Weight of Glory
“So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure…”
2 Corinthians 4:16-17
Much like the dual nature of the season of Advent in which we focus on the birth of Jesus and celebrate the eventual coming of Christ in the future, Easter also has a dual focus.
More than anything, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus in the season of Easter, however, in that celebration, we tend to look ahead to when our lives are over and rise to new life in God’s heavenly kingdom. During Easter, we become aware of that entry into God’s glory. In that eternal Easter, we will rise from death to life and become a part of that same glory. The immensity of that glory is reflected in Paul’s words above as “weighty.”
It can also become “weighty” in a negative sense if we become too preoccupied in this life with the gift of that glory that is to come. For that gift was not given to us to feel self-important or treat this life, this world and those in it, as insignificant — and in doing so, forget the admonition of our Savior to “love our neighbor as ourselves.”
As C. S. Lewis wrote, we generally overlook or ignore the same “weighty” glory of our neighbors. In his essay, “The Weight of Glory,” written one year after the Battle of Britain and once America entered World War II, Lewis is particularly concerned about living in the present and living for one another. He writes, “It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour .The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken … It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”[1]
As we near the end of this Easter season, we should remember to grasp our own lives lightly, while shouldering our neighbors’ lives more heavily. In so doing, we fully embrace Jesus’ call to be His followers and take on the “weight of glory beyond all measure.”
[1] C. S. Lewis, “Weight of Glory and Other Addresses,” ed. Walter Hooper and excerpted in The Essential C. S. Lewis, ed. Lyle W. Dorsett (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1988), 369.
