On that day the branch of the Lord shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and glory of the survivors of Israel. Whoever is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem, once the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning. Then the Lord will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over its places of assembly a cloud by day and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night. Indeed over all the glory there will be a canopy. It will serve as a pavilion, a shade by day from the heat, and a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain (Isaiah 4:2-6).
In my career of over forty years as a psychotherapist, thousands of souls have shared their struggles and stories with me in confidence. Meanwhile, a consumer society swirls about the office. The traffic outside the door goes to and from services and markets to which we travel for what we want. Merchants and providers take our money, assuming we know what we want, or at least they feel confident in convincing us what we want.
I provide a service too. People come because they sense a need, a desire for something better. First, I ask them what they want from meeting with me, and they answer with varying degrees of certainty. Many confess they do not know. I appreciate their honesty. Because as our conversations unfold, we find ourselves, more times than not, searching for what they really want. Defining what they want is often half the battle.
Desire fills and consumes us, but we really spend our lives trying to identify what we want. We do not really know. Owning that may embarrass us. But the search just to define and recognize what we want helps make the journey of life worth the trouble. It makes it interesting. Moreover, what we want most deeply is much nobler and more beautiful than we consciously realize.
In scripture, the word for what we want is “glory.” In our competitive society, we associate glory with winning the Super Bowl, playing lead guitar before thousands of adoring fans, having enough money to pay off the national debt, or supermodel looks. But that idea of glory reflects our idolatry. We take an attribute of God and apply it to a substitute.
“Glory” in scripture refers to God’s loving, welcoming, and beautiful presence available for us to experience. “The branch of the LORD shall be beautiful and glorious,” begins our reading from Isaiah, and to speak of God’s glory refers to beauty, how it calls our attention to God. “A cloud by day and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night” (v.5) recalls God’s guiding presence in the exodus. Amid glory, we speak of “seeing God,” whether we do so literally or not.
When Moses asked God atop Mount Sinai, “Show me your glory,” God refused full disclosure, only allowing a view of God’s back in passing (Ex 33:18-23). So much beauty, so much love, so much light would have overwhelmed and killed Moses. God hides because God has mercy.
Glory also connotes significance. The moment of seeing God – and it is typically just a moment – gathers all your life story before and after into a meaningful whole. Many tell me about such moments in therapy. While most come away from these moments with some kind of faith they will not ever fully relinquish, some dismiss the experience because they find it too overwhelming, too unfathomable to manage.
But they want that significance nonetheless. They want that beauty in their lives. They want the welcoming love of God. They want to see God. When I ask at the beginning of the first interview what they want, nobody says they want glory. But at the heart of the desires that confuse and vex them, that lead them to starve themselves for beauty, to try to control people they cannot or submit to control in flight from freedom, to give up a thousand hopes to avoid one disappointment, I know they want to see God.
We seldom discuss that. It would overwhelm us both. Such is mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Mt 5:8), Jesus promised. Purity avails us of God’s glory. Jesus’s blessing of the pure in heart culminates a long biblical struggle that moves from an emphasis on purity as social identity to more of a matter of the heart.
In Isaiah 4:2-6, we see both dimensions of purity with an emphasis on social identity. These verses follow a judgment of the privileged and powerful as vain and indifferent to the needy, as symbolized by wealthy women preening themselves and preoccupied with finery. After judgment, they find themselves filthy and bloody, bald and wearing sackcloth, pleading for a man to protect them in a harem (Is 3:13-4:1).
Hence, in our image of glory, “The Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem” (v.4). Their impurity begins within, in unjust hearts, but manifests in the social injustice of self-glorification at the expense of God’s beloved poor. The prophet uses the imagery of bodily uncleanness and cleansing to make the point. Our image of glory afterward depicts a people cleansed “by a spirit of judgment and a spirit of burning,” a purifying fire.
Once purified, they can see God, abide in God’s glory. In the religions of antiquity, deities required that mortals purify themselves to come into their presence. Jesus never disputed that. But whereas Isaiah 4:2-6 depicts a few remaining purified ones under a canopy separate from outsiders, Christ blew away the canopy and offered that all, Jew and Gentile, with pure hearts will see God.
Most scholars agree that a post-exilic editor inserted Isaiah 4:2-6. After the people returned to Jerusalem from exile, they emphasized restoring social identity amid Gentile neighbors. From this perspective, God welcomes us insofar as we are insiders, not outsiders. Such exclusivism easily degenerates into the belief that God does not welcome us if we keep outsiders among us. That exclusivism showed up in Nazi Germany where the Aryan majority saw their loss in World War I as God’s judgment for having the Jews among them. It shows up in America today with white supremacism alive and well in our halls of power.
Jesus challenged this understanding first by violating it regularly, talking with women and foreigners, touching the sick, and breaking dietary and Sabbath codes – all marks of impurity in that context. Then he taught with shocking hyperbole to detach from anything that lures us from what we most deeply desire, the glory of God. For example, he commanded tearing out your right eye if it makes you fixate on a beauty less than God (Mt 5:29). A pure heart has a singular focus on God. In this way, Jesus shifted the emphasis from social identity to personal integrity before God.
Not that social relations mattered little to Jesus. To the contrary, he offended insider-outsider purity by offering a Samaritan, a despised outsider, as the model of a good neighbor. Furthermore, when the Samaritan handled a bloodied and naked man to help him, that violated purity codes. The priest and Levite who did not help preserved their purity to present themselves to God in the Temple (Lk 10:25-37). But to Jesus, purity is now a matter of inclusion, not exclusion, even if it means getting blood on your hands.
He taught that it is not what we put in our mouths that purifies us, not whether we eat the kosher food that marks us as a group. It is what comes out of our mouths because our words express our hearts (Mt 15:11). Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
The good neighbor has a pure heart. Whenever you feed the hungry and thirsty, visit the sick and imprisoned, or clothe or shelter the naked or the alien – contact with whom would make you impure by the old social identity standard – you do so for Christ. You purified yourself by loving and came into divine presence, unawares (Mt 25:31-46).
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Did you know that, whatever your struggle, that is what you want, to see God? Tap into that desire. Living out of that desire purifies your heart. What a wonderful circle! Just desire the blessing, and you have it!
But it is also very challenging and takes a lifetime. For as Soren Kierkegaard said, “Purity of heart is to will one thing,” and so much competes with our desire for God. So many glittering, gorgeous things pose as glory. Every chapter of our lives involves letting go of attachment to things that vie with God for our worship. Embracing the way of inner integrity challenges us to such inner work, to spiritual formation.
Paradoxically, we need each other as we pursue that inner work. The formation that comes with prayer and worship, with communion with one another over word and sacrament, with confession and loving intention, with service to people in seemingly godless predicaments: Those constitute the way of life marked by baptism.
Throughout that challenging life, replete with suffering and joy, you will learn what you want. And you will find it, ultimately, after you fully realize that God’s glory, God’s welcoming presence, found you long before.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God (Matthew 5:8)
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