The Hope of Glory

By Canon Chris Palmer

This month, we mark the end of the Second World War, including the first use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Victory in Japan a few days later. There is a strange and disturbing complexity to these things. The horrors of nuclear attacks and the terrible legacy of human suffering sit alongside gratitude that the world was again at peace after six years of conflict. Around 80 million people died in World War II, including casualties on all sides, military and civilian, and those who died from associated illness, famine, and persecution. This figure includes, of course, 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

It has often been noted that the anniversary of Hiroshima coincides with the Feast of the Transfiguration on 6 August, and VJ Day with the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 15 August. These coincidences invite us to reflect on the horrific consequences of war in the context of the glory to which God calls all of us. The Transfiguration reveals the glory of Christ – both of his divine nature and the glory of his humanity. The Assumption speaks of Mary being received ‘both body and soul into heavenly glory’, and points to the hope of embodied resurrection life for all God’s people. These are the things of the Gospel, the hope of the immense and luminous life to which God calls us – a hope which brings together bodily existence and the glory of God. 

But it is a hope deeply shaken by the wholly destructive and terrible immensity of World War and nuclear bombs. Is the hatred and destruction of warfare just so great that holding on to the hope of glory and of resurrection becomes impossible? Is the mutilation of human bodies in warfare just so extreme that resurrection can never be more than an empty platitude?

I think it would be if it wasn’t for this one thing: that the resurrection body of Jesus had itself suffered the agony and destruction of human cruelty. His glorified body bears the nail marks and spear holes of his crucifixion. I said before that the Transfiguration reveals the glory of Christ’s divinity and his humanity. These are intimately connected, as St Irenaeus recognised: ‘The glory of God is a human being fully alive…’ This isn’t a glory that ignores or is ‘despite’ the messy suffering of our humanity, it is a glory and life that is discovered through suffering.

And there’s more – and here’s the real rub. It’s not just about recognising that our suffering tends towards our glory; rather that we have to recognise we have the glory to which God calls us comes through the sufferings of those we have victimised. Bishop Rowan Williams makes this point eloquently in his consideration of the resurrection: our victim is our hope. Or the theologian James Alison in discussing what it means to ‘know Jesus’, talks about the ‘intelligence of the victim’. We are invited to own our absolute dependence on and need to embrace the perspective and generosity of those we have victimised. Charles Wesley puts it, perhaps in a more catchy way:

‘died he for me who caused his pain,
for me who him to death pursued…’

We are complicit in the suffering of the world – from the suffering of Jesus to the horror of nuclear attacks – and only by owning our complicity and embracing those who we have victimised, and in a way free from defensive self-justification, will we discover the glory and resurrection life that God is inviting us to. And only by doing so are we likely to contribute to the peace which God desires for the world, rather than fuelling its ongoing warfare.