Day Twenty Nine

Psalm 40

6 O Lord my God, great are the wonderful things which you have done, and your thoughts which are towards us:
there is none to be compared with you.

7 Were I to declare them and speak of them:
they are more than I am able to express.

8 Sacrifice and offering you do not desire:
but my ears you have marked for obedience.

9 Burnt-offering and sin-offering you have not required:
then said I, Lo, I come.

10 in the scroll of the book it is written of me, that I should do your will:
O my God, I long to do it, your law delights my heart.

received in emails:

The glory of God is in the human being fully alive; the life of the human being is in the vision of God.
Irenaeus of Lyons, bishop and teacher (died about 200)

or another translation of that text with discussion:

"When the Church celebrates the feast of the Transfiguration next Wednesday what we are celebrating is, in the words of one of the earliest Christian writers, St Irenaeus, the reality that "the glory of God is a human being truly alive, and the end of human living is the vision of God". When the disciples saw Christ radiant with the light of glory, they had a foretaste of heaven, just as Gormley's shimmering figures are surely a symbol of resurrection — each human being a unique diagram of the love by which and for which we are made. It is the vision of that glory which opens our lives to be shaped by the grace of God so that our love may be set in order, and we may be remade in the likeness of Christ."

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell, Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe.