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The Most Beautiful Thing in the World

22nd Sunday : 31 August 2014

The Philosopher Martin Heidegger said that the petrol station was the perfect symbol of life in the 20th century. Functional, utilitarian, designed to get the customer serviced and off the premises as soon as possible, and ugly. But then petrol stations aren’t on their own. The famous architect Le Corbusier defined the house as a machine for living in. And some of the awards winning public buildings of recent times proudly display their pipes, ducts, and service lines as primary visual focus.

In the classical world architecture was about harmony, proportion, beauty. And that stress on aesthetic values was paralleled in philosophy by the transcendentals, the three ways in which what really mattered disclosed itself. Truth and goodness and beauty were closely associated in revealing the divine. And truth and goodness and beauty walked arm in arm to disclose to human beings abundant life. To receive joy of heart and radiance of spirit you needed to be connected to the plenitude of being that enchanted the visible world, and that disclosed itself through the three transcendentals.

We are the inheritors of the machine age. We benefit greatly by the ability of the machine to dominate and make useful to us the visible world. But there is a price tag that goes with it. Amongst other things it has made much of our world ugly. There are pockets of beauty in our world. Here and there we can view beautiful spaces and places and buildings. But by and large the eye rests on what displeases it. In my years in Wellington I lived opposite what I came to believe was the ugliest house in that town. In those days longed for someone to give me a bazooka for my birthday.

I want to be fair about this. There are machines that in their clean lines and austere simplicity are beautiful. And our sensibilities have changed. Looking at the solid blocks of blending colour in abstract expressionism is a more satisfying experience than the chocolate box and kitsch that passes for much representational art. There are times when artists bring together the discordant and the shocking in striking, original ways that can make the plastic arts of antiquity seem insipid by comparison.

However, we live in a world that is not sure what truth is, or whether there is any – is not sure what goodness is, or whether it is possible to live the good life – and that certainly thinks there is no connection between beauty and truth and goodness. Beauty is just there, when we find it, as a recreational option. It is no longer a transcendental.

How intriguing then to have this question put to us in this morning’s readings – what is the most beautiful thing in the world?

The prophet Jeremiah with his bad news message, and his bound to fail mission, sticks with it through the most discouraging moments because he has been enraptured by the Divine presence. Paul encourages the Christians at Rome to change their behaviour and to live the good life motivated by their awe and wonder at the holiness of the Divine presence. Sometimes religious believers are seduced by overpowering religious experiences into irrational changes of lifestyle. But Paul offers a stabilising anchor to prevent that. Be like Jesus Christ. Acquire his mind. And Peter discovers to his discomfort that the way of the cross is at the heart of who Jesus is.

Here is the punch line. The most beautiful thing in the world is not a painting, or a sculpture, or a building that I can tell you to go and see. Nor is it a mystical experience of the transcendent God that is reliably logged in the history of Christian spirituality. It is to be found in the divine Word that took human form in the manger at Bethlehem, who grew to maturity in Nazareth, who exercised a ministry in Galilee that he concluded on the cross. This life and ministry, in the words of Aidan Nicholls, "often happens beautifully, for beauty is the power of expressive truth to radiate out and captivate."

What is beautiful about Jesus of Nazareth is not his handsome good looks, or paintings of him by well-known artists, or the tasteful symmetry of his words and actions. It is the self-emptying pattern of his life. It is the way he seeks out our God forsakenness. The way he enters into those parts of human experience that seem empty of meaning and drained of any sense the Divine presence. It is the way he draws near to the broken hearted and the despairing.

Peter was shocked to hear that Jesus was about to embrace the way of suffering. How could he know that the silence of Jesus on the cross is the most powerful proclamation of his ministry? Nor could he anticipate that the desolation of Holy Saturday was the turning point of the worlds. For it was then that Jesus descended into the depths to preach good news to those frozen in the eternal loneliness of hell.

What attracts, what enraptures about Jesus is his instinctive seeking out of the lost. His willingness to enter a place of powerlessness in order to know it in a way that is useful to us in the worst that might happen to us. From there he leads captivity captive.

There are depictions of Jesus on the cross that spare us none of the blood and the guts. From Grunwald to Mel Gibson there are those who have loved the sadomasochistic aspects of all that. But the Romanesque era had the most helpful way of depicting what he does for us on the cross.

The Christus Victor shows him dressed in the Eucharistic vestments of a priest. A crown is on his head, and his arms are stretched out with calm, strong, confidence. He is reigning from the tree. Having journeyed through the far country of our suffering and death he has returned to the right hand of the Father. Now in joy he presides as what is offered and who it is who offers in this sacrifice that we are about to present to the Father.

There are many beautiful images of the Christus Victor. And Churches should always be beautiful places. But the most beautiful thing in the world is the way he seeks us out in whatever desolate place we have lost ourselves in, and leads us back by the hand into that place of joy that is the kingdom.