• What is the eternal weight of glory?
• Is Paul calling your affliction light?
• What did Christ mean by heal the sick?
• A sermon preached in wartime Oxford
• Who carries the weight now?

What is the eternal weight of glory?

The eternal weight of glory is what Paul says God is working in us, and in his sentence it is the heavy side of the scale. Read it slowly. For that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation, worketh for us above measure exceedingly an eternal weight of glory. Momentary faces eternal, and light faces the eternal weight of glory.

The Latin keeps the balance. Paul’s trouble is momentaneum et leve, momentary and light; what it works is aeternum gloriae pondus, the eternal weight of glory. The Greek he wrote has the same pair: elaphron, light in weight, and baros, a load.

That pairing is older than Paul. In the Hebrew Scriptures the ordinary word for glory is kabod, and Strong’s lexicon gives its proper sense as weight, from a root meaning to be heavy. When Paul speaks of an eternal weight of glory, he is drawing on the word’s root sense.

Then the sentence does what no balance can. Above measure exceedingly, says the Douay; supra modum in sublimitate, says the Latin. Paul sets up a scale and then says the eternal weight of glory will not fit on it.

So the eternal weight of glory is not a reward stacked against your pain until the pain loses. It is a weight so great that Paul gives up measuring it, and he says it is being worked in nobis, in us.

Is Paul calling your affliction light?

No. Paul is weighing his own affliction, not yours, and the verse says so: tribulationis nostrae, our tribulation. A sentence about the eternal weight of glory is easy to turn outward and use on somebody else.

Here is the reading that does harm. Someone in a wheelchair, or in the tenth year of a pain no scan can explain, hears a visitor call their suffering momentary and light and tell them to fix their mind on the eternal weight of glory. It is said kindly. It lands as a verdict that what they live with is small.

I want to name who carries this, because the verse’s own grammar asks for it. Disabled people and people living with chronic illness have had the eternal weight of glory quoted at them from the foot of hospital beds and from pulpits, almost never by the one in the bed.

So read what Paul calls light. In this same letter he lists it: five times forty stripes save one, three times beaten with rods, once stoned, three times shipwrecked, a night and a day in the depth of the sea. That is what he calls momentary and light. He is not shrinking anyone’s suffering. He is saying that even his own is outweighed by an eternal weight of glory that breaks the scale.

A person may set their own load beside the eternal weight of glory and call it light. No one standing beside them has the right to do it for them.

Test the reading by what it grows. A church that hands the eternal weight of glory to people in pain as a reason to stop complaining grows people who stop telling the church the truth about their bodies. A church that lets Paul speak for himself grows people who can say this hurts, and still trust that an eternal weight of glory is being worked in them.

What did Christ mean by heal the sick?

He meant care. In the Latin the command is curate infirmos, and Lewis and Short give curo first as to care for, to take care of, and only then, in medical language, to heal or cure. The Greek of Luke, therapeuete, comes from a verb whose first sense in Thayer’s lexicon is to serve, and whose second is to heal. The Church has too often heard only the second.

Read the sentence to its end. And heal the sick that are therein, and say to them: The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you. In the sentence’s own grammar, the people told that the kingdom has come near are the sick, where they live, and the sentence does not make the good news wait on how the care turns out.

That closes a door that has hurt many disabled people. The teaching that a body must be fixed before it belongs, or that a cure withheld means faith was lacking, cannot be built from this verse. The order is care, then good news, and the good news is not a reward for recovering. Neither is the eternal weight of glory.

St. John Leonardi knew both halves of the word. He spent his youth learning to prepare remedies, and he died in Rome in 1609 of influenza caught while ministering to the sick. The Church does not remember him for a cure. It remembers him for going.

In July this Gospel stood beside St. Ignatius and asked whether time taken by illness is lost time, and Thursday’s offering asked where a church’s money goes. Today asks who may weigh another person’s pain against the eternal weight of glory, and what the Church is sent to say to the sick.

A sermon preached in wartime Oxford

On Sunday evening, 8 June 1941, with Britain at war, C. S. Lewis preached at Solemn Evensong in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. He took his title from today’s Epistle, from the eternal weight of glory. The sermon was called The Weight of Glory, and the journal Theology printed it that November.

Near the end, Lewis turned the verse toward the pews. The eternal weight of glory, he argued, is not only something waiting for each of us. It is also the glory of the person beside us: the load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back.

Think of a sickroom. The person in the bed is not a lesson in patience laid out for visitors. They are someone in whom an eternal weight of glory is being worked, and it presses on everyone who walks in. Lewis does not ask the sick to carry their pain lightly. He asks everyone else to carry their glory heavily.

That is what a person in pain needs from any of us: not a speech about how small their suffering is, but someone who understands the eternal weight of glory being worked in them.

Who carries the weight now?

Put the readings together and they ask one thing of a church. The Gospel sends us to the sick with care and good news. The Epistle says the eternal weight of glory is being worked in people whose bodies are wearing out, and that their suffering is not for anyone else to call light.

The Collect asks that we so profit by St. John Leonardi’s instituta, his teaching, that we reach everlasting rewards. Its Latin remembers that God raised him up ad fidem in gentibus propagandam, for spreading the faith among the nations, the same word that named Propaganda Fide. A man who helped found the Church’s office for the missions is honoured with a Gospel about being sent to the sick, and an Epistle about the eternal weight of glory.

So here is the work. Go to the sick and serve them. Tell them the kingdom has come near them, whether or not they get better. Never call anyone’s affliction light unless you are the one carrying it. That is how a church honours the eternal weight of glory in someone else.

If you are the one in the bed today, hear this. Your pain is not small, and no verse in Scripture requires you to say it is. Paul does not promise that your suffering weighs little. He promises an eternal weight of glory worked in you, heavier than anything you have had to carry.

If none of the theology is yours, the human half still stands. Do not tell another person how heavy their life is. Sit with them, bring what helps, and treat them as someone of great weight.

↑ The order resumes below.