Give glory to your son, so that your son may glorify you,
just as you gave him authority over all people,
so that your son may give eternal life to all you gave him.
God made us all to glorify him so that the world may know him, and, in knowing him, have eternal life. We must therefore live in such a way as to glorify God. This means that we must be willing to let our light shine for God, even to be willing to pray, 'Give glory to your sons and daughters so that we may glorify you.'
We must not be content to hide in the shadows when the hour arrives for us. We naturally fear the hour of the cross and what it entails and tend to shrink from it. But if we first pray that God manifests his glory through our participation in his hour and his cross we will have good grounds for confidence. Commonly we hide from both the cross and from glory. We hide from the cross because we fear to suffer. We hide from glory out of a false humility which is really wrong handed if God is the one who brings the glory. We should rightly fear any glory that is not from him because such exultation would only set us up for a fall. But the glory God gives is unique in that it is his action in us. When it is truly from him it is foolproof. However, if we know a little bit more about what God is offering we may hide from the glory because we realize that the glory itself entails the humility, the hour of darkness, the sacrifice. But again, if we realize that it is his work and not so much our own we need not fear.
The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness- Pope Benedict XVI
Jesus was glorified by the Father in his resurrection and ascension. But his glory was already shown forth before that triumph in his passion and death on a cross. This was because his death on the cross revealed in the world of time the love he had for the Father from all eternity. It was so evident that a Centurion who witnessed it said, "Truly this was the Son of God!" (see Matthew 27:54). What the Centurion saw manifested in time was Jesus receiving everything he was from the Father and offering it back to the Father, showing forth the love who was the Holy Spirit himself, thus revealing the Trinity, the glory from before the world began, to the world of time.
Now glorify me, Father, with you,
with the glory that I had with you before the world began.
It was this Trinitarian revelation that itself would be eternal life for us. Eternal life was not something given as a consequence of intellectual data. Rather, it was knowing the Father as the Son knew the Father and knowing the Son as the Father knew the Son, which was a different sort of knowledge from the merely abstract, something which itself could be truly called eternal life. In God this was a selfless way of knowing that automatically in itself was a glorification of the other, and in that sense, an outpouring of love. For us it would be a gaze into eternity that could anchor the one who saw it in that place beyond time.
I pray for them.
I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me,
because they are yours, and everything of mine is yours
and everything of yours is mine,
and I have been glorified in them.
Jesus prayed for us. This was not trivial. By his prayer we entered into the exchange whereby everything of the Son's was the Father's and everything of the Father's was the Son's. By this prayer Jesus showed his intention to include us in his own self-offering to the Father. By this prayer the doorway to the divine life of the trinity was opened to us.
But now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem.
Paul was not reluctant to meet his own hour when it came, nor to show forth God's glory in his own life. The Son had made himself known to Paul at Damascus and the Spirit was given to him when he was baptized so that he could live for the glory of God. By his encounter with the Son his life was taken up into the life of God and his mission became that of the Son, animated by the same Spirit that filled Jesus himself. Because of the difference it made for Paul in his own life he became the most compelling of witnesses for that life to others. It is meant to be so for us as well.
I earnestly bore witness for both Jews and Greeks
to repentance before God and to faith in our Lord Jesus.
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