#564: The Inherited Glory of Easter
+ Called into Questions for $2.40!
MLA: Amazon has discounted the Kindle version of Called into Questions to $2.40 this month. This is as cheap as you will get it—though of course if you want a paper copy, you can simply become a member of this newsletter for $20 a year! As I am no longer on social media, any assistance you might give me in spreading the word about this deal would be much appreciated. Now on to it.
The resurrected body of Christ is real, but ethereal; it is concrete, but elusive. “Flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God,” Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15. Thomas is invited to place his fingers in Jesus’s hands, showing that it is present within space and time—but Jesus appears and disappears in a room with locked doors at will. The disciple whom Jesus loved witnessed these things and has little doubt of the reality of Jesus’ corporeal presence. He also wrote that “what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”
The resurrection of Christ invites us to live within the glory of God. “The glory that you have given me I have given to them,” Jesus prays in John 17, “that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” This glory that Christ has given us, as I noted on Good Friday, takes the form of a cross: we radiate glory by reveling in being shamed and slandered for our good works. In glorying with Christ, we are crucified to the world and the world is crucified for us. We no longer live, but Christ lives in us: His wisdom, His power, and yes, His glory, become ours.
A few years back I wrote a number of theses on Christian ambition. I have had many occasions to revisit the subject over the past two years, not least because I have spent considerable time thinking about the value of our reputations. There is one path for our reputations which goes the way of negation: they are of no value to ourselves in light of the cross, nor much to anyone else. The other would be the way of affirmation: my reputation has a positive value for me, such that I am rightly permitted to tend to it and guard it. The former path seems too world-denying to be tenable, while the latter risks cultivating the pride that Christ’s humility has put to death. We could, in light of these options, split the difference: we might deny the value of a reputation to ourselves, while investing them with significance for others: my reputation has a ‘missional character,’ as it were. Saint Paul defends himself when others are liable to sin because of the slanders against him, but otherwise remains silent.
This third picture of how we relate to reputations, though, can only be made plausible if what we are given in denying the value of reputations is sufficiently satisfying. I need assurances that doing so will renouncing the aspiration to glory and the kinds of goods it might generate will not simply be better in some abstract sense, but will actually meet and answer to the very ambitions that the possibility of glory gives rise to. My intuition here is a perfectly realist one: some people do have ambitions to do great things; those aspirations should not be destroyed, but elevated (and in being elevated, transformed).
Something like this is present within Scripture, to be sure. In Psalm 84, David writes that he “would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.” Milton’s Satan inverts the line, infamously: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” he says, which aptly names the dangers of sub-Christian ambition. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that he was taken up into the third heaven in order to trounce his enemies—but he does not name himself, simultaneously outdoing them in humility while demonstrating his superior credibility. Nothing is lost for Paul in pointing away from himself, in single-mindedly giving over his life to Christ: he only gains, his reputation and fame is enhanced with, in, and through Christ’s.
This is what I think it is so hard to understand about Christian ambition: the astonishing, overpowering majesty of Christ dignifies every follower in such a way that servanthood feels like Lordship. The glory of God is non-competitive with human glory: it is not diminished through being shared with humans, but enhanced. As we bask in the glorious victory that Christ wins, the ethos of glory becomes ours—raising us up and ennobling us, such that we take on the characteristic marks of Christ’s glorious reign.
In Marina, a poem based on Shakespeare’s Pericles, T.S. Eliot writes of a man who is captivated by the grace he receives in recognizing his daughter who was lost at sea. As my friend Dr. Christina Lambert observed in a wonderful talk on the poem this evening, the diffusion of grace turns the speaker of the poem toward creation: he recognizes that he made the ship he is sailing on, but in such a way that his creation is alienated and strange: “Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own,” he says. As Lambert noted, the line expresses something about the man’s relationship to his daughter, who is begotten and not made—the father’s own, but not his own, similar but distinct.
It seems to me that what is true of creation is true of glory, though: it is my own and not mine own, alienated and familiar, possessive and possessing. The ordering of this relationship is crucial: like children, the glory that Christians inherit is decidedly not our own in the first place but becomes ours as we embody the charity that unites our lives with God. And—also like children—this refracted glory that we inherit often takes strange and surprising forms: on the day when “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” I think it likely we will be praised for good works that we made “unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.” We glory in the cross by placing our lives in the ground as a seed, which must perish for a tree to come forth and bear much fruit.
The message of the cross and resurrection is not only that Lordliness in the kingdom of God means servitude and death, but that the servant of all may walk with a straight back and his head held high, proud of the glory that he inherits through dwelling in the King’s presence. And though the good of the world surely depends on those who now rest in unvisited tombs, their goodness is known unto God and their names have been immortally preserved within His gracious Book of Life.
Around the Web
This was a very good response by my colleague Alan Jacobs to The New Yorker’s deep dive into the classical education movement. I think Emma Green is one of the best reporters going, but her ending to that essay was odd.
This essay on the productivity genre from Esquire is interesting for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that the author seems to cite John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life and the Harris brothers’ Do Hard Things alongside many secular works.
And speaking of glory, we talked through John’s depiction of the resurrection events on Mere Fidelity this week. I am biased, of course, but I thought this was an unusually lively and edifying discussion.
The Penultimate Word
“To sum up, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the great verdict of God, the fulfillment and proclamation of God’s decision concerning the event of the cross. It is its acceptance as the act of the Son of God appointed our representative, an act which fulfilled the divine wrath but did so in the service of the divine grace. It is its acceptance as the act of His obedience which judges the world, but judges it with the aim of saving it. It is its acceptance as the act of His Son whom He has always loved (and us in Him), whom of His sheer goodness He has not rejected but drawn to Himself (and us in Him) (Jer. 31:3). In this the resurrection is the justification of God Himself, of God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth, who has willed and planned and ordered this event. It is the justification of Jesus Christ, His Son, who willed to suffer this event, and suffered it to the very last. And in His person it is the justification of all sinful men, whose death was decided in this event, for whose life there is therefore no more place. In the resurrection of Jesus Christ His life and with it their life has in fact become an event beyond death: ‘Because I live, ye shall live also” (John 14:19).’ — Karl Barth