And the things of earth will grow strangely clear

Last updated on: November 11, 2022 at 3:56 pm by Jonathan Aigner

And the things of earth will grow strangely clear 2022-11-11T15:56:52-05:00 Jonathan Aigner

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A Beautiful Benediction

The truth is, turning our eyes upon Jesus doesn’t make the world grow dim. It’s dim enough without Christ. With Christ, it grows brighter, clearer. The things of earth are strangely, curiously brought into sharper focus. The world might be dying, but God is in the process of bringing it back to life.

That’s good news, and it changes everything. It changes how we care for the environment. It changes how we go about evangelism. It changes how we respond to social justice issues. It really changes the tenor of the Gospel reality. It calls us to yearn for peace instead of war, for justice instead of oppression, for more and more of the coming kingdom to be realized through our efforts.

All this is not to say that sin isn’t still all around us, but it’s not the truest part of creation, and there’s coming a time that all will be well in this currently chaotic world. And in that day, the wolf will lie with the lamb, and this world will be brighter than ever before.As so many from my background are, I was born and bred to be the morality police. Seriously. The message I got was, “Who gives a dang about anything goes on in the world, as long as nobody’s drinking, gay, or having lots of sex and abortions.” They wanted to turn their eyes in Jesus’ general direction to dissociate from all the things that offended their fundamentalist sensibilities.

But the clarity that comes from actually looking at him calls us to be more compassionate, to be less judgmental, to be okay with gray areas, to be completely not okay with injustice, and to engage with the world around us with hope and purpose.

N.T. Wright says it this way:

There’s an old chorus which begins, ‘Turn your eyes upon Jesus; look full in his wonderful face’. That’s a great invitation, but sadly it goes on ‘and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.’ There is a truth in that, but actually in today’s gospel a very different note is sounded: when we look fully at Jesus, risen, ascended and glorified, and when Jesus sends his Spirit on his people, then the things of earth will be seen in a new, sharp and properly disturbing light. And instead of escaping from the world, retreating like an embarrassed chameleon to one colour-field only, we are sent into the world, not to take on its colour but to reveal the new combined reality of heaven and earth, to live in that reality – which we do in sacrament here, and in service outside – and to declare to the awkward and unready world that Jesus is Lord. Pentecost is the end of the great cycle of events that began with Advent; but it is of course the beginning of the new world, the world of God’s kingdom, of his combined heaven-and-earth reality, the world in which, by praise and prayer and prophecy, we are now called to live without embarrassment and to love without measure.

And with all due respect to Ms. Lemmel, maybe we shouldn’t sing this one anymore.

Further reading:

N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, (New York: Harper), 2008.

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