Glorified by God

Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent
John 8:51-59
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/032626.cfm

When Jesus was asked, “Who do you make yourself out to be?”, he answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is worth nothing; but it is my Father who glorifies me,of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’“

There are a lot of ways we glorify ourselves and how we identify ourselves. Our identities come with a sense of pride and judgment and opinions from others. There are all kinds of these judgments. We do it with gender, race, age, sexual orientation, ancestry. I always thought my heritage was primarily German so I identified it and the good attributes about German people and none of the bad. When I took an ancestry test and found out I was far less German than I anticipated, it took me some time to process that change in identity.

I live in St. Louis area and everyone from the area wants to know where a person went to high school; it’s a way to size a person up. It lets them provide judgments about social class. It sounds very innocent, but it comes with a lot of baggage. We also make presumptions about birth order and form judgements about others depending on their birth order. We do this with generations, income, organizational associations, hobbies, health, appearance, profession, etc. It’s hard for us to go beyond how we identify ourselves and how we identify others. Ask yourself the question asked to Jesus, “Who do you make yourself out to be?” Take a minute and truly reflect on it: who do you make yourself out to be?

Ultimately, we put a lot of value in how we identity ourselves and how others identify us. It can be a driver of a lot of our actions. But, what if we could give that identity over to God. Let go of the control, the performances, the playing, the attire, the styling and just let yourself be. No matter what you put on yourself, it pales in comparison to God's image of you. That image is who you truly are, not what you layer on top of it. That person is who God glorifies, but we’re keen to play roles and play into expectations we place on ourselves.

As we approach the end of this Lent, let us try to connect with the core of who we are, free from our presumptions and projections. Let us learn to just be in our unique creation, ever trying to grow and expand it in loving relationships with others and God.