The Hope of Glory

By Jon Meacham

Convergent Books    2020

112 pages     Spiritual

The historian and author, Jon Meacham, is a frequent speaker at Episcopal churches. In his book, The Hope of Glory, these meditations on the final words of Jesus were presented at Good Friday services in Meacham’s church in New York City. The book contains a prologue telling about how Meacham came to write these sermons, or meditations. In the prologue, he also describes how the words purported to come from Jesus came to be important in scripture and in the foundations of the Christian church.  He says, “I am sharing these meditations in the hope that a sense of history and an appreciation of theology might help readers make more sense of the cross in a world too much given to the competing forces of hostile skepticism, blind acceptance, or remote indifference.” He is interested in “illumination, not conversion.”

Meacham then devotes one meditation to each of the seven phrases or sentences that Jesus spoke from the cross. He outlines the traditional historical reasoning for why each of those phrases were spoken and why these particular phrases are included in the scriptures. Within each meditation, Meacham elaborates on what he considers to be the theological meanings for each phrase.

I read each of the chapters as a daily meditation, and found that Meacham has a very similar outlook to his faith as I do. At one point, he acknowledges “that we cannot know everything does not mean we can know nothing.” He also suggests that “for the thoughtful believer, then, there is nothing more certain than the reality of uncertainty, nothing more natural than doubt, which is perhaps thirty seconds younger than faith itself.”

I found myself underlining many of Meacham’s thoughts as I pondered these last words of Jesus. By reading some every day, I was able to really think through his ideas and come to my own understandings. Beyond Meacham’s meditations on Jesus’ words, I was able to have a Lenten time of growth in the midst of anxiety and mountains of bad news. As Meacham says, “Light can neither emanate from, nor enter into a closed mind.” For this time of meditation and insight, I am extremely grateful.

A couple of other things. When I was a girl, my Good Friday always included a presentation of the oratorio of The Seven Last Words of Christ by Theodore Dubois. My father, a tenor, always sang the tenor solos, wherever we were. A very fond memory. Here is a beautiful YouTube presentation from a church in Texas.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that the Kirkus reviewer complained that the theology of The Hope of Glory  is very Episcopalian, and said that the book was a “middling contribution to Christian studies.” I, on the other hand, found the book to be insightful and thoughtful, and I could see it being used for a Lenten study series or a book discussion for “progressive” Christians, as the Publisher’s Weekly writer suggests.