10 He says, Father the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that Your Son may glorify You. He says that the hour, not the day nor the time, has come. An hour is a fraction of a day. What hour must this be? The hour, of course, of which He speaks, to strengthen His disciples, at the time of His passion:— Lo, the hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified. This then is the hour in which He prays to be glorified by the Father, that He Himself may glorify the Father.
But what does He mean? Does One who is about to give glory look to receive it? Does One who is about to confer honour make request for Himself? Is He in want of the very thing which He is about to repay? Here let the world's philosophers, the wise men of Greece, beset our path, and spread their syllogistic nets to entangle the truth. Let them ask How? And Whence? And Why? When they can find no answer, let us tell them that it is because God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. That is the reason why we in our foolishness understand things incomprehensible to the world's philosophers.
The Lord had said, Father, the hour has come; He had revealed the hour of His passion, for these words were spoken at the very moment; and then He added, Glorify Your Son. But how was the Son to be glorified? He had been born of a virgin, from cradle and childhood He had grown to man's estate, through sleep and hunger and thirst and weariness and tears He had lived man's life: even now He was to be spitted on, scourged, crucified. And why? These things were ordained for our assurance that in Christ is pure man.
But the shame of the cross is not ours; we are not sentenced to the scourge, nor defiled by spitting. The Father glorifies the Son; how? He is next nailed to the cross. Then what followed? The sun, instead of setting, fled. How so? It did not retire behind a cloud, but abandoned its appointed orbit, and all the elements of the world felt that same shock of the death of Christ. The stars in their courses, to avoid complicity in the crime, escaped by self-extinction from beholding the scene.
What did the earth? It quivered beneath the burden of the Lord hanging on the tree, protesting that it was powerless to confine Him who was dying. Yet surely rock and stone will not refuse Him a resting-place. Yes, they are rent and cloven, and their strength fails. They must confess that the rock-hewn sepulchre cannot imprison the Body which awaits its burial.
Source: On the Trinity (New Advent)