The phrase came before I had any use for it.
It was not long after the cardiac event. I was sitting with a cup of tea, working out what the rest of it was for. Three words turned up that I had not gone looking for.
The weight of glory.
I don't know where they came from. I wasn't reading anything.
I searched the phrase and found that C.S. Lewis had preached a sermon with that title in Oxford in 1941. I read it that afternoon.
I did not understand most of it. There are pages in that sermon I could not have explained to anyone, and one or two I still couldn't. But twice while I was reading it I found I was crying, and I could not have told you what at.
Then I sent it to people. Several people. I told them it had done something to me and that they ought to read it. When one or two asked what it was about, I said you'll see, which is what you say when you don't know.
Then nothing, for a long time. The sermon sat on my desk. I didn't work on it.
Last Sunday our pastor preached on the two short parables in Matthew 13 — the man who finds treasure hidden in a field, and the merchant who finds one pearl and sells everything he owns to buy it.
He said what those parables are usually taken to say: that the kingdom is worth everything you have, and that anyone who really sees it will pay whatever it costs. That is true. I have said it myself.
I came home unsettled. The parable had a bigger room in it than we had gone into.
This morning I woke well before the sun with three phrases in my head.
The light momentary affliction. The surpassing worth. The treasure.
I reached for my phone and typed them in, because things that arrive like that don't survive breakfast. Then I lay there a while trying to get back to sleep, and gave in, and got up, and turned to my Bible.
The treasure. The pearl of great price. Sunday's message and the words that had interrupted my sleep were the same words.
This was the parable.
Two of the three are in one chapter. But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us — 2 Corinthians 4:7. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison — verse 17. The third is Paul again, in Philippians, counting everything he owned as loss.
Ten verses apart, and the sentence just before the second one is this:
Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.
My study carried on well into the daylight.
I had been trying to describe what God was revealing. Unveiling is the better word. It presumes a cover.
The cover over the story — what it was trying not to reveal — was part of the meaning. Jesus never explained the parables in public, only to a few, and he said the covering was deliberate. They are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be uncovered, and once a thing is uncovered for you it is yours, and you cannot go back to not seeing it.
A jar of clay is the cheapest thing in the house. You keep oil in it, and when it breaks you sweep it up and get another.
I have a scar in my upper chest and a pacemaker under it. A device that keeps time I can't feel, in the cheapest container in the house.
I had carried that phrase for six months and never been able to explain it satisfactorily to others. But this morning I saw something for the first time, and understood what Jesus had been pointing at.