what is glory? 7th week easter tuesday 2014

Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come.  Give glory to your son, so that your son may glorify you.”  What is glory?  What is the glory of the Son?  What is the glory which the Son renders to the Father?  When we read the gospel of John, glory and glorification refer to the cross for it is in the cross where Christ reveals the depth of his love for the Father and for us.  In times of great crisis those who receive and give the greatest honor are not those who survive but those who give the supreme sacrifice of their own lives for others.  Love is always proven by how much you are willing to sacrifice for others.

There was a time when self-actualization was the norm.  Even in psychology human fulfillment reaches its peak when we have become the best of who we are, when we have discovered our capacities and have actually succeeded in actualizing them, when we have developed our true potentials as a person becoming successful and rich, achieving the height of our careers and profession, heaping rewards after rewards for our achievements.  There was a time when the world defines happiness as individual achievement.

But more and more people have realized, and even psychology has now realized that this is not the peak human experience.  You may have everything in this world and still remain unhappy.  You may have attained what needs to be attained and yet remain unfulfilled.  Self-actualization is not the goal of human life.  It is not what makes man happy.  The goal rather is self-transcendence - when a person goes beyond thinking only of himself, when a person goes beyond doing things solely and primarily for his own good, when a person begins to think of others and does things for others even to his own disadvantage, when we do things beyond self-love, beyond the need for self-fulfillment, beyond our craving for personal success and accomplishment.  In other words in self transcendence we begin to think of others more than we think about ourselves, in our service, in our love.

This is the point of Jesus.  Glory is not about personal achievement.  Glory is the cross, the peak human experience is the cross, when we have offered our lives for the sake of others.

This is the reason also why we celebrate today the life and death of St. Charles Lwanga and companions, martyrs who have shown fortitude and courage in their faith.  We are celebrating today 22 martyrs composed of catechists, soldiers, judges, even teenagers who gave their lives to God in Uganda.  But martyrdom doesn’t have to be as gruesome as the one suffered by these 22 martyrs.  Martyrdom can be everyday when we go beyond ourselves and learn to serve and even sacrifice for others, even for people we do not know and care less.  Anything that makes us less egoistic, anything that makes us less concerned about our well-being and more about others is a martyrdom for they move us beyond our concern for the self.  We move to self-transcendence which makes life more fulfilling