THE KING OF GLORY

Good Friday

Today is the climax of Lent. Our exercises, fasting, prayers, and giving of alms, our Lenten abstinences from chocolates and television programs have focused on “giving something up” for the sake of Him “Who took our nature upon Him.” All you’ve done (and even what you‘ve failed to do) comes together today. As His disciple, you’ve been denying yourself, picking up your Lenten Cross and following Him. That journey has brought us to Golgotha hill.

We’ve noted along the way that you and I are Jesus’ disciples, and not too different from His disciples of old. They often didn’t understand what He was talking about or what He expected of them. Neither do we. They said they wanted to follow Him—Peter insisted at the Last Supper he’d follow Jesus even if it cost him his life—but when their time came, they ran away from Him. So do we. We see them in the Gospels, jealous of each other, bickering among themselves, pretending to understand what He’s said to them, but falling short time and again.

Every church service this season focuses on our sins. We insist that “we have erred, and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,” but do we really believe it? We kneel beside each other and say we’re sinners, but how do we react if someone says we’ve done “what we ought not to have done?” If someone accuses us, our insides seethe. I’ll admit to being a sinner—at least I’ll admit to “respectable” sins—but how dare you agree? We do indeed follow Apostolic tradition, but not always in ways we want to remember.

If Jesus’ disciples, then and now, are weak and unsure of themselves, He was—and is—neither. He told them repeatedly He was going to Jerusalem to die, but they either argued with Him or listened to His words in sullen incomprehension. Not only did He know what lay before Him on His journey, He alone knew what His death meant—for Him as a Man, for Him as Lord of His Church, and for Him as the Eternal Son of the Everlasting Father. Even after all these centuries His words still baffle us.

When the Lord speaks about His upcoming death, He calls it His “glorification.” During His last few days with His disciples, He reiterates “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified…unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Since childhood I’ve heard the Passion Gospels read during Holy Week; over and over I’ve heard Jesus’ words: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify Thy Name.” I’ve heard priests talk in many sermons about our Lord’s death and its importance, but nobody ever explained how Jesus was being glorified by getting pushed around, spitted on, kicked, slapped, made fun of, beaten to a pulp, stripped naked before friends and foes alike and finally crucified. Where’s the glory in all that? I don’t see it.

That’s because I see with “carnal” vision. I see with my heart fixed firmly in this world, with its fallen values and dim understandings. The oldest depictions of the crucifixion, those up until the middle of the Middle Ages, showed the Lord Christ on the Cross, but written on the sign above His head wasn’t the historical “INRI” (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum) but instead the placard reads “The King of Glory.” This isn’t because they were ignorant of the original words on the card; they were, rather, proclaiming what those words meant. Jesus, the Crucified, is by His crucifixion the King of Glory. How?

Jesus’ true glory is hidden not because it’s invisible but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see, any more than His first disciples, the path the Royal Road takes: where it goes, I don’t want to follow. His glory, He said, was to do the will of Him Who sent Him. In Jesus, true God and perfect Man, God the Trinity brought fallen Adam to glory. In Christ our corrupted nature is restored. That restoration came through Jesus’ willingness to pick up His Cross and walk it up the hill.

Adam’s sin wasn’t that he ate what he shouldn’t have, but that he relished and embraced the words of the tempter: “You can be like God.” “Why play second fiddle?” the devil whispered. Adam chose himself over God his Creator (just as you and I do all the time) and broke the bonds of love. Jesus Christ chose the bonds of love over everything—in the desert, His perfect humanity rejected the tempter’s promises—on Golgotha He gave up everything, even His life, to restore us to the men and women God created us to be. “Don’t you know,” St Paul asks, almost incredulously, “that as many of us as have been baptized into Jesus Christ have been baptized into His death?” Christ’s glory is invisible to those who want to cling to the tempter’s words. “It’s okay. You can still be all you can be, go ahead. You deserve it.” Christ’s glory is the glory of Heaven revealed on earth; the glory of self-giving love. On this fallen earth, the self-giving love the Father has for the Son and which (Who, actually, but that’s for another time) the Son has for the Father reveals its depths in the Cross. That love exists from and to eternity, but here’s the glory: God doesn’t leave us out of it. He wants to include you and me (creatures that we are) in that Eternal Trinity of love. To include us in His self-giving love, He has to break us and burn out of us every trace of selfishness. He is preparing us for an eternity with Himself.

“Whoever loves his life will lose it,” the Lord says. “Whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Cryptic words which only make sense if we, like Jesus, embrace the Cross. “If anyone serves me,” the Lord continues, “he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be.” To follow Jesus is to walk in His way, up the hill to die.

Next time you are hurt or afraid, next time you’re wrongfully—or even rightly!—accused, next time you feel injustice or the sorrow of life, when bad things come, deserved or not, pick up the sorrow and pain. It’s your Cross, personally crafted. It is dreadful, terrible, and only you can fully appreciate the pain it brings. But it’s your one sure and certain path to glory—and to an unending love none of us can imagine.

“I have been crucified with Christ. It’s no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me.”