https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uiGMWTUSh5Q
You, in your Rumpelstiltskin talk, we’re talking about death and glory. How does that relate to Christ being a perfect mediator? Yeah, so I would say that that is a good place to go because there’s a mystery, right? There’s this mystery that we find, you know, we could call it the problem of suffering, the problem of death, you know, it is in some ways the mystery that a lot of people struggle with. And I think that what Christ shows, and it’s very difficult to talk about this because we don’t want to make light of suffering and death, but what Christ seems to show is that the reason for death and suffering is that they can be transformed into glory and that there is in some ways a connection between the two, which is, which you could say is there at the outset, which is there at the origin. So it’s not a, it’s not a, although it’s mysterious and it’s difficult, it’s also not completely opaque. That is, glory is the overflowing of something, right? It is, glory of something is not directly related to its essence, right, or its essential characteristics, but it is the effect that it has in the world, right? It is the, it is the impact that it has. It is the radiance that it has. It is the overflowing of that being into other, into other things. And so once you understand that, you can understand that in some ways it is a form of multiplicity. It’s a form of, a form of multiplicity, which if broken off from its source can become fragmentation, can become death. So when you look at the way that, for example, St. Paul talks about it, you’ll get a good Because in the one hands, he’ll say, you know, run the race, win the prize, get the glory, get the crown, right? Do all the, do all this stuff and you’ll get the crown and that crown will participate in God’s glory. And then he’ll turn around and say, works are dead. You know, you’re not saved by works, right? It’s like, how, what, how, what’s going on? It’s like, yeah, that’s exactly it. It’s like the things you do, the things you do in the world that are like an overflowing of your being, they are that glory that will shine, but they are also, if they’re cut off from the heart, if they’re done for the sake of themselves, then they become death itself. And so it’s like, it’s a mystery that is there in the, in the fall that becomes a mystery that becomes everything about scripture. If you start to think about it that way, you’ll see that all the things that humans do, right, create civilization, create technology, create all these things. In some ways they’re dead. They’re these like dead things, but ultimately in the final image, they are saved by God and become an aspect of his glory. They are the temple, they are the heavenly Jerusalem. And so all the elements that are part of death get transformed into glory. And of course, the ultimate image is the crown of thorns, which is a direct connection to the fall in Genesis, because God says when Adam and Eve fall, that the earth will produce thorns. And then Christ takes that multiplicity, right? The thorns are glory, right? In the sense that they are these multiple extrusions from the plant that are like not the plant itself, they’re kind of like these dead hard things that come out of it. And in some ways are death, that they are dangerous, they’re all that, but ultimately Christ is able in a very mysterious way to make it into a crown. And so he basically fills the, so death becomes glory. And then that’s, if you don’t understand that, or if you can’t at least pierce into that a bit, so many things about Christianity will remain mysterious to you. It’s like, why do we have these martyrs? Like why are martyrs important? Why do we have this idea of, you know, all these images that we have of self-sacrifice, of all this stuff that you have to die to yourself? You know, why is it dying? You know, all of a sudden we think that dying to yourself is somehow going to build that body of glory, right? It’s like, it’s a weird thing, but once you start to get into the imagery, you start to see that it’s actually quite coherent.