The Power and the Glory

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.22.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 12:20-33

Listen to Audio Here:

“For thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory.”

Man, again with the tough bits of prayer, for reasons that go well beyond theological parsing and playing around with words.  Here, we’re closing on the end of this greatest prayer that Jesus taught, and the familiar lilting cadence of that perfectly churchy conclusion starts to wrap up, back and forth in a rhythm that seems made for worship.

In the Greek of Matthew’s Gospel, it reads, hoti sou estin he basilea, kai he dunamis, kai he doxa.  Basilea meaning kingdom, dunamis--like dynamic or dynamo--meaning power, and doxa--which gives us the prefix for doxology, that song we sing after the little collection baggies go around--meaning glory.  It’s a part of the prayer we know, part of the way it comes out every time we pray it.  

Wonderful.  Perfect ending to a perfect little prayer.  Thanks, Jesus!  

Only...um...that passage is not actually there in your bible.  I mean, really.  Take a moment, and look at Matthew 6:13.  Not there.  Not in the New Revised Standard Version.  Not in the New International Version.   Oh, it is if you’re reading from the King James, but it’s not part of any recent direct translation.  Just isn’t in there, because most of the most ancient authorities did not have it, and those were manuscripts the King James translators didn’t have yet, because in the year 1611, archeologists hadn’t found them yet.  Again, a significant majority of the most ancient and reliable manuscripts agree: the prayer does not contain those words.  The most ancient authorities indicate that the prayer originally in Matthew was almost exactly identical to the prayer we find in Luke 11:1-4.  

This section comes to us later, hundreds of years after Jesus, as the communities that had gathered to celebrate and follow Jesus added in a conclusion so that the prayer would end, you know, like a prayer.  That’s why there are, in the Greek texts of the ancient church, no less than ten different endings to this verse.  Ten.  

Otherwise, we’d come to a screeching halt at “but deliver us from evil.”  And...um...what?  No Amen?  I can’t even get an Amen?  The text doesn’t give it to us.

So what to do with this bit, this ending, when we know as certainly as reliable scholarship can tell us that this wasn’t part of what Jesus taught?

A clue, a wee little inkling of a clue, can be found in the passage from John’s Gospel this morning.  

John’s Gospel, the record of the Beloved Disciple, is a tiny bit hard to figure out.  The way that John tells us about Jesus is different from the way that the other three Gospels pitch out that message.  If it’s Mark, Matthew, or Luke...particularly Matthew and Luke...the stories come one after another.  

The three synoptic gospels, the three that are “seeing-together,” they offer up the storytelling of Jesus of Nazareth, as he forces us to use our imaginations about the nature of the Reign of God, meaning what the world looks like when we all are living according to the love of God.  Those stories make us use our brains as we try to grasp the message that Jesus came into the world to deliver.

But John doesn’t roll like that.  Instead, this much more intimate Gospel tends to record challenging conversations, prayers and peculiarly subtle sayings that play with language in odd mystic ways.  Unlike Mark and Matthew and Luke, the focus of those conversations is not God’s Kingdom here on earth, but Jesus talking about how he personally is living that out.  This is who I am, Jesus says.  This is how you can be.

It’s a strange story, this reflection, as we first hear of some Greeks...meaning, Greek-speaking citizens of the Roman Empire who were not Jewish...who ask if they can meet with Jesus.  The story goes wildly amiss from there, as Jesus answers them with a strange nonsequitur, suddenly talking about his death in oblique and challenging ways.  He’s talking to a crowd, and the the Greek speakers are forgotten, washed away, like a thread of a story that no longer seems relevant to the conclusion.  Jesus instead talks about glory, and about how the glory of who he is...the doxa...is woven up with the glory of the Creator.

What I am doing, you can do.  You are part of this thing, he says.  You are called to live this life too, and to share in it.  Follow me, and be where I am.

It’s an intense teaching, made all the more intense because right as he’s wrapping up, he gets an answer from above.

Rrrrumble, go the heavens, right at exactly the moment he’s making his point.  Some folks hear God speaking.  Some hear angels.  Most just hear thunder, but it makes everyone shiver just a little bit.   My glory is God’s glory, says Jesus.  And then, You will be honored, as I am honored.  You will be glorified, as I am glorified.

We hear this, and we’re like, yeah, awesome.

Because we like glory.  We like power.  And we sure do like being in charge of things.  Well, maybe I can’t speak for all of y’all, but I can talk with some authority about myself.  I really like that stuff, in ways that are a constant challenge spiritually.  

Glory?  That’s the brightness, the shine, the sparkle, the thing that you look at in wonder and awe.  Glory is you lying flat on your back in the grass on a fourth of July night, when the light and thunder of that display you’re sitting just a tiny bit too close to fills the whole field of your vision, a riot of leaping colors and brightness, the concussions filling your hearing, so intense you feel them in you deep, a whole body hearing.  And even though you’ve seen it dozens of times in your life, and you’re supposed to be all grown up and jaded, you go, Wow.  You just can’t help it.

We want that to be us.  We like it when people see us, and go, Wow.  That’s wow in a good way, and not because of our tendency to wear white socks with dress shoes or because of our less-than-perfect haircut.  We like glory.  Glory is what we value, what we celebrate.  It is the goal and dream of our culture, to be celebrity, to be the bright shiny one, noted by all, our every post with five hundred likes and an endless stream of admiring comments.  

We like that, that, and power.  We like power more.  We are dynamic!  We’re a dynamo!  We like knowing that we can make things happen, that we can get it all done, that we’re completely capable of accomplishing anything we wish to accomplish.  We will get it all done, every single thing on our list.  We will meet every need, we will go to every meeting and do every last thing that’s expected of us.  Sure, it’ll drive us crazy, leave us stressed and in a ruin of mental chaos, but gosh-darn it, we’re going to try.  We will repair that toilet, we will, and there’s just no way in the world we need to call a plumber, because we’ve got this.  Do you remember where the water shut-off valve is, honey?  And you didn’t need any of our towels any time soon, did you?  We like to feel ourselves in control of our lives, in our homes, in our education, in our politics, in every conversation we have and everything we do.  We.  Like.  Power.

And the kingdom, or the “reign?” That has everything to do with authority over territory, which has to do with power.  Here, the place that we rule!  This place is ours!  And human beings are very, very peculiar when it comes to the places that we assume are ours.  This land is my land, we may sing, but our lives mumble the part where we say this land is your land.  We’d much rather it be ours, because that space is the space where we do our thing.  Like when I was a kid, and my Mom and I would sit up in the balcony of the church where I grew up, all the better to pass notes and to whisper about things to one another.  Sometimes, every once in a while, someone would come and sit right where we usually were, and it was just so easy to feel grumpy about it.  That’s our turf, I’d think, as I started humming a song from West Side Story to myself.  Or when I come into the Starbucks where I often sit when my youngest son is at drum practice, and someone is already in that nice chair off in the corner where I like to write and study.  Grumble grumble grumble.  They’re in my spot, the spot that is mine because it belongs to me because I sit there and it’s mine.

But the early church, the church that wrote this prayer?  They knew exactly the nature of Christ’s power, glory, and kingdom.  It belonged to God.  Was a part of God.  And it bore no resemblance to the glory, the power, and the kingdom that we’re used to.  In fact, it subverted all of that.  

That sense of power or glory as something that is owned and ours?  That doesn’t stand, not in the face of our acknowledging that what we’re asking to share in is the glory we see in a Jesus who set it all aside for the love of not just those who followed him, but those who would take his life.

Because it’s not our power, glory, or control that rests at the heart of this prayer.  That power transcends us.  The early church knew it, as the Spirit taught it to them, and so when we pray that prayer, we can add that in with confidence that it’s really kinda sorta what Jesus was getting at anyway.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.