Our journey through Advent is nearly at its end. Tomorrow is the 4th Sunday of Advent and already Christmas Eve! The light has grown, both with the warm Advent candlelight and the incremental lengthening days. There is still darkness all around, but yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
How are you feeling right now? Excited? Hopeful? Warm? Stressed out? Anxious? Lonely? The holidays bring in their wake a mix of emotions. It seems there is always too much of something, and far too little of another thing. And beyond the holiday cheer, a heaviness hangs in the air.
We are cynical enough that we expect political corruption in our leaders, but we wonder how far it all goes. We worry about taxes, environmental destruction, systemic discrimination, and policies that break up immigrant families (to deter illegal crossings). We are sickened by the constant barrage of sexual assault news. Closer to home, we hurt when we feel disconnected and distant from the ones we love. We feel the sting of rejection when the ones we thought loved us don’t really love us the way we long. We feel the trauma of past wounds. We worry about making ends meet, our deteriorating health, and about our kids’ emotional intelligence and social development. All of this makes us feel heavy.
The promise of joy seems like an end to the heaviness. We long for the day which will be only light and warmth. Then, we will glory in the incredible lightness of being.
Hebrews 12:1-2 is a familiar passage promising us strength for the journey:
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Jesus is our exemplar. Like Him, we may cast aside every hindrance in pursuit of what is ahead. Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of our faith, endured the cross for the joy set before Him. He was glorified for it. He sits now at God’s right hand.
C.S. Lewis wrote a book called The Weight of Glory. The name is clever but redundant. In Hebrew, the word for glory, כָּבוֹד, means just that: weight and heaviness. Certainly, it has the connotation of honor and praise, presences, radiance and all of that, but underneath these lofty notions is substance and consequence. God and Jesus are forces to be reckoned with.
We see the weight of glory illustrated in 1 Samuel 4 when the ark of God is captured. When Eli heard that ark was captured, he collapsed and died under his own weight, that is his own glory (1 Sam 4:18). His daughter-in-law named her son Ichabod because the glory of the Lord departed Israel (the weight of God no longer rested on the Ark’s mercy seat, 1 Sam 4:21). Too much weight had been given to leaders and strategy (and even the magic ark), Israel did not give to YHWH his proper due. They did not follow God wholeheartedly, they gave weight to these other things. With the weight of God departed, the ark was taken away (V. Philips Long first alerted me to this weighty wordplay in Samuel).
The Joy of the Lord we await is not weightlessness. We await the day when all the stuff we face, will have their proper weight. Anxieties, worries, wounds will not weigh us down the way they do now. We won’t be heavy laden with past guilt, present danger, or our anxiety about our future. We will no longer be burdened by sin or tangled in the bramble. We will finally give weight to what matters most.
We will see the Lord exalted, high and lifted up, the train of his robe filling the temple (Isaiah 6:1). God’s glory will be revealed. And all the struggle and the pain, the scorning and shame, will no longer matter on the day when Christ comes again to reign. It will be worth the wait when we see the substantial, powerful, radiant and weighty, Glory of God. For the joy set before us, we joyfully await the glory.
thoughts, prayers & songs: 