“I’m just an old lump of goal, but I’m gonna be a diamond someday,” sings John Anderson in an old cover of a Billy Joe Shaver song. The same sentiment appears in much more exalted verse by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem, “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.”
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
Hopkins is (and possibly Shaver too) referring to verse 2 of our text for this week from I John 3:1-7. John writes, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” It’s an assurance that whatever we are now, which is at the least beloved children of God, we will one day be like Christ. In other words, pure, “just as he is pure” as it says in verse 3.
That hope for some great future as yet mostly undefined is familiar to most parents looking at their children, especially infants. It’s also becoming known to us as grandparents as we watch via twice-weekly Skype calls our new grandson grow and begin to exhibit his own personality and delight in the world around him. We occasionally wonder if he will grow up interested in obscure academic matters like his parents and grandparents, or if he will strike out in a direction of his own and become a rock musician or a soccer (“football” in England) player.
The “comfort of the resurrection,” as Hopkins puts it, is that all of us, no matter how old and worn, marred or broken, like a potsherd, God is planning to make something pure and good out of us in and with Christ. The challenge of that comfort and hope is what John moves too in the second part of the text beginning in verse 3, “All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” The rest of the text is the disconcerting suggestion that those who hope in Jesus ought not to be sinning, now, they should be moving toward that ultimate diamondhood, that purity like His.
It’s a disconcerting word when we like Shaver or Hopkins put our present self up against what we hope to be, dirty coal or potsherd against the clear diamond. Yet how else ought we to live? If such purity is our future, how can we not want to strive for it now? Without some measure of progress in purity, how can we do as Jesus commanded in our Gospel lesson in Luke 24:48, be “witnesses to these thing?” Won’t our witness simply be laughed off if those who hear us find our moral status no better or even worse than their own?
Even Shaver said that if he was going to be that “diamond someday,” he would have to “kneel and pray every day” and “spit and polish my old rough-edged self.” We have a glorious future that calls us to a hopeful yet diligent life in the present. May we start polishing a few of those rough places today.