All Glory, Laud, and Honor

This beautiful hymn expresses so wonderfully the glorious praise heaped upon Christ as He made His glorious entry into Jerusalem.  Imagine all the people gathering in the streets, laying out their cloaks and palm branches and shouting Hosanna to the Son of David! as He fulfilled the scriptures by riding in on a donkey.  This glorious event was a recognition of Christ as fulfillment of the prophecies and as the King, the Messiah.

What happened to change so quickly the people's hearts that they should go from praising and glorifying Him to calling for His death?  For it was only a short time later that they shouted instead: Crucify Him!  Crucify Him! 

Is it not the same thing that happens in our own hearts?  When all goes well and we see the brilliant path of God's plan, we praise and glorify Him, but as soon as we face trouble and discouragement or no longer feel a desire to serve Him we want nothing to do with Him.

Again and again we face this reality through our lives.  We are uplifted on the waves of joy and delight in His consolations and then crushed beneath the weight of desolation.

As we come to know this pattern more deeply and to understand His love more fully, perhaps we shall be able to abandon ourselves more perfectly in both joys and sorrows.  May He grant us that grace as we enter this Holy Week with Him!

Have You Been Transfigured?

Throughout our lives we face joys and sorrows, moments of great enlightenment and times of deep darkness, the toss and swell of waves in the sea of life.  Although we long to taste the pleasures without the pains, these opposites reflect and complement one another, working together into a pattern that one day we shall know in its fullness.

At times we may feel such elation in the face of some joyful experience that we feel we shall never taste sorrow again.  Love in particular may produce such fruit.

Then death or pain comes and we wonder how we shall ever taste joy again.

Yet ever we step forward, day by day, toward our resurrection, from joy to sorrow and then to joy again.  We are able to continue forward because of our transfiguration experiences.

The apostles standing at the Transfiguration saw Christ revealed in His glory with Moses and Elijah beside Him, talking with Him of the Crucifixion, the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.  For in that Transfiguration the apostles were given an experience of the glory shrouded in the Crucifixion that they might not despair when the time came.  Yet they wanted only to build tents there that the experience might never end.

It is ever so.  We wish to cling to those moments of transfiguration.  We do not understand—or do not wish to believe—that they are lights given us to carry us through our own crucifixions to the Resurrection.