And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” Jn. 1:14 NKJV
“The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.” Jn. 1:14 The Message
To behold “His glory” is to behold His stunning-ness. To become mesmerized by His surprising-ness...His jaw-dropping-ness...His eye-popping, take your breath away wonder. Unfortunately our day has reduced Christ to such a safe, mellow, unthreatening personage that He exudes a life of little more than maxed-out niceness. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Dorothy Sayers puts it so well:
“I believe it is a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it…We cannot blink the fact that Jesus meek and mild was so stiff in His opinions and so inflammatory in His language that he was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger. Whatever His peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference.”
“To those who knew him…he in no way suggests a milk-and-water person; they objected to him as a dangerous firebrand. True, he was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before heaven; but he insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites. He referred to King Herod as ‘that fox’; he went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a ‘gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners’; he assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; he showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humour that affronted serious-minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb.”
“…The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore – on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him “meek and mild” and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. Those who knew him, however…objected to him as a dangerous firebrand.”
Notice her recurring phrase for describing our Lord - “dangerous firebrand”. And she’s exactly right. Our Lord is the most dangerous and delightful Firebrand of all time. It’s all a part of His glory, you know. God save us from reducing Him to anything less.
Flashpoint: Jesus Christ - the same Firebrand yesterday, today, and forever.
