I must have been about thirteen years old when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out. There is that great scene towards the end where the bad guys open up the lost Ark of the Covenant. Indiana Jones and his companion close their eyes. Out flies the beautiful Angel of the Lord which turns into the Angel of death, and the bad guys melt like hot wax, dead Nazis everywhere. But Indiana survived because he did not behold the glory. A perfect ending for a thirteen-year-old boy, especially the bad guys melting, eyeballs and all. I loved it! Wonderfully gross.
Moses wanted to see God’s glory- again. The burning bush wasn’t enough, neither were the plagues of Egypt or the pillar of cloud and fire or the parting of the Red Sea. “God, what have you done for me lately.”
Obviously, Moses had not seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, God’s glory wasn’t something to play with!
God hid Moses in a cleft in the rocks and covered it while he passed by so Moses didn’t see the full glory of God’s face, only the diffused glory of God’s backside. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel literally has God mooning the Universe as he passes by. It would make a great bulletin cover! Lord show me your backside!
Show me your glory. Be real. Be undeniable. Be spectacular and overwhelming so that I know that you are there, so that I may see and believe, rather than believe and see.
If you study the lives of the Saints and the biographies of the so-called ordinary believers, powerful conversions and experiences of God’s presence are often followed by a profound sense of God’s absence.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, while still a young woman, had a profound experience of Jesus being present in the poorest of the poor that called her to serve the outcasts and the dying of Calcutta India.
Soon afterward that powerful presence disappeared to never return. The rest of her life, her entire ministry, the great living Saint for the whole planet, felt God to be absent from her life, one the great spiritual ironies of the 20th century.
She attended desperately to prayer, to the sacraments and to the poor to find God again. Faith is often an extreme endurance sport.
God show me your glory. Just enough. Not too much, but just enough. Don’t melt me, just make me feel alive like only you can do.
Where do we find God’s glory? Where do we look?
Irenaeus of Lyon wrote that Jesus is the glory of God, and beholding that glory keeps humanity alive.
John’s Gospel says something similar, that Jesus is the glory of God for us to see, the fullness of God’s Grace and truth.
And that glory of God that is Jesus, for John’s Gospel, is made most visible when Jesus washed the disciples’ feet, who are then commanded to do likewise, to love one another.
Show me your glory we pray.
The answer?
Wash one another’s’ feet, love one another, lift one another up.
God’s glory. It can melt us like wax. Yet it is found in the simple acts of love, day after day, that make for the life of faith. And we don’t have to close our eyes to survive it. Just the opposite in fact, open our eyes, behold and become fully alive, like only the backside of God’s glory can do.