Today’s very brief gospel passage from St John concerns the so-called glorification of the Son of Man, and God’s glorification in him. “Glorification” is the event that shows forth dazzlingly, for all to see, the depths of God’s splendor and nature as love. And God’s glorification is an event because it is not like the automatic activity of the sun simply shining on and on in the sky before our eyes. Glorification involves deliberate acts of the will, the deliberate assuming of a stance as witness, regardless of the dangerous consequences. It happens when someone in the world speaks words and performs actions that manifest irrefutably that God’s power to create and to redeem is taking very precise form here and now, and is having the effect of transforming reality into something wholly new, wonderful and unforeseen.
The Lord Jesus clearly, everywhere in the Gospel, is the locus and the agent of God’s glorification in our world. His every word, gesture and action point to the infinite depths of God’s nature as unconditional love. Simply by being with us and interacting with us as the Son of God, Jesus is all the time making the unfathomable treasure of God’s goodness and light burst forth in our sight into the world and transform our hearts and lives. In this manifestation, we are struck with love by the arrow of God’s beauty.
But the reference to Judas at the very beginning of this gospel passage adds a new poignancy to the meaning of the Father’s “glorification” in and by the Son. Judas’ choices and destiny do not let us forget how the supreme glorification of the Father in the Son was achieved. Jesus our Lord glorified his Father supremely by pouring out the blood of his love into an abyss of gloom and treachery, as if wanting to fill to overflowing—with the substance of his being—the immense void of betrayal and refusal of love carved out by human malice. At the very moment Judas exits the room of the Last Supper, after Jesus had given them all his Body and Blood in the Eucharist and washed their feet with a servant’s humility, at that very moment Jesus exclaims: Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. In other words, the mechanism of betrayal which Judas is about to set in motion, and which will culminate in Jesus’ death on the cross, is the divinely appointed means for the full revelation of God’s glory to the world and all ages. Now, in this betrayal, does the event of God’s glorification begin to take place. The seed of Resurrection is already sown in the heart of betrayal by the love of Christ’s self-oblation.
Judas’ betrayal sets the scene for the last act in the drama of the world’s redemption, because it is in the excruciating defeat and immobility of the cross that Jesus will manifest the depths of God’s love for humanity. Jesus’ intense desire to make the Father’s love known through his own suffering and death is the power that drives the redemption of the world. The glory of the God of Jesus Christ consists in his loving infinitely and unconditionally those who least deserve this boundless love. This is a truly and purely divine glory because it so incredibly transcends any human and worldly conception of “glory”, always based on the glitz and glamor of possessions, reputation, brute power, violence, and self-centered achievements.
By contrast, the glory of the Lord is all about the power of endless self-giving, all about the very substance of God’s Being being made by God himself to flow forth from his Heart through the Person and Mission of the eternal and incarnate Son, until it reaches the depths of our own being. By allowing the cross, by sending his Son to offer himself as a sacrifice for the salvation of all, the Father demonstrates the unimaginable, the truth on which all our hopes and longings depend: namely, that God has not loved us, individually or collectively, any less than he has loved the eternal Son of his divine Heart since before the foundation of the world. It is a truth that must be believed precisely because it is so unbelievable! Who could have invented that proposition?
And we should not be surprised if this very brief but densely packed gospel passage then concludes with these words of Jesus: My children…, I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. In this context, the expressions my children and my disciples here used by Jesus signify far more than mere familiarity and affection: they are an intrinsic part of Jesus’ new commandment because they are nothing less than a forceful declaration of our divine pedigree. If Baptism and the Eucharist do indeed, through a lively faith, make us true children of God, true disciples of the eternal Son, then the divine blood coursing through our veins as a result of our divine regeneration will not allow us to live lives that have any vital principle other than the unconditional love of God himself. Communion in the Paschal Mystery of Christ connects us intimately to the Heart of God.
Henceforth we will not only draw all of our own life from this divine Heart, but, receiving life from the very Font of all life, we must in turn become fountains of life and salvation for others. Here is where the crucial element of choice and commitment on our part enters in. We must actively choose to love as we have been loved, which is unconditionally. This is what it means that we should love one another as Christ has loved us, and in this consists the novelty of this “new” commandment. Jesus did not invent love. In various manners, all profound religions and ethical systems point to the centrality of love as the core of both human and divine existence. But only the God of Jesus Christ so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (Jn 3:16).
To be a child and a disciple of Jesus means becoming here and now for one another what he has first been for us. In fact, our love for one another and for every suffering member of the human race is not only possible but absolutely necessary, because it is through us—his beloved Bride, the Church—that Christ chooses to be and act in the world and in history ever since his Resurrection and Ascension. We are a new creation in the Spirit, because the One who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” Therefore, if we are to be sharers in the divine glory, we too must glorify God in and with the Lord Jesus in this world by engaging in deep prayer and by speaking life-giving words and by performing actions that manifest irrefutably the power of God’s love to create and to redeem. None of this is our doing. As with Paul and Barnabas, this is what God has done with us.
