Sermon: A Fierce and Fiery Happiness

There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about, as Oscar Wilde observed. But fame is a seductive thing. Most of us want it, if only to be famous for three minutes. The cult of celebrity feeds the fantasy that any of us could appear in Hello magazine, if not in our own right, then in the penumbra of some show-biz luminary. We had a moment of glory last year when my wife, one of our cats and I appeared in Country Life, a few pages on from the debutantes. But the star of that photograph was the Deanery itself. Its occupants were of decidedly lesser interest.

Glory is seductive, and experience tell us that its rewards are short lived. Shakespeare’s plays are full of the mighty who are fallen, the great and powerful of this world whose circumstances, or flaws or false friends fatally topple them from the pedestals on to which they have so laboriously clambered. Timon of Athens, for example, a play I have never seen, whose poetry is probably better than its drama, charts the fortunes of a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, whose wealth brought no happiness when he had it and when it had gone left a legacy of bitterness and hatred. His name ‘Timon’ is derived from the Greek timé, which means both ‘personal honour’ and the ‘value’ that is put on something, including a legal sense where it means the assessment of damages: it’s as if the man is reflecting on the meaning of his own name. His faithful steward Flavius knows him best, as only servants do:

O, the fierce wretchedness that glory brings us! Who would not wish to be from wealth exempt,
Since riches point to misery and contempt? Who would be so mocked with glory, or to live
But in a dream of friendship, To have his pomp, and all what state compounds,
But only painted, like his varnished friends?

It is all ‘only painted’: it’s on the surface, an illusion that is skin-deep. It is what Jesus meant in the Sermon on the Mount by saying of those who parade their piety so as to be noticed, that ‘they have their reward already’.

Today’s readings give us a different perspective on ‘glory’. In the Old Testament, Moses beseeches the Lord: ‘show me your glory I pray’. That is perhaps the universal prayer of all religious people: to glimpse even the outskirts of God’s splendour. But it is a deeply dangerous prayer. How can anyone see God and live? Ovid tells the story of Semele who is misguided enough to goad her lover Zeus into coming to her in his true shape. When he reveals himself as the god, the sight is too much: his thunderbolts kill her. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. So the passage that follows our reading tells how God orders Moses to hide himself in the rock as God passes by in case he sees too much, sees the face of God and the glory crushes him to death. I use that metaphor deliberately, for in Hebrew, the word for ‘glory’ means ‘weight’.

In our New Testament reading, St Paul is saying that splendid though the old dispensation of Moses was, it is nothing compared to the glory of the new that is here in Jesus. ‘If the ministry of death, chiselled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory’ (the giving of the law at Mount Sinai – the very event celebrated in the Jewish feast of Pentecost), ‘how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? If what was set aside came through glory, how much more has the permanent come in glory!’ It’s part of a long and important argument in the 2nd Letter to the Corinthians in which Paul is setting out his understanding of his ministry of reconciliation, which is, as he says in the next chapter, to proclaim ‘the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God’. And these themes occur all through what is one of the most marvellous pieces of writing in the New Testament: the unveiling of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ, the turning of humanity to the light, the demonstration of Christ’s love for us in his death and resurrection, the contrast between what is transitory and what will last for ever, eternal in the heavens.

But there is an important insight into ‘glory’ at the end of our reading. He says: ‘we all reflect the glory of the Lord with faces uncovered, and are transformed into his image, from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.’ That is to say, what was true of Moses in the Old Testament, that he not only saw the glory of God but radiated it as he came down the mountain, is now true of all believers. For by remaking the broken image of God in us, Christ makes us mirrors that reflect his glory – and this transformation, this metamorphosis, brings us more and more into that image and likeness of God in which human beings were created at the beginning. So ‘glory’ for St Paul becomes the possession, the gift, of every believer. It no longer belongs to those who are great and powerful but instead to those with whom Paul constantly identified: the vulnerable, the unnoticed, the weak – the people who made up the churches Paul loved so much, in whom, more than anywhere else, he saw the power of God at work.

And this, he says, ‘comes from the Lord, the Spirit’, the Spirit who gives life; the Spirit who brings glory; the Spirit who makes free. It is this Lord who is the Spirit whom we celebrate on the Feast of Pentecost. And while we recall the ancient story of fire and flame possessing the disciples in Jerusalem on the 50th day after Easter, this is not what lies at the heart of Whit Sunday. In the Hebrew calendar, Pentecost began as an agricultural festival that marked the first fruits of the corn harvest. For Christians, it is our celebration of the Spirit who presents us as the first fruits of the harvest of the new creation, remaking us in the image of the Creator, animating and energising us in the path of holiness and witness to the resurrection, the inspiration and begetter of all who care about art, beauty, wisdom, knowledge, peacemaking, charity and justice in our world.

The great 2nd century bishop of Lyons, Irenaeus, one of the first and greatest theologians of the western church, said unforgettably: ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive; and to be alive consists in beholding God’. This is what we celebrate today: not the painted fame and honour we crave so much, but the love of Christ shed abroad in our hearts. This is to see God. This is what it means to be alive. This is what yields the true glory. This is the fierce and fiery happiness that is God’s gift and God’s pledge.