Ordinary life discloses to us, in the experience of loving, this dimension of glory—discloses the transcendence of loving over everything else that a human being can do. The Gospel of John suggests to us that the divine glory, in that ultimate dimension in which it appears in the handing over of Jesus, is of this same shape, though on a vaster scale. There is in it something whose shape we know and can recognize—the shape of the glory of loving. There is in the God Who is disclosed in Jesus first the glory of signs and mighty works—the glory of free and unfettered activity and achievement; but when Jesus destines himself, by His own will and initiative, to wait at the end of exposure and helplessness, there is disclosed, as the ultimate dimension of the divine glory, that same glory which we dimly perceive in our own experience when, because we love, we destine ourselves to wait and to be exposed and to receive. The glory of that waiting figure in Gethsemane is not wholly strange and unfamiliar to us—not so strange that we could mistake it for misfortune and regard the figure with pity or sheer incomprehension. The glory of God which finally appears in the waiting figure in the Garden is the glory of that not wholly unfamiliar activity which always, in the end, destines itself to waiting—the activity of loving.
From The Stature of Waiting by W. H. Vanstone. © 1982, 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com.