Glory FROM God in the Highest!
2The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being… (Hebrews 1:3)
Mild he lays his glory by …
How do you picture glory? Light, splendor, brilliance, magnificence; exultation, joy beyond words, music, dancing, a city alight and ablaze with the celebration of a mighty victory; ascending ranks of angels, Heaven itself.
What usually does not come to mind is an animal feeding trough; labor and delivery; poverty, a cross.
Christmas is the story of the God of all glory coming down, down, down. The Glorious One emptying himself of all the marks and signs of divinity, Glory willingly making itself fully at home in that which hasn’t known much glory for a long, long, long time.
The immensity of God nested in a womb; the uncontainable laid in a manger; the Eternal entering into and accepting the limitations of space and time. The Word by whom all things were made willingly becoming a wordless baby who can only squall and cry and coo. The Most High becomes the most low. The Living One becomes obedient to death, even to death on a cross. He who knew no sin becomes sin for us, the Lion become Lamb.
Christ in us, the hope of glory.
In Christ, God comes down to us, that God might lift us up into himself. Jesus fully becomes who we are, that we might be fully one with who he is. No, we don’t “turn into” God – we become, finally and fully, who God has always intended us to be, people fit for his presence and purposes.
Mild – quietly, calmly, unobtrusively, unassumingly, -- he lays his glory by, because he wants us to become partakers of his original glory. To rescue us, he not only comes to where we are, he becomes who we are, subject to hunger and thirst, constrained by creaturely limits, mortal.
Born that man no more may die, he will defeat Death by dying in order to bring us to life, into the abundant, lavish, overflowing, unlimited life of God.
How glorious is a manger, a cross, an empty tomb?
More glorious than we have any idea of. But if we will unplug from all our noisiness and harken, if we will stop twisting our eyes every which way to catch the latest shiny thing and behold, he is more than willing to let us in on it.
Lord Jesus, the Glory of God and Light of the World, remake us in your image and likeness. Amen.
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2 Comments
Brian Dec 20, 2024 @ 7:18 am
Debbie Kiser Dec 20, 2024 @ 7:04 am