The Beautiful Gospel

How do we define “attractive” and why are we attracted to certain things over others?

Why do some things repulse us, and other things inspire us?  Why are we geared towards and inspired by the profound and luminous?   

As we ask these things, the ancient paths of our faith illuminate this question.  We desire beauty because we were made by a beautiful God.  We have this sense of the great and perfect that is not us, yet we long to see it and become it [1].   Somehow, we know this has to do with God’s nature and His intention for what people are meant to look like.  It is like a shadow of something we cannot see fully, but we know intuitively it exists. Lurking somewhere out there where we cannot see.  We only faintly brush past it in times of reflection and clarity.

       We also know that we are too broken and ship-wrecked to reach that high.  Our grasping falls short of the mark of the absolute beautiful and lovely that exists in our minds.  Christians have classically termed this brokenness and falling short of this absolute beauty: “sin”.  

       Sin is the power that enslaves us and all of creation.  Sin created “un-beauty”: selfishness, desolation, poverty, war, the destruction of the beautiful itself. It seeks the unmaking of what God conceived in His glorious joy.  It reduces to rubble the innocence of the builder, if unchecked it will cannibalize itself and creation with it.  

        We often don’t think of sin like this.  We often view it as breaking a rule, defying a law.  Legal metaphors for sin and redemption run the course of western theology, but one of the most ancient and I think one of the more “organic” metaphors is that sin is a power that destroys and has dominion over the hearts of people [2] . The legal metaphors of sin help us to diagnose ourselves, to know that our hearts are sick [3][4], but these are symptoms and not the source. The source is this evil power, sin itself.  We pass it on throughout the ages like a virus: parent to child, and we cannot help it.  There is still goodness and the ability to respond to it in us, but it is a broken sense of goodness.  It is not complete and perfect goodness.  All creation subsequently is affected by our brokenness.  Contrary to western individualism, the scriptures see sin being a problem larger than the individual, the entire created order is impacted [5].

        The sorrow this causes our Creator did not catch Him by surprise.  It was with Him as He created the world, He knew what we would unleash.  Yet in His heart, He was already crucified [6] and prepared to let the beast devour Him at the cross in order to destroy it and liberate the creation.  Love risks rejection for its own sake.  One cannot love without the beloved accepting or rejecting the heart of the lover.  Love is a choice and love also liberates. This is why redemption was woven throughout the foundations of the world.  God is love and love rescues.

       As God is the essence of love, so His love allowed the choice for creation to accept His loving rule in partnership with Him or reject it and insist on ruling itself.  The choice was then, and still is today: beauty or un-beauty.  If we notice, the serpent’s temptation was to question if God and His ways are truly beautiful and good [7].  Adam and Eve knew God was good already and that He is love. Maybe above all; they knew He is beautiful?  Like plants and flowers grow in sunlight, we grow as intended in the light of God’s splendor.  When we don’t, we become mutated and twisted into less than the design of our Maker.  We grow deformed.  The serpent was able to convince them that “God is not good”, they believed it and the result is our story: evil and selfishness. Destruction came from our hearts and vomited out onto the world.  Creation as a result fractured like a mirror into a thousand pieces.

       Yet in His goodness, the Creator picked up the pieces and wore them himself as He died to them, overturning sin’s dominion.  The cross was The Father giving up His Son to the heart of sin in people and the powers that exploit its rule.  However, God’s rich mercy was the great turn around and defeat of these powers.  The sickness was cured through the cruelty of the cross.  And it was the resurrected Christ that took the broken creation with Him into the grave and came out with it again, restored and redeemed.  

     Beauty was working its way back into things. 

     God’s Kingdom was rising as the yeast in dough rises before it bakes.  It has and is permeating throughout the loaf.  The cure from un-beauty was delivered.

  

      But as in the garden, God gives choice.  Love does not manipulate or coerce.  It is freely given and freely received.  In a sense, God leaves His rule to us as an optional one. We can grow as intended through His Kingdom and His ways that produce life, or grow deformed and fall from His intentions as we rule ourselves.  He also gives people the option of an eternal kingdom of self-rule: hell.  

      We often think the agony of hell is external punishment inflicted on the occupants.  I would guess that the agony one feels is inheriting what the person there wants.  It is the rule of the self apart from the God of love.  In the void of self-rule is blackness, darkness, and pain. It is the very eternity of our choice if we so desire it. But it is one forever devoid of beauty.  In this chasm only the grotesque will reign.  Not because God desires it, but we do.  This is a sobering contrast to our culture where the self is omnipotent and always correct.  Hell provokes a startling question, “Am I truly correct?”, “am I really god?”  Of course, none of us are God, that is only delusional.  We are quite mortal.  We desire to be God, but like when a child tries to use his dad’s power tools, only danger will result.  

       It was in a sense this desire to be God that motivated us to kill Jesus.  Jesus, who did nothing but good to those he met, enflamed this desire in us to overthrow God.  It wasn’t Jesus who was on trial that day in front of Pilate, it was humanity.  What would we do if given the opportunity to touch God if he became fragile like us?  It was the un-beauty in all of us that cried, “Crucify him!”  It was the beast that enslaved us gushing forth from our mouths.  It was this deformity in the heart of humanity that was on trial that day.  The case against this aspect of us was found at fault with the murder of the Messiah.  Yet God knew this would be the case and returned it back to us, not in revenge; but in extravagant mercy.  Mercy to cleanse the blood of God off of our hands.  Mercy to kill the beast.  Mercy to scrub out all the un-beauty in our nature.

       This is the good news; God has redeemed creation and will completely redeem her at the end of all things.  In reality, it will be more like the beginning of new things.  There will be no more destruction, death, or sorrow.  The ugliness we sowed into creation will be uprooted.   In its place will be a people who reflect the beauty of their God and their Messiah forever.  Creation will sing a song of freedom.  It will have an eternal release from the grip of the repulsive.   Beauty will forever reign, with a renewed earth and a renewed creation growing up vigorously, like an eternal flower in the light of His splendor…





Notes:

[1] Philosophers and theologians would categorize this type of idea as “ontological”.  See Alvin Plantiga’s “The Ontological Argument: From St. Anselm to Contemporary Philosophers” for a detailed discussion. 

[2] For examples see:  Jaroslav Pelikan: “The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine” Vol. I; pgs. 141-155,  Fleming Rutledge:  “The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ”; Pg. 175,  James R. Payton Jr.:  “The Victory of the Cross: Salvation in Eastern Orthodoxy”; Chapters 3 and 5.  References include discussions on the nature of sin and the atonement.

[3] See for example Paul’s lists of sinful actions: Romans 1:21-32, Galatians 5:19-21, Ephesians 5:1-9, Colossians 3:5-11.  Notice too that Paul contrasts these lists of actions with lives that are reborn and living in congruency with God’s Spirit.  The ways of The Spirit give life because they are good and are intended for us anyway, but we rebel against them not realizing that we are sick with the infection of sin.  The gospel presents us with the sobering idea that we may in fact be wrong, and wrong about a lot of things!

[4] Paul’s discussion of the Law of Moses contrasted with the new covenant in Christ with the Galatians also illustrates this point.  The law is in a sense a diagnostic tool so that we can know what the outward actions of an evil heart look like, but they cannot remedy the disease, the cure is in the Messiah (see the discussion in Gal. 2:1-21, 3:1-29, 4:1-30, 5:1-26).  These ideas are central to Hebrews as well: see Heb. 8:1-12, 9:1-28, 10:1-18.

[5] Paul frames the groaning and rebirth of creation in this sense in Romans 8:19-23.  Redemption becomes creation’s cry itself.

[6] This mystery is briefly mentioned in Revelation 13:8

[7]  Genesis 3:1