THIS Gospel highlights a mystery. What on earth is “glory”? The Bible tells us that glory is an attribute of God. Theologians suggest two kinds: intrinsic (how God is glorious in himself) and extrinsic (how God manifests his glory to us).
Glory is also a process. Father glorifies Son, Son glorifies Father. We glorify them both. Regular readers know that I love Latin; but, by giving us the verb “glorify”, it makes it sound as if we make God glorious, when “glorifying” means acknowledging God’s glory, not creating it.
When we interpret words, we start with their original or literal meaning, which is concrete, physical. From this come derived meanings, which are not. For example, we can talk of the “root” of a problem, because we know what the root of a plant is; or we can say that Christ will be “a light to lighten the Gentiles”, because we know what the light of the sun is.
In the New Testament, “glory” translates a Greek word, doxa. It is familiar from the label “doxology”, which we use for praise at the end of a psalm or hymn. Doxa starts by being a word for what things look like, for their appearance. That led to the emergence of a further meaning: “reputation, honour”. This is how, in scripture, it developed into a term for divine splendour.
When the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament was translated into Greek, the translators used doxa to translate the Hebrew term kavod. That meant “weighty, important”. It came to mean “riches”, as when Joseph tells his brothers about his “glory” in Egypt (Genesis 45.13). The human mind moves easily between wealth and importance, then as now.
In moments when we feel close to God, our proximity enables us to see his glory. This is not the same as observing something that is beautiful: it is closer to ecstasy — that dissociation from the physical self in which a vision comes. The vision need not be anything so grand as a one-to-one encounter with God. It is more about insight than physical sight: a feeling of clarity, reaching us like the voice of God himself, in a “sound of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19.12).
The Greek word doxa has reminded us that one vital component of glory is that it is visible. We could call John’s Gospel the Gospel of Glory; for the very moment of the incarnation (John 1.14) is also the moment when the revelation of Christ’s glory begins. John is in harmony with Luke. Both put glory at the centre of the incarnation. That text in Luke that we know as the Nunc Dimittis makes a statement of fact: that God expresses his glory in the salvation of his people (2.32).
John’s Gospel is undoubtedly preparing us for the glory-fication of the Son of God. To understand how that works, we should read chapter 17 as if we had never read it before, with no idea how the story would end. When we do that, we notice that the tone is triumphant. It sounds as if “glory” is a guarantee of winning, succeeding, earning the right to impose authority.
This way, Jesus’s priestly prayer reads like many a prayer of ordinary people in Bible days, and still today. Shorn of that knowledge of what comes next, it sounds nakedly transactional (“I have done ABC for you; now you do XYZ for me”). That is not inappropriate; for prayer is supposed to be reciprocal. Both parties, beseecher and besought, get something out it. And it explains why the disciples were so devastated by Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion. The prayer — at which we must remember that they (except for Judas) were present — sets them up to expect a triumph, not some bitter and shameful humiliation. The incarnation turns the meaning of glory inside out and upside down.
Above all else, God’s glory is not an abstract quality, but something visible and close to us. The pillars of cloud and fire in the wilderness (Exodus 13.21) were not images of God’s glory: they were epiphanies of it. God was right there, in the cloud and fire, among his pilgrim people.
We may still be unclear about what God’s glory is. But one thing we know beyond reasonable doubt: “we have the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4.6).