6 minute read
Glory in the Lowest
Glory in the lowest
In a collection of paintings from the late 20th century, a website that focuses on depictions of Jesus in pop culture gathered versions of the nativity in contemporary settings. In each one, the artist offered visual conjecture if Christ had been born where they live.
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Most are set in cattle sheds of some kind. There’s a Nicaraguan lean-to, an English barn, a Congolese stable of branches lashed together, the porch of a Thai house, a Crow Nation teepee.
A painting by a Texas artist is set in a small apartment. Mary is lying in a single bed, cradling her infant. The night table beside her has a reading lamp and a white slimline Princess phone. There’s a bassinette nearby. A man, Joseph perhaps, looks on from a distant place. Outside, three men in business casual attire topped with birthday party hats are coming down the sidewalk, bearing gift boxes
PARTY HEARTY – Magi in birthday hats arrive for celebration in this contemporary rendering of the nativity by Texas artist James Janknegt.
– used by permission
that might have been wrapped at the credit counter at Sears. Apparently Magi still shopped at department stores in 1995.
The paintings are all reverential. The infant Jesus is often in the center of the composition or in the foreground. In some, there’s a light source overhead and in a couple Jesus himself is especially bright. His is not a reflected glory; Jesus himself is the light source.
Since the angels broke into the night sky over Bethlehem singing about the highest glory, humans have been surprised by the myriad ways God shows up. And still, depictions fail us, in words or pigments, of the divine doxa.
What complicates the matter more is that God shows up in lowly places, where the contrast may be more evident but harder to capture. Rendering sky-fields of angels in brilliant light with banners reading “Gloria in excelsis Deo” may be cliché, but it communicates. Pampers-swaddled Jesus in a Texas barrio—that’s more of a stretch. And yet he is there, in all his glory.
John said, “We beheld his glory,” but what did the apostle see that he understood to be glory? And now, as then, why does the glory keep popping up where it’s least expected?
Heavy, brother
A newborn baby weighs about as much as a gallon of milk, which is to say, not a lot. But when we consider the Holy Newborn, we have to think about weightiness. The concept stretches back to an Old Testament understanding of glory.
More than bright, shiny, or praiseworthy, glory has in its Hebrew roots “weight.” A new penny, a fresh scrubbed face, and a good report card may be bright, shiny, or praiseworthy, but they don’t have the weightiness that demands honor. What Moses experienced close-up at the burning bush the Hebrew people witnessed later from a distance in cloud and storm—the presence of God. That was glory.
That was kavod, almost too heavy to bear even from afar. The people knew kavod when they saw it (2 Chron. 5:14), and they knew kavod when it was absent (1 Sam. 4:21). The glory of God left no one scratching his head and asking if he had missed it.
Glory was a real concept for Israel. They were accustomed to God’s appearances in impressive places among impressive people, specifically among kings and priests and in the capital of the world as they knew it, Jerusalem.
They were not prepared for it among shepherds, carpenters, or in a quaint suburb six miles outside of the big city, but at Bethlehem the glory was revealed. The shepherds saw it first. “And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear” (Luke 2:9).
The heaviness of God’s glory is not to be taken lightly. Fearful shepherds knew it, even if they didn’t understand what was happening. God had interrupted their ordinary jobs as night watchmen with a declaration that bore investigation and repetition.
They saw the glory in the lowest of places—work.
From the shepherds onward, Jesus’ followers would find his glory in ordinary places and events: stables, roadways, temple porches, cemeteries, social gatherings.
Far from the throne room of heaven or a flight of angels in chorus, a wedding is a lovely celebration but relatively lower on the glory scale. But at such a festive event, Jesus chose to show the weightiness of his presence with a miracle; he turned water into wine. He blessed the couple, but he also honored his mother’s plea. Honoring father and mother is commanded in the Ten Commandments with same Hebrew root word for kavod (Exod. 20:12).
For John who was also present for the party, “This, the first of his signs…manifested his glory” (John 2:13). In New Testament Greek, it’s doxa, which produces our English word doxology.
“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” the company of heaven sings in Revelation 5:12. Ascribing such glory to the Lamb is not only for what he has done. It is more rightly for who he is.
John Piper describes God’s glory as “an attempt to put into words what God is like in all his magnificence and purity. It refers to his fullness of all that is good.”
The divine Presence of the universe is so amazing that all creation gives him glory because he is glory itself. Glory! But, can you believe it, he who is worshipped in heaven also chooses to express his glory down here with us.
On earth, the wedding at Cana was only the beginning of signs John catalogued. Jesus’ miracles were for friends in low places, if we may borrow from country singer Garth Brooks. The blind see miracles, as do the deaf, diseased, and demonized. God’s glory is made manifest for the least people in the most need, as Jesus revels in revealing the power of the Almighty in ways that elevate the lowest and confound the highest. He did so all the way to the cross.
“And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed,” Jesus prayed on the night before he was crucified (John 17:5). Even at Calvary, he was simply being himself, glorified in heaven, glorified on earth; glory in the highest, glory in the lowest.
And he still does today, everywhere he shows up.
Eric Reed is editor of Illinois Baptist media.
