Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is what we like – what we love – what we find alluring. Beauty, according to our world, is not so much an objective standard as something determined by our own preferences and our own personal delights. But is that really what beauty is? While that notion of beauty certainly captures the subjective experience of being drawn to something, it takes no account of God.
What if beauty is not just something pleasing, but something that is just as it should be – something perfect in every way, something in which there is not any kind of blemish or fault? If that is the case, we immediately see how beauty is found most wonderfully, most fully and most gloriously in the person of God himself.
This seems clear when the psalmist identifies their deepest desire in these terms:
One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple. (Psalm 27:4)
The creation God formed was also beautiful. When God surveyed all that he had made, he declared it ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31). It was just as it should be.
But it is not so now.
True ugliness
Trauma, when the term is properly used, describes some of the very worst kinds of suffering. The terrible brutality of warfare, the dehumanising violence of sexual assault or the devastation that comes from an appalling accident. Such things are polar opposites to beauty. They involve the kind of ugliness you want to turn away from. But in trauma you can’t turn away. And feeling unable to do anything to avoid or escape or resist is part of what traumatizes a person.
The prophet Isaiah speaks of a suffering servant – it is his anticipation of Jesus, the Messiah. This servant is described as one who ‘had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him’ (Isaiah 53:2). It’s an odd description. The crowds flocked to Jesus – they pressed around him so much that sometimes the only way to him was through a roof (Mark 2:4). Yet Isaiah presses his case: ‘there were many who were appalled at him – his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness’ (Isaiah 52:14). Isaiah’s suffering servant is, it seems, ugly. What does he mean?
In these chapters Isaiah is, of course, anticipating the cross. Just a few verses later Isaiah writes that this servant ‘took up our pain and bore our suffering…he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.’ (Isaiah 53:4-5). The cross was ugly. A brutal, disfiguring death that meant terrible suffering – the very worst of which was Jesus’ desolating experience of spiritual isolation.
True beauty restored
But here is the extraordinary, we might even say beautiful, irony. That which was ugly beyond imagining becomes the centrepiece of the Christian faith. We celebrate the cross. We preach the cross. The apostle Paul will boast about nothing except the cross (Galatians 6:14). That which was ugly is transformed. We see in the terrible brutality, the deepest compassion; in the desolation, the making of peace; in extreme pain, the deepest healing. Nowhere is the beauty of God, the loveliness of God made more visible than here – in the ugliness of the cross. For here ‘God demonstrates his own love’ (Romans 5:8).
To those who have known the ugliness of trauma, those for whom evil has broken in, the cross brings a message of hope. For it says that ugliness can be overtaken by beauty. In Christ all can be redeemed. On the cross evil was turned back on itself and its power broken. It seemed to be the ultimate eclipsing of beauty – the Son of God put to death by evil men and Satan was finally victorious. But it was not so.
Beauty prevailed.
Jesus took the ugliness of evil and sin upon himself and he defeated it. So that now we gaze on the beauty of the Lord in fresh ways – now as ‘a Lamb looking as if it had been slain’ (Revelation 5:6). Our gospel hope couldn’t be more powerful – ugliness truly is overtaken by beauty.
