Sermon by the Rev. Ross Kane
The Rev. Ross Kane
Proper 5 Year B, June 9, 2024, St. George’s Arlington
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
“For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.” -2 Corinthians 4:17
“An eternal weight of glory,” Paul says; quite a phrase. Paul juxtaposes images such that the phrase seems both heavy and light at the same time. An “eternal weight” feels overwhelming. “Glory”, however, Glory feels uplifting, even freeing.
This mixture reminds me of the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, with its contrast between heaviness and lightness. Kundera portrays human life as caught between a sense of heaviness and importance on the one hand, and fleeting lightness on the other. He poignantly portrays this tension in all his characters, but most especially in his main character Tomas, a talented surgeon working in Prague during the Cold War.
Tomas knows heaviness, the sense that life carries profound importance, yet this heaviness east of the Iron Curtain becomes too much to bear. Amid the brutal state politics, Tomas publishes a letter in the newspaper challenging the Communists, only to then get arrested and ultimately silenced. Amid this turmoil Tomas embrace’s life’s lightness through his perpetual adultery, finding a new--if fleeting--significance from each encounter.
For Kundera, humans sense that we must choose between lightness or heaviness. Heaviness represents a sense that humans seek some larger significance--something eternal--beyond the humdrum of everyday life. Lightness, on the other hand, reflects life’s transitory nature. If life is simply one event after another, lacking any wider meaning, then “everything is pardoned in advance,” Kundera writes, and “therefore everything [is] cynically permitted”. The ultimate irony for Kundera is that whether we choose heaviness or lightness, both prove unbearable. Heaviness is unbearable because eternity is an illusion; lightness is unbearable because life becomes fleeting, robbed of moral responsibility and meaning.
* * *
Enough on Kundera for now; you came to church to hear good news, right?! Paul, I think, would have no qualm per se with Kundera’s paradox of lightness and heaviness in human life--humans carry “an eternal weight of glory” Paul says, after all. In Christian terms, we could put the tension this way: the fact that our lives carry eternal consequence, that we are made in God's image and made to participate in God's divine life - this gives a weightiness to life. To that body that one day will again become dust, surely eternity is greater and seemingly heavier than anything we can experience. How can mortality carry immortality? How can human beings, in all our frailties and imperfections and weaknesses, carry with us a sense of the divine without being overwhelmed by the glory of God’s beauty and love? The glory of God is weighty because we human beings carry our mortal bodies with us while also somehow carrying the eternal. The mortal and the eternal both dwell within us. Kundera is right, at least in his diagnosis: the idea of eternity feels weighty and even, at times, unbearable.
For Paul the same contrast is there but it plays out differently. It’s not that we choose between lightness and heaviness; it’s rather that they’re already mingled together in this life. Paul does not see us stuck between lightness and heaviness, neither of which gives any meaning. Paul does not see us destined for Kundera’s modern malaise.
Instead, Paul sees human beings traversing through our heaviness in order to achieve glory. And the more we traverse through the heaviness, the more light and glory we can see and experience.
* * *
However burdensome the life of faith may seem, however hard and tedious it might feel to follow the path of doing what’s right over and again every day--loving neighbors and nurturing a spiritual life--it leads somewhere. It leads to what our scriptures call “fullness of joy”, “radiant light”, “the glory of God”. It leads to a life that is more satisfying than living for what is fleeting or what is petty.
We grow as we traverse through the heaviness. Growth is an unappreciated theme in Paul’s letters. Elsewhere he beckons us to “grow into the full stature of Christ.” (What an image, right? It’s like he’s saying “You there--become Jesus”!) Here in 2 Corinthians he asks us to anticipate the weight of glory that is on its way to us. While we are amid heaviness and lightness, we are ever moving toward greater lightness and greater light. And so we can journey forward amid the heaviness of life knowing that the glory of eternal love can slowly and persistently grow in us.
A problem with lots of 20th century European philosophers and novelists, I admit, is that they’re better at diagnosing a problem than giving us a way through. If Kundera is spot on in the diagnosis, Paul is spot on in the response. It is not that lightness is fleeting and the heaviness of eternity is an illusion. Rather, our sense of lightness comes from the limitations of mortality which cannot bear, cannot contain, the fullness of love that is divinity. Our heaviness is only the temporary heaviness of carrying eternal love with us without yet seeing its fullness. And each day, when we strive for it, we can see a bit more of that eternal love. When we live that way - ever growing in love, each day getting closer and God’s vision of love and justice and becoming a little more like Jesus - the lightness of being becomes not unbearable but glorious. AMEN.