Fully alive

 ‘…And glory has come to me through them’ (John 17:10)

From John 17:11-11 (Year A: Easter 7)

A need to glorify is deeply embedded in each of us.  From primitive beginnings human beings created images and glorified a higher being or reality. In more recent times some extraordinary examples of the human need for glorifying have presented at rallies and other manifestations. From Nuremberg to Red Square a figure head or an ideology is glorified. Nature has always abhorred a vacuum.

The prayer ‘Glory be to the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit …’ is said by Christians over and over again. What does it mean to glorify in this way? Does a god or Our God feel a need to be glorified?  The dense discourses in the Gospel of John – especially from the 14^th chapter to the 17^th are packed with references to Glory, the Spirit, the Father-Son relationship as well as all the other Johannine themes of reciprocal love, unity, faith, light, joy and peace. But, glory is something that cuts across human reality. What we hear in the opening of the 17^th chapter is a powerful affirmation of the unique privilege of being human. A glory ascribed to God alone is realised in us. Writing in the second century St Irenaeus said ‘The glory of God is a living human person; and the life of a human person consists in beholding God’. Some translate this simply as ‘The glory of God is humanity full alive’.

Whow! The glory of God is ordinary human beings like you and me fully alive. Not just alive but fully alive. Better than any prayer. It is prayer to be so.