Over the next few weeks, we are going to be looking at…
Signs of Glory & Broken Signposts
One of the central themes of John’s Gospel is glory.
Glory is one of those big words that we all have a sense of what it might mean but it goes beyond that into other areas entirely.
In ancient Hebrew, the word for glory kavod has to do with weight.
- something that is weighty
- something that means something
- something that matters
- something that you can’t ignore
Glory spills over in two directions
On the one hand, it spills over into authority and rule, so that when the Psalmist says that God has put humans into a position of glory and authority, it means that they have all the other creatures of the world subject to them. That’s the glory and honour that God has given to human beings. This is picked up in a passage like Romans 8 where the authority of humans, because they are now in Christ, is the thing through which God is going to remake the world.
But there is also a sense of the visibility of glory and the glory of the divine presence. So that when the glory of God comes to dwell in the tabernacle in Exodus 40, or in the temple in 1 Kings 8, the priests can’t stand to minister, because the glory of the Lord has filled the house
- and it’s dazzling
- and it’s radiant
- and they can they can’t bear to look at it
At the beginning of the Book of Ezekiel, when Ezekiel sees the vision of the divine throne chariot with this figure sitting on this throne, he falls down on his face as though he’s dead. The glory has to do both with the authority of God over the world and with the extraordinary radiance of God’s presence within the world and then dangerously and strangely with the human beings who are called to stand at that intersection of heaven and earth.
Here are the passages and themes we will be looking at
7 signs of glory
- Changing water into wine at Cana John 2:1–11
- Healing the royal official’s son in Capernaum John 4:46–54
- Healing the paralytic at Bethesda John 5:1–15
- Feeding the 5000 John 6:5–14
- Jesus walking on water John 6:16–24
- Healing the man blind from birth John 9:1–7
- The raising of Lazarus John 11:1–45
7 broken signposts
- Spirituality turned inward
- Love turned selfish,
- Justice is denied,
- Beauty is defaced,
- Freedom is taken,
- Truth is skewed,
- Power is abused
