Jesus Glorified
Jesus Spoke
the cross was the glory of Jesus because it was the completion of his work. ‘I have accomplished the work’, he said, ‘which you gave me to do.’ For him to have stopped short of the cross would have been to leave his task uncompleted.
The folklorist and writer of short stories H. L. Gee tells of an incident from the Second World War. Attached to one of the Air Raid Precautions Stations in Bristol, there was a boy messenger called Derek Bellfall. He was sent with a message to another station on his bicycle. On his way back, a bomb mortally wounded him. When they found him, he was still conscious. His last whispered words were: ‘Messenger Bellfall reporting—I have delivered my message.’
A famous painting from the First World War showed an engineer fixing a field telephone line. He had just completed the line so that an essential message might come through, when he was shot. The picture shows him in the moment of death, and beneath it there is the one word, ‘Through!’ He had given his life, that the message might get through.
That is exactly what Jesus did. He completed his task; he brought God’s love to men and women. For him that meant the cross; and the cross was his glory because he finished the work God gave him to do; he made people forever certain of God’s love.
“I glorified You on the earth, bhaving accomplished the work which You have given Me to do.
5 “Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.
6 “I have manifested Your name to the men whom You gave Me out of the world; they were Yours and You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.
7 “Now they have come to know that everything You have given Me is from You;