that it allows us to see the glory of both at the very same time. We see the astonishing beauty of the temporal ability to bring a whole new person into being. At the very same time, we lay claim to the eternal: God’s promise to renew and restore God’s people, again and again, as often as we need it. Which has been, and will continue to be, a LOT, and forever. Until the end of time, at which all Creation will be made new.
In the meantime, we will make things. To which I say: Glory!
[1] Sam Wells, Sermon Preparation Workshop for Easter 5C, 2025, posted on Facebook May 6 2025 https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19kSb8g4jN/