Readings:
2 Kings 12:1-12;
Psalm 50:1-6;
2 Corinthians 4:3-6;
Mark 9: 2-9 

Collect:
Holy God, you know the disorder of our sinful lives:
set straight our crooked hearts,
and bend our wills to love your goodness and your glory
in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen 

Reflection

Can you remember a holiday when you returned home saying you’d had ‘a glorious time’, or ‘glorious weather’ or ‘glorious food’? Maybe you brought back a souvenir or tried to recreate part of the experience at home, lingering over the holiday photos. Maybe you longed to be there again. Then the regular life events and routine bring you back to earth with a bump!  Historically the idea of a holiday stems from a retreat or ‘Holy Day’ – a time set apart from the every-day necessities and responsibilities of life to seek God’s presence or tune into his will in a new way. Later, it became a time of recreation and in some way we return re–freshed or even ‘re–created’. 

This particular ‘holy day’ in our gospel reading that Peter, James and John experience is a special case of that. They go up – retreat – to the mountain to pray with Jesus – a rare privilege as he usually went alone. And there they saw his ‘glory’. All three synoptic gospels record this event. All speak of his glory either directly or indirectly. The disciples had a glimpse of what lay beneath the outward appearance of Jesus. Understandably – as with our holiday experience – the three disciples wanted to prolong it. Ultimately, they can only ‘be still for the glory of the Lord is shining all around’. They don’t want it to end here. Our experiences of God’s glory stick with us forever. They give us hope in the face of ongoing despair. The disciples Peter and John both looked back to this event many years later in their own writings in 2 Peter 1:16-18 and John 1:14.

So, what exactly is Glory? The departure of Elijah in a ‘chariot of fire’ is a graphic example of an event that expresses God’s ‘glory’, worthy of any movie-makers CGI department to visualise! 

In the Old Testament it’s the Hebrew word kabod – splendour, magnificence, ‘weight’ as in significance, and opposite from ‘light’ as in light-weight, and it means also wealth and plenty. Examples of past glory are Psalm 19:1 and 57:5. In the exodus of God’s people from Egypt, we read how God’s glory was revealed in the physical action of deliverance from their oppressors (Exodus 16:7).

In the New Testament it’s the Greek word doxa – dignity, glory, honour, praise and worship. More examples here of past glory are the angelic visitation to the shepherds in Luke 2:9, or Jesus’ raising of Lazarus in John 11:4. It’s something that Jesus had with God all the timebefore his brief visitation to earth (John 17:5), and like at the Transfiguration, his very person reflected God’s glory (Hebrews 1:3a).

But we also read in the New Testament about a future glory, one we will share once more, and for ever, with God. St Paul considers sufferings we have here are not worth comparing with it (Romans 8:18), preparing us for an ‘eternal weight of glory beyond all measure’ (1 Corinthians 15:43). St Peter speaks of winning a crown of it (1 Peter 5:4), and Saint John has a vision of heaven where the glory of God is its light (Revelation 21:23).

But what about present glory, reflecting his glory here and now?

I like astronomy, and in making an astronomical telescope, you start with a piece of curved glass, ground to incredibly tight tolerances, which is to be the primary mirror. It’s all foggy to start with, and then the finer it’s polished with finer and finer grinding powders, it becomes clearer and clearer, until it’s ready to get it’s silver coating – and then it’s transformed to give a perfect image of distant stars.

Jesus reminds us that we reflect God’s glory by what we do: 

let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:16)

St Paul echoes this idea: 

And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:18) 

Like a mirror that is gradually being polished up and silvered, so the HS is sanctifying us, as we become finely honed to reflect the glory of God more and more. As the song puts it:
                  As we gaze on Your kingly brightness                    
                  so our faces display Your likeness,                  
                  ever changing from glory to glory:                   
                  mirrored here, may our lives tell Your story

We’ve done a whistle-stop tour of scripture – like a holiday! – a world cruise if you like – stopping off at glorious and memorable sites along the way, but this cruise holy-day has been to inspire us from the past into the future: to equip us for our present – gazing on God and reflecting his glory to those we meet in the humdrum of life, and to prepare us with confidence for the future, to experience that same glory into eternity.

Dave Talks