Jesus Christ Our Lord
The Gospel of Christ
The Physical Resurrection
Dwelling on The Cross and the Empty Tomb
Chronology of Passion Week
Fiction
John sits back, lowers the quill, strokes his beard and looks at the drying parchment. The introduction: finalized. The material: organized to steadily reveal flashes of glory. He remembers the means He used to glorify God….
…and he remembers how God the Father glorified Him.
He died of His own volition; Pontius didn’t have a choice in the matter. He died a criminal labeled King and was buried without a dime and yet within a rich man’s tomb—only to have the tomb be vacated.
The sight of that stone, moved aside and for whom? The one who commanded the waters to be still, the one who raised the dead by calling them by name, the one who could make rocks sing if he so wanted; he didn’t need to roll away that stone. After all, he showed up behind closed doors, not once but twice!
That stone was rolled away for us. We could see. An event that none of us saw, but there was the evidence: glory had flashed and death died as God, laid aside his burial clothes as if waking up from a nap, and walked out of closed tomb.
Everything has changed.
We now look forward to that day when he returns in glory and power, thinks John. What a day of rejoicing that will be.
Maybe it will be soon? I hope it’s soon, he thinks as he blows out the candles.
He’s old. He can’t move as he used to. But he remembers these things as if it were yesterday.
You can’t put a cap on this revelation of glory.
Everything has changed.
The whole time that He was here, He kept saying that He wasn’t seeking His own glory. Others received glory from one another, but Him—not seeking to glorify Himself at all. Mindboggling, thinks John, utterly mindboggling.
The one who has the right to stand in the midst of all and demand the glory from His creation, quietly going off to do the work of The Father for the purpose of glorifying Him.
Even before entering Jerusalem, asking the Father to glorify His name.
But oh, the way that the Father would be glorified. As we sat around that table, and Judas—that traitor—ran out to do his dastardly work, our Lord announces that the hour has arrived for the Son to finally be glorified. To be glorified by hanging on the cross! To hear our Lord praying for the Father to be glorified and for He to receive the glory He had before creation—the wonder of it! Ever since the foundation of the world, he’s been somehow (I don’t understand how) involved in a way that necessitated a return back to that previous glory but as a man!
And then that glory to be transferred to us because of what He was doing on that cross: God of the cosmos, creator of the universe, orchestrator of time—pinned to a tree to glorify God, and to give us that glory.
Glory unveiled on a tree as the sky was occluded!
John, seeing that other Gospels have been written, considers an introduction to his own biography of Jesus. He knows the purpose of His coming. He knows how well His life was documented in other retellings. He knows that plenty of books could be written.
But he stops.
We saw Him. We saw God. We handled Him. We heard Him. We at with Him. That same shekinah manifestation of God in the Scriptures, walked with us and declared the Father.
The Word became Flesh, dwelled amongst us and we beheld his glory—glory as the only begotten of the Father filled with grace and truth.
That’s what we saw, he thinks to Himself. And although we beheld His glory at all points, there were times that pointed directly towards the purpose of His coming. Times which resonate with his prayer before Jerusalem.
“Father, Glorify your name!”
With the Father’s response: “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.”
And so many didn’t recognize Him. So many saw His glory but they would not believe. Just like Isaiah said.
Flashes of Glory.
How would you deal with the question: “When did the Son of God exist?” Notice that it’s not asking “when was the Word created” or “Is Jesus eternal?” The question is specifically asking about the Son of God and doing that assuming a whole bunch of things about what it means to be the Son of God.