The Weight of Glory: When Suffering Has a Name

The Empty Nets and the Groaning World

"For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." Romans 8:18.

"Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets." Luke 5:5.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

These two voices — one from an apostle writing under imperial persecution, the other from a fisherman kneeling at the edge of Galilee — are separated by circumstance but asking the very same question. It is a question every faithful soul in this church has whispered at some dark hour of life.

Why does faithful obedience so often feel like an empty net?

Simon Peter and his companions had done everything right. They were skilled professionals who knew these waters as well as they knew their own names. They had worked through the darkest hours of the night with practiced precision. And they had taken absolutely nothing — not because they were negligent or faithless, but because that is what life in this broken world sometimes gives even to the righteous: empty nets and aching hands.

Saint Paul knew that emptiness too. He had surrendered his prestige as a Pharisee, his comfort, his standing — and received in return shipwrecks, beatings, and imprisonment. And yet from that very place of loss, he writes with the calm conviction of a man who has made a rigorous and unshakeable calculation: the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

This morning, The Church places both texts before us — the groaning theology of Romans 8 and the miraculous obedience of Luke 5 — not so that we might merely endure our suffering with gritted teeth, but so that we might understand it, see it in its true and eternal proportion, and come to see our suffering for what it truly is — not the end of the story, but a shadow that vanishes the moment the light of eternity breaks through.

The Thesis of Glory: A Reasoned Calculation

We begin with verse eighteen, the thesis upon which everything else in this morning's Epistle rests: "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us."

The phrase that demands our first attention is "I consider." That word — in the Greek — is not the language of feelings or wishful thinking. It is the language of a man doing the books. It belongs to the ledger rooms of Roman commerce. When Paul says "I consider," he means: I have looked at both sides of this equation carefully, honestly, and I have reached a conclusion I cannot argue myself out of.

On one side: the sufferings of this present time. On the other: the glory that is to be revealed in us. And Paul's verdict is that these two things do not even belong to the same order of comparison. As Saint John Chrysostom writes, Paul does not say that glory will compensate for suffering, as one might balance a debt against a payment. He says the glory doesn't just outweigh the suffering — it makes the suffering disappear. You don't tip the scales. You break them.

Saint Augustine adds a further dimension. Suffering, rightly received, is the very instrument by which God trains the soul to loosen its grip on the temporal. Every pain received in faith performs a holy surgery — cutting away our disordered attachment to things that cannot last, and fashioning within us a hunger for the only good that is permanent. The Catechism of the Council of Trent is clear: God created the human soul for one supreme end — the beatific vision, the direct and unmediated knowledge and love of God Himself for all eternity. Measured against that end, the suffering is real — but it is small. Smaller than we think. Smaller than it feels.

Creation Groaning: The World on Its Knees

Paul now moves from the individual believer to the entire created order. Verses nineteen through twenty-two: "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now."

Paul uses a Greek word here that literally pictures someone standing on their tiptoes, neck stretched forward, straining to see something just over the horizon. That is creation right now. The whole world is leaning forward, holding its breath, waiting for the moment when God's children are finally revealed in their full glory.

Why does creation groan? Because it was subjected to futility as a direct consequence of the Fall. God placed Adam in the garden as a kind of priest — someone who would care for creation and offer it back to God. When man fell, creation fell with him. But here is the hope: the world is not headed for destruction. It is headed for renewal. That groan you hear from creation is not a death rattle. It is a labor pain.

Now I want to place before you a real and historical face that makes this theology breathe.

Her name is Blessed Margaret of Castello. Born in 1287 in Italy, she came into the world severely disabled — nearly blind, hunchbacked, and lame. Her own parents, consumed by shame, hid her away, and when they brought her to a famous shrine hoping for a miraculous cure and none appeared, they did the unthinkable: they walked away and never returned. They abandoned their own daughter on the steps of a church in a town she had never seen.

Margaret was, in her own body, a living image of creation subjected to futility. And yet when the poor citizens of Castello took her in, they did not find a bitter or broken woman. They found a soul burning with supernatural joy — ministering to prisoners, to the dying, to the poor. When she died at thirty-three, those who prepared her body discovered that her heart contained three small, pearl-like stones, each bearing the image of the Holy Family. Her incorrupt body rests in Castello to this day. Her life is Romans 8 made flesh — one long and unbroken groan, not of despair, but of birth pains carrying something eternal into existence.

To those of you in the later years of your lives — whose bodies are wearing down, who face illness or the slow loss of things you once took for granted — hear this: your suffering is not a sign that God has forgotten you. You are groaning with all of creation, toward the same destination. The body you carry now is a seed, not a final ending. Every pain offered to God in faith is being woven by His loving hand into a glory you cannot yet imagine.

And lest you think this truth belongs only to the saints of the distant past, consider a woman from our own century whose life preaches this same sermon without a single word from a pulpit.

Her name is Joni Eareckson Tada. In the summer of 1967, at seventeen years old, she dove into the shallow waters of the Chesapeake Bay and struck the bottom. In an instant, the break of her fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae left her paralyzed from the shoulders down — a quadriplegic for life. She was a vibrant, athletic young woman. And in one moment, everything changed.

What followed was not a quick and tidy resolution. There were two years of grueling rehabilitation, rage, depression, and desperate cries to God in the darkness. She has said openly: "I spent two years in the hospital asking God to heal me, and He didn't. And I had to decide — was I going to trust Him anyway?"

She chose to trust Him. And what emerged from that choice is nothing short of astonishing.

Joni went on to become a painter — holding the brush in her teeth. She became a singer, an author of over fifty books, a radio broadcaster, and the founder of Joni and Friends, an international ministry to the disabled. But more than any of that, she became a theologian of suffering — one who has sat in the fire long enough to speak of it with authority.

Listen to her words. She has said: "Suffering is having what you don't want, or wanting what you don't have. But God uses that suffering to purge sin from our lives, to strengthen our commitment to Him, to force us to depend on grace, to bind us together with other believers, to produce discernment, foster sensitivity, discipline our minds, and to spend our time wisely. Suffering stretches our hope, causes us to know Christ better, makes us long for truth, leads us to repentance of sin, and teaches us to give thanks in times of sorrow. Suffering increases our faith, and strengthens our character."

And again: "I would rather be in this wheelchair knowing God than on my feet without Him."

And perhaps most powerfully of all: "God permits what He hates to accomplish what He loves."

There it is. That is Romans 8:18 spoken not from a scholar's desk, but from a wheelchair. The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed. Joni Eareckson Tada did not arrive at that conviction by reading it in a commentary. She arrived at it by living it — by groaning with all of creation, and finding at the bottom of that groan, not emptiness, but God.

The Inward Groan: The Firstfruits of the Spirit

Paul concludes the Epistle in verse twenty-three: "And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies."

Notice the word adoption. In the Roman world, adoption was not a sentimental gesture. It was a precise and irrevocable legal act. The paterfamilias — the father of the family, the absolute legal head of the Roman household — held total authority over every person under his roof. His word was law. His name was inheritance. When a Roman paterfamilias adopted a son, all previous debts were cancelled, all former ties dissolved. The adopted son received the father's name, the father's inheritance, and could never — under Roman law — be disinherited. He was legally indistinguishable from a natural-born son. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that this divine adoption is conferred upon the soul in the waters of Holy Baptism — genuinely and truly given. And yet Paul is wonderfully honest: this adoption is not yet fully realized in our bodies. We have the firstfruits of the Spirit — the initial sheaves of the harvest, a real and true portion of what is coming, but not yet the fullness.

Saint Augustine puts it simply: God gives us this foretaste on purpose — so that our hunger for the full inheritance grows deeper, more urgent, more real. The down payment makes us desperate for the full payment.

And so we groan inwardly — not from despair, but from a hunger awakened by the foretaste itself. Saint Ambrose reminds us that the image of birth pains is exactly right: a woman in labor is not dying. She is bringing something glorious into the world, and the pain is the very mechanism by which that glory arrives. It is purposeful pain. Directional pain. Pain that knows where it is going.

Duc in Altum: Launch Into the Deep

We turn now to the Holy Gospel, and what Paul gives us in careful theology, Our Lord illustrates in the urgent drama of a single morning on the shores of the Lake of Gennesaret.

Our Lord arrives at the shore and finds empty boats and men washing their nets. These are skilled professionals, worn out by a full night of disciplined effort that yielded nothing. It is the Gospel's living image of Paul's great theme — human effort subjected to the futility of a fallen world, groaning for a deliverance it cannot produce on its own.

Into this scene, Our Lord steps directly into Peter's boat and turns it into a pulpit. When the teaching is finished, He issues a command that must have sounded entirely irrational to any experienced fisherman: "Duc in altum (DOOK in AHL-toom) — Put out into the deep — and let down your nets for a catch." Midday heat. Deep water. Precisely the wrong conditions. Cyril of Alexandria saw something in that dark, empty night that I don't want you to miss. He said — that long, fruitless night on the water? That's a picture of the world before Christ. All those centuries of straining and trying and coming up empty. The Law was good. The prophets were faithful. But the nets kept coming up light. And then morning comes. Christ steps into the boat. And everything changes. Not the nets. Not the lake. Not the fishermen. What changed was the word spoken over them. And that word made all the difference.

Simon's answer is one of the most instructive moments in all of Scripture: "Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets." He names the futility honestly. He doesn't pretend the circumstances look favorable. And then, on the sole and sufficient basis of Christ's word, he obeys. The result is a catch so overwhelming that the nets begin to tear and both boats fill to the point of sinking.

Augustine draws a distinction worth holding. Here in Luke, the nets break and the boats strain — an image of the Church militant on earth, which contains both saints and sinners, which labors under human weakness and is sometimes torn by division. In John 21, after the Resurrection, the nets hold perfectly — an image of the Church triumphant in heaven, where nothing is lost. We are living in Luke 5. We are in the breaking-net Church. And we must not be discouraged by the breaking.

When Peter sees the miracle, he falls at the knees of Christ: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." True encounter with the holiness of God does not produce pride. It produces the same shattering self-knowledge that struck Isaiah in the temple. And Christ's response is the same as His response to every soul that comes in genuine contrition — not condemnation, but commission: "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men."

To the young men and women here this morning — those for whom life's defining decisions still lie ahead — I speak with urgency and love. Peter walked away from the greatest financial windfall of his entire professional life. He left it all on the shore — the fish, the nets, the boats, the income, the career — and followed without condition. That is the call that comes to every young soul within the sound of my voice. Our Lord wants to take the vessel of your gifts, your ambitions, your years, and your strength, and use them entirely for His Kingdom. Will you put out into the deep? Will you leave the shallow waters of comfort and launch into a life surrendered to the word and will of Jesus Christ? The Duc in altum (DOOK in AHL-toom) demands everything. But as the Apostle has already shown us — whatever it costs you in this present time, it is simply not worth comparing to the glory being prepared for those who love God without reservation.

I want to tell you about a young man who heard that same call — and answered it with everything he had.

William Borden was the heir to the Borden dairy fortune — wealthy, brilliant, with the world at his feet. After a trip around the world as a young man, he saw the poverty and lostness of millions who had never heard the Gospel. He came home, opened his Bible, and wrote two words in the back: "No Reserves." He was going to the mission field, and he was holding nothing back.

He went to Yale, transformed the campus, turned down every corporate offer, and walked away from his family's empire to prepare for missionary work in China. He opened his Bible again and wrote: "No Retreats."

He never made it to China. While studying Arabic in Cairo, he contracted cerebral meningitis. He was dead at twenty-five.

The world called it a tragedy. A waste. But before he died, Borden opened his Bible one last time and wrote beneath the other two inscriptions his final words: "No Regrets."

No Reserves. No Retreats. No Regrets.

William Borden stood on the shore of a literal fortune and left it all behind. He launched into the deep — and he never looked back.

Leave the Fish on the Shore: A Call to Follow

We have traversed both sacred texts this morning, and a single vision has emerged from them together.

Paul in Romans 8 gives us the theology: the sufferings of this present age, real and heavy and grinding as they are, do not even come close to the glory God is preparing for His children. Creation knows it — it stands on tiptoe, straining forward, waiting. The baptized soul knows it — we groan inwardly, not in despair, but in the ache of someone who has had just enough of a taste to know how good the fullness will be.

And Luke 5 gives us that theology lived out on an ordinary shore on an ordinary morning in Galilee. Peter, Andrew, James, and John stand before the greatest haul of fish they had ever seen — boats sinking with abundance they couldn't have earned in a month of ordinary labor. And quietly, immediately, without negotiation, they perform the exact calculation Paul sets forth in Romans 8:18. They look at the temporal wealth. They look at Christ. And they determine, with a clarity that only grace can produce, that it is simply not worth comparing. They leave everything. They follow Him.

That is the posture every baptized soul is called to. Not all of us are called to leave our boats in the literal sense. But every one of us — the aged parishioner who has carried the weight of many decades, the young person just beginning to understand the cost of discipleship, and every soul between — is called to hold temporal goods, health, plans, and ambitions with an open and surrendered hand. These things are seeds, not harvests. And the harvest coming is of an order so magnificent that the seeds, in its light, will appear as almost nothing at all.

So receive this final word. Whether you are aged and walking slowly toward the eternal shore with tired and faithful feet, or whether you are young and standing at the water's edge with the whole of your life stretched out before you: Christ is in your boat. He is speaking from it. And He is issuing to every soul here the same ancient, sacred command: Duc in altum. Launch out into the deep.

Do not be afraid of the empty nets of the past. Do not be afraid of the groaning of your body or the darkness of your present night. Do not cling to the miraculous catch when He calls you beyond it. Leave the fish on the shore. Launch into the deep water of prayer, of the holy sacraments, of total surrender to the word and will of Jesus Christ. Trust the word of the God who broke into this broken world with a promise that cannot fail — that the glory being prepared for those who love Him will swallow every sorrow whole, heal every wound, raise every broken body, and vindicate every act of faith ever made in the dark.

The weight of that glory, dear brothers and sisters, is beyond all calculation. And by the grace of God and the merits of Our Lord Jesus Christ, it is yours.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.