on glory

 

Summary: we should be slow to excommunicate others, as the glory of God is revealed through them in ways we have (as yet) failed to comprehend.

Fifth Sunday of Easter: Acts 11.1-18 and John 13.31-35.

If there is a theme connecting these two readings, it is recognising God’s glory. The reading from Acts ends with a group of men glorifying (to ascribe value) God (somewhat lost in the NRSVA translation, ‘they praised God’). The reading from John’s Gospel starts with Jesus saying, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.’

The context for recognising God’s glory in the passage from Acts is that the men who recognised God’s glory had planned to excommunicate Peter (to separate themselves from him, to judge him as no longer one of them; again, somewhat lost in the translation ‘criticized’) but their troubled spirits were quietened/brought to rest/at peace, by Peter’s step-by-step explanation of why he had eaten with Gentiles, whom his hard-line critics referred to by a racial slur. God’s glory is seen not in purity of observance — neither orthodoxy nor orthopraxy — but in divine initiative expanding who is included in the life God gives: who may participate in the risen life of the risen Jesus, that quality of life that triumphs over death. (This is the instruction Peter hears from heaven, first to get up — rise, with Christ — and then to offer a previously unacceptable sacrifice that has been redesignated acceptable to God, by God.) The validity of transformation in the Gentiles was not determined by conformity to the expectations and demands of Peter’s accusers (though the new Gentile believers would be asked to embrace minimal accommodations to the sensibilities of their Jewish brothers).

The context for recognising God’s glory in the passage from John is the highly ambiguous preceding verses, in which Jesus reveals that one of his apprentices will betray/entrust him into the hands of another; Jesus shares bread with Judas; Satan — the Accuser — enters into Judas after the bread; Jesus instructs Judas?/Satan? to do what he must do, quickly; having taken hold of the bread, as an act of volition, Judas/Satan escapes/goes out. God is glorified, and glorifies Jesus, through the ambiguous actions of those who oppose him — who, intending to betray Jesus into the hands of those seeking to kill him, in fact entrust him into the hands of the Father — and the equally mysterious actions of Jesus towards Judas/Satan, who does not depart before, in essence, receiving communion. Jesus then reinforces his actions, mandating that his apprentices should wish one another well/take pleasure in/esteem one another in the same way that he — who had just shared bread with Judas — had done. This enemy-love will be — above all else — the revelation to the watching world that they are his apprentices.

When Peter eats with Roman soldiers, and accepts them as brothers and fellow heirs of the life God gives, he is participating in the life of the risen Jesus.

Whenever we claim that a group of people are outside the scope of transformation God has wrought in Jesus, unless they conform to our understanding of that life, we side with those who moved to excommunicate Peter. In the grace of God, they received the gift of being able to change. May that be our story too.