Why something so bad and ugly is so good and beautiful.
Have you perhaps noticed within yourself, in the midst of our global climate and issues closer to home, a longing or desire for some sanity, some goodness, some beauty. Perhaps you’ve wished that there is, for example, a news source that is trustworthy because they share the truth and not a propaganda-embedded narrative. You’re fed up with hearing about the power-plays of world leaders, sickened by the callousness to human life on display all over the world, and disturbed by the false ideologies and spiritualties that young people especially are bombarded with every day through social media. But never mind all that: you have your own personal stresses that you go through – work stresses, financial stresses, relationship stresses. You get home and you’re exhausted, and so you look for some entertainment on the TV for a brief escape, and even that is disconcerting as to what passes for entertainment. In the stress of your life, perhaps you’ve contemplated a getaway to somewhere beautiful where your soul can be nourished by the beauty you encounter.
I invite you to embrace wholeheartedly the gift of disillusionment,[i] because living an illusion is never healthy. That longing or desire for something better brought about by the harshness of our world? It’s called a longing for heaven – a longing for our true home. A place where goodness, beauty and truth are the norm: but more on that a bit later.
Truth. Beauty. Goodness. In philosophy these are known as transcendentals, because they exist beyond the time-space-matter world.[ii] They are self-justifying in their existence because they are considered virtues in and of themselves: other virtues are usually measured to the extent by which they reflect these transcendentals (for example, an act of kindness is beautiful and good). Their recognition goes back a long way. Both Aristotle and Plato regarded these as giving meaning and purpose to the cosmos, and human living was at its best when a person aligned themselves with these values. The human being was recognised as having the internal capacity of reason (logos), morality (ethos) and emotion (pathos). Our internal capacity for reason corresponds with the transcendental of truth, our morality to goodness and emotion to beauty.
But Christians recognised that these were more than abstract principles. Truth, goodness and beauty exist as transcendentals because they are rooted in a transcendent source: God – and more specifically the Triune God (and I should point out that unity and oneness is another transcendental). This is not a case of God containing these virtues as part of His make-up: He IS these virtues. That’s why we can say that all truth is God’s truth, all goodness is God’s goodness and all beauty is God’s beauty.[iii]
You may have noticed that when you’re in the presence of incredible beauty, or goodness, or truth – you find yourselves experiencing the sensation of awe and wonder. Perhaps it’s a stunning sunrise or sunset, or encountering the vastness of a landscape or the night sky, or standing before a powerful work of art, or listening to music (Beethoven once said – and I’m paraphrasing – that music is the only bodiless entry into a higher world of knowledge that comprehends mankind and yet is not comprehended by it). Physicists and mathemeticians speak of feeling this in encountering the elegance of formulas. It’s how so many wives feel with regard to their husbands: “You’re so amazing I can’t believe you chose me…” OK – that last sentence came out wrong: It’s how many husbands feel regarding their wives, not being able to believe that their spouse said yes to being their wife and still continue to love and support them! At least that is the case for me.
Experiencing wonder in the presence of truth, beauty and goodness has a marvellous way of making us feel small, and yet at the same time making us long for a connection to the greater source that enabled us to experience that wonder in the first place.
And so I invite you to look at the person of Jesus. The Scriptures teach us that the God who IS truth, who IS beauty, who IS goodness, became a man and lived with us. John 1:1 states it simply
In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
The preamble of John’s gospel (1:1-18) is pretty much a celebration of how transcendence became touchable.
Philippians 2:6-7 speaks of how Jesus,
though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men…
And if you read through the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus, you will discover a man who embodied goodness, beauty and truth not only through what He taught but also through how He lived.
As Peter preached in his Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:22
Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know…
The people of Galilee and Jerusalem had encountered the authoritative teaching of Jesus (Truth), encountered His goodness through how He interacted with them and stood up against the religious establishment and dealt with evil. As Jesus Himself explained (Luke 4:18-19), quoting Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent meto proclaim release to the captives
and the regaining of sightto the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
19 to proclaim the yearof the Lord’s favor.”
The people experienced His beauty as dealt with them in compassion and taught them to see with new eyes. Remember His famous teaching on how we shouldn’t be anxious? In that teaching Jesus said (Matt 6:28-29):
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these
And then something crazy happened.
Peter tells us precisely what:
This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.
How does the transcendent source of all that is good, beautiful and true get pinned to a cross and die?
Well, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, what we need to understand is that what we are witnessing is a ‘terrible beauty.’ Calvary is the ultimate expression of paradox.
Humanity in essence committed suicide that day as they engaged in homicide (because Jesus was fully man as though he were not God) and Deicide (because Jesus was fully God as though He were not man).
Truth got crucified by lies. The trial was in essence a kangaroo court with false witnesses. I mean, Pilate is literally standing with Truth in front of him, the One in Whom, as Col 2:3 reminds us, is “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” and he poses the question “what is truth?” (John 18:38).
Beauty got marred by ugliness. In fact, the most beautiful person in the world wasn’t beautiful to look at, as Isaiah 53:2b-3 reminds us:
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Goodness absorbed evil into itself as He who knew no sin became sin (2 Cor 5:21). This is an incredible point to ponder, because as the prophet Habakkuk observed (1:13):
Your eyes are too pure to look on evil;
you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.
Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?
Why are you silent while the wicked
swallow up those more righteous than themselves?
Or, as John put it (1 John 1:5):
This, in essence, is the message we heard from Christ and are passing on to you: God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him
And yet: I want us to consider the invitation of William Blake when he says
“This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye.”
Let’s unpack the paradox. We killed Jesus, and yet at the same time Jesus didn’t have His life taken: it was given. As Jesus explained in John 10:17-18
“The Father loves me because I am willing to give up my life, in order that I may receive it back again. 18 No one takes my life away from me. I give it up of my own free will. I have the right to give it up, and I have the right to take it back. This is what my Father has commanded me to do.”
Peter highlighted this when he explained that the death of Jesus was part of the plan. It turns out you cannot kill the source of life. This is what the resurrection proves.
Jesus, who is incapable of committing evil, absorbed evil when He took sin into Himself, thus getting justly punished, but then result of that is that you and I can then receive the goodness and righteousness of God. He receives the judgment, we receive the mercy. He swops our sin for His goodness.
Good Friday is called Good because although it was downright bad and ugly, this is what the transcendent source of goodness, beauty and truth who became man decided to do so that there would be a beautiful and good result: you becoming family. As the writer to the Hebrews explains in Hebrews 12:2, Jesus
Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising its shame and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God
Simply look in the mirror to see the joy that was set before Him.
I wrote a poem a few years ago trying to make sense of the paradox of Calvary, where I tried to look beyond (2 Cor 4:18) what was visible. It reads as follows:
Look Beyond
It did not seem right.
Born into wood.
Lived by wood.
Died on wood.
This carpenter turned preacher seemed weak.
Yet
Repaired broken souls, sawed Time in two
Measured men’s hearts
Joined man unto God
Hate unleashed itself on Love that day
Truth got crucified by lies
The Word that once spoke “Let there be”
Now screamed out in agony
Spat on, Naked, Mocked and Despised
Absorbing God’s wrath and the Pain of Mankind
Source of Life yielding to Death
“Father Forgive” His only request
To those who were blind, His cause seemed lost
But His weakness proved too strong for the Cross
His love tore the curtain and Man was set free
Hope rose victorious and gave us a destiny
Suffering hurts but it’s not what it seems
Look Beyond and see the Unseen
All else is temporary, eternal is God
See with the Centurion: This man was God.
Calvary was awfully good. Isaiah 53 as a whole presents to us the glorious paradox of Calvary. We thought Jesus was getting punished by God, but it was our punishment He was taking. We are the ones who went astray, and yet the one who is faithful and true is the one who gets judged. Although Jesus had done no violence and there was no deceit in Him, He got treated like a wicked person, a criminal of the most depraved kind. And yet
Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous and he shall bear their iniquities (v11)
It was a bad and ugly day, but the whole purpose and result of it was good and beautiful. And this is why easter changes everything, because through what Jesus did upon Calvary, we get invited to experience transcendent truth, goodness and beauty first hand. How?
Through relationship. For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:16).
Jesus, the Good, Beautiful and Truth-source God, embraced vulnerability, weakness and suffering and accomplished the greatest miracle ever known in the history of humanity: bad, ugly liars getting transformed and reconciled to God, giving us the opportunity to be embraced by God as dearly loved children (1 John 4:10) instead of being rejected as the rebel criminals we naturally are. Calvary proves that the heart of God is for me.
I think that what makes truth, beauty and goodness so incredible is because it is rooted in love, a love revealed through a Triune God whose essence is defined as love (1 John 4:8). In fact it is only through being rooted in love that these transcendentals find proper expression, because as Blake also shrewdly observed: a truth told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent[iv]. In our fallen state we can find ourselves mocking the good and marring the ugly, and yet God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit invites you to abide in Him, because only then will your longing for truth, beauty and goodness, be satisfied. You can move from disillusionment to wonder as you discover that heaven is to know God, to enjoy Him (John 17:3). You will come to appreciate the truth of, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: “God is the beyond in the midst of our lives.” You will discover the calvary paradox, that as you lay down your own life in surrender, you will discover His.
And that is the wonder of Calvary.
[i] See Mike’s article THREE CONTRADISTINCTIVE GIFTS OF HOLY WEEK – The Third Way
[ii] Samples, Kenneth @ https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/reflections/the-3-transcendentals-truth-goodness-beauty
[iii] ibid
[iv] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Blake