Poles

Isaiah 6:3 (NIV)
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

Last week we looked at Ecclesiastes 3:11

Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NIV)

¹¹ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

We saw the tension between everything “beautiful in its time” and the haunting of “eternity in our hearts”.

In Isaiah 6:3 we have similar polls of comparison, the holiness, meaning the otherness and separation of God from everything else, and the idea that the whole creation is shot through, seemingly in-discriminant with his glory. God is both untouchable and has made his presence seen, felt, heard, tasted and smelled in every square inch of creation.

Glory

Christianity says that the meaning of life is glory. It is the reason God made the world. It is the reason God did not abandon humanity to its rebellion but instead began a long process of redemption and restoration that will culminate in the glory God built into this world being reclaimed as his own.

The polarity of Isaiah 6:3 is felt in the reality of otherness in glory.

Let’s begin with an apple pie. The domesticated apple originates in wild apples in Kazakhstan. Years of human cultivation and domestication go into creating what you consider the apple today to be. From there the cook takes apple, flour, eggs and other ingredients with heat to create the glory of an apple pie.

Glory has a funny relationship with personhood. When we create glory we recognize it is something outside of ourselves, yet something we have contributed to. We don’t own it, and any attempt to own it or fully possess it diminishes the glory.

Rebellion as Attempted Theft of Glory

Our rebellion against God has everything to do with our attempt to take glory for ourselves and from others, including God. The heart of our rebellion is to employ glory to make it do work for us, glorify us, and make ourselves self-sufficient and demand that the rest of creation adore us, obey us and serve us. These things can only be true of God which means that our rebellion against God is essentially a move to replace God at the center of existence, our own and the world’s. This rebellion is, from the start, doomed to fail because we are creatures, not the source of creation and we are not ourselves the source of glory, the source of ourselves, or the source of everything we wish to possess. This is why the heart of our sin can be refracted into all of the sins possible in humanity. Our rebellion is pride, theft, greed, and on and on.

God is in himself perfectly self-giving and we are made in his image, to be like him by reflecting him in this way. This is why the perfection Jesus admonishes us to take on is seen as generosity.

Matthew 5:43–48 (NIV)

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. ⁴⁶ If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? ⁴⁷ And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? ⁴⁸ Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Weeds and Wheat and Glory

Jesus also tells and interesting parable about an enemy who sowed weeds that looked like wheat in a field.

Matthew 13:24–30 (NIV)

²⁴ Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. ²⁵ But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. ²⁶ When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared. ²⁷ “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’ ²⁸ “ ‘An enemy did this,’ he replied. “The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ ²⁹ “ ‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. ³⁰ Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’ ”

If applied to the idea of God’s gifting of glory to the world this means that God lets the rebellion and the glory work together. We can’t harvest the glory without hurting it because it’s intertwined with evil. God patiently waits until the field is ripe and then will do the sorting.

Imagine all the cultures of the world, all the people of the world surrounded by glory. Human beings, even in their rebellion can’t not do what we were made to do with is to “be fruitful and multiply” which means to do culture making. All of the peoples of the world, all of the cultures of the world both act in rebellion and in glorious culture making, like weeds and wheat growing together. God claims ownership of all of this, because it is his glory, even if we on the sight are constantly trying to take the glory for ourselves and therefore diminishing it. God is patient, however, and gives us time.

Contrast this with a materialist view of the world that says that the world is just a product of chaos. Glory is incidental. Materialists recognize beauty but if the only thing that drives “progress” forward is a Darwinian vision of propagation of the species then the beauty of a child is incidental to its procreative potential. It struggles to account for the incidental beauties of a song, a painting, a landscape. What it is that makes Yosemite National Park or the Grand Canyon beautiful is not what makes a gold mine beautiful or a rich field full of crops. The Grand Canyon or Half Dome should be impediments and useless obstacles but we see in them glory.

A materialist view of the world says that while it might be nice for us to imagine the glory of every person, every culture, every family, every moment this glory is simply an emotion, one that will be destroyed when the chemical/mental processes that create it end. All glory, in this view of the world is lost, forever.

Christianity believes that the weeds and the wheat grow together, and God will not leave his glory laden universe unfulfilled.

Isaiah 60

The glory mentioned in Isaiah 6 comes to full flowering in Isaiah 60. Its an amazing vision of God restoring and reclaiming not only the children of Israel lost in exile and disbursement but all of the glory in the world brought to the throne of the great king in Zion. The kings and powers of the earth bring back the lost children of Zion to Jerusalem and restore their fortunes.

The Magi

The Gospel of Matthew, the gospel written to and for early Jewish believers has the story of the Magi.

The story is familiar to many. Magi from the East, see a sign in the heavens that they interpret as the birth of a new King of the Jews. We know that in 7BC there was a conjunction of Jupiter (the “star” of kings) and Saturn (the “star” of the Jews) three times in that year. This is one of a few theories as to the star and the backstory to this story.

It is important to remember that these were pagans coming looking to honor a king of the Jews. In the Matthew story Herod, and all of Jerusalem with him, is troubled by this because such news is easily interpreted by Herod and the other powers as a threat to their power and position. In the story the Magi outfox Herod and are successful in bringing their gifts to the newborn king.

The story itself has a long and fascinating history of interpretation throughout Christian history. Many of you might wonder why these “magi” who are essentially pagan court astrologers who read the heavens looking for signs of what is to come get called “kings” in some Christian songs and stories. The reason is the connection with Isaiah 60. Christians have long associated the gifts of the wisemen as a proleptic fulfillment of the prophesy of Isaiah 60.

This ties together a lot of threads in Christian theology.

• Nature (in the stars) recognize her true king
• Pagans, who once rebelled come now to bow before their true king

CS Lewis’ Corn King

CS Lewis, someone who knew more about the pagans of antiquity notes the pattern.

In other words, does not the Christian story show this pattern of descent and re-ascent because that is part of all the nature religions of the world? We have read about it in The Golden Bough. We all know about Adonis, and the stories of the rest of those rather tedious people; is not this one more instance of the same thing, ‘the dying God’? Well, yes it is. That is what makes the question subtle. What the anthropological critic of Christianity is always saying is perfectly true. Christ is a figure of that sort. And here comes a very curious thing. When I first, after childhood, read the Gospels, I was full of that stuff about the dying God, The Golden Bough, and so on. It was to me then a very poetic, and mysterious, and quickening idea; and when I turned to the Gospels never will I forget my disappointment and repulsion at finding hardly anything about it at all. The metaphor of the seed dropping into the ground in this connexion occurs (I think) twice in the New Testament, and for the rest hardly any notice is taken; it seemed to me extraordinary. You had a dying God, Who was always representative of the corn: you see Him holding the corn, that is, bread, in His hand, and saying, ‘This is My Body’,3 and from my point of view, as I then was, He did not seem to realize what He was saying. Surely there, if anywhere, this connexion between the Christian story and the corn must have come out; the whole context is crying out for it. But everything goes on as if the principal actor, and still more, those about Him, were totally ignorant of what they were doing. It is as if you got very good evidence concerning the sea-serpent, but the men who brought this good evidence seemed never to have heard of sea-serpents. Or to put it in another way, why was it that the only case of the ‘dying God’ which might conceivably have been historical occurred among a people (and the only people in the whole Mediterranean world) who had not got any trace of this nature religion, and indeed seemed to know nothing about it? Why is it among them the thing suddenly appears to happen?

The principal actor, humanly speaking, hardly seems to know of the repercussions His words (and sufferings) would have in any pagan mind. Well, that is almost inexplicable, except on one hypothesis. How if the corn king is not mentioned in that Book, because He is here of whom the corn king was an image? How if the representation is absent because here, at last, the thing represented is present? If the shadows are absent because the thing of which they were shadows is here? The corn itself is in its far-off way an imitation of the supernatural reality; the thing dying, and coming to life again, descending, and re-ascending beyond all nature. The principle is there in nature because it was first there in God Himself. Thus one is getting in behind the nature religions, and behind nature to Someone Who is not explained by, but explains, not, indeed, the nature religions directly, but that whole characteristic behaviour of nature on which nature religions were based. Well, that is one way in which it surprised me. It seemed to fit in a very peculiar way, showing me something about nature more fully than I had seen it before, while itself remaining quite outside and above the nature religions.
Lewis, C. S. (1994). God in the Dock. (W. Hooper, Ed.) (pp. 79–81). HarperOne.

In other words the pagans had long seen the reflection, the glory but knew not the author, its source. The Jews were the only ones to NOT serve the corn king, because they had the genuine article before them.

Three Options

This story of glory, lost and found seems to leave us with three large, worldview options.

The first is materialism, the pervasive public, yet minority religion. In it glory is simply a chemical/emotional experience of the brain that cannot endure beyond the material existence of the brain itself. The beauty of your child, of your lover, of your art will vanish with the eye that beholds it. You may have your moment of wonder but only a moment, and you must own the fact that it is a temporary illusion. This grim reality is likely why so few can really manage to live in this world without cheating, escaping into door number 2.

The second is paganism. This is the grand, disorganized and diverse project of trying to make nature work for us at every level. It imagines real glory but also supposed that we can finally, through material and spiritual means become the gods we’ve always wanted to become. We can, one way or another, become self-sufficient authors of our own realities for our own pleasures. We are successful makers of glory but unsuccessful securers of it. We are in the field of the weeds and the wheat producing fruit but imagining that at the end we can run away with the harvest.

Each story ends, however, in frustration and failure because our magic doesn’t work, our power is too short, and in the end we are insufficient to compete with our peers much less our maker.

The story of the Magi communicates to us the third option. We have enjoyed the stories of Nature-gods and played with them ourselves, but what we find here is not a nature-god but Nature’s God and our own.

This God is love, which means he creates the universe filled with glory, but he is not contained by it or limited to it. Nature is our sister. She would be a willing servant but she rebelled from us when we rebelled from our master and so we continually try to make her our slave.

This God is perfect in giving but finally right in claiming that all depends on him and goes back to him. He invites us into our rightful relationship with glory by our service to him and co-laboring in creation.

We anticipate the harvest of the weeds and the wheat as a refinement of the glory produced by God’s creation and humanity’s work within it. While the rebellious servants will not all come to the table the fruits of creation and culture can be redeemed.

We anticipate culture making and glory making to continue far beyond and with far less encumbrance than we see now in our period of rebellion. This is just, in fact, the beginning.

We see in the gift of the Magi the beginnings of the great harvest that the king they worshiped has already begun. We are the harvest, we are the harvestors, and we are the witnesses to, the product of, and the glad enjoyers of the glory that has come and is get to grow to its fullest.