Passion or Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week. We all know the different characters who played their roles in the suffering and death of Christ. In short, we are made aware of the cruelty, the suffering and the sorrow involved in our salvation. Mel Gibson, through the blood-soaked images of Jesus in the Passion of the Christ, tried to show the sacrifice that the Saviour suffered for our salvation. Even though the blood-soaked images of Jesus may help to convey the depth of the Saviour’s love, yet we might just miss out on that which gives sense to all that we are doing this entire week. And, what is that? Let me draw your attention to one of the readings for Good Friday taken from Isaiah. It speaks so splendidly of the person whose beauty radiates through who He is.As the crowds were appalled on seeing him—so disfigured did he look that he seemed no longer human—so will the crowd be astonished at him, and kings stand speechless before him; for they shall see something never told and witness something never heard before: “Who could believe what we have heard and to whom has the power of the Lord been revealed”? Like a sapling he grew up in front of us, like a root in arid ground. Without beauty, without majesty (we saw him), no looks to attract our eyes; a thing despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering, a man to make most people screen their faces; he was despised and we took no account of him.Like Mel Gibson, Isaiah appears to draw our attention to his lack of beauty and lack of majesty. But, in truth, his beauty and majesty shine forth because the entire liturgy is concerned very much with the beauty of the one who died on the cross, the beauty of the one who prayed for his tormentors and the beauty of the one who never lost faith in God. It is His beauty and majesty that beckon or draw us near. In John’s Gospel, Jesus himself said, “When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself. And the 2nd reading is nothing but a hymn of sublime poetry. So, if you think about it, the crowd was astonished and kings stood speechless not because of his lack of beauty or majesty but because His beauty and majesty was just too intense that they immediately shied away from him for fear that they might be overcome by the sheer majesty of His beauty.
We are all attracted by beauty because the soul lives for beauty. Unfortunately, we live in a post-modern world. Beauty is ambiguous because the standard of beauty clearly differs from one individual to another individual. One man’s lady is another man’s broad, to paraphrase the popular adage. But, beyond this ambiguity, what is objectively beautiful must not be confused with one’s own tastes and convictions. Beauty is not just what I think or I feel because if truth, goodness or beauty were, then genuine human interaction would not be possible. The Pope reminds us that if it were just what I thought or felt, then we would have given in to a dictatorship of relativism. This dictatorship does not recognise anything as certain but has as its highest goal, one’s ego and one’s desires. It is not possible to be civilised in such a world.
So, there is such a thing as objective beauty that can claim our hearts. And it is important because it has everything to do with God. Let’s reflect on just one facet of our worship--music. When music is beautiful, we listen to it and are caught up by its beauty. Try to make the connexion between hearing and the Gospel. “Listening” is a response to the proclamation of the Gospel or Good News. Therefore, being caught up by the beauty of music should in a way pre-dispose us to be more open to the beauty of the Gospel, the truth of the Good News.
The search for beauty is innate or inborn in us and is part of the human make up when you consider our common experience of addiction. We know how destructive addictions are. We are afraid of them but in truth, an addict is someone who has had an encounter with beauty. An addiction is just symptom of mistaking a lesser beauty for what is truly beautiful. This description also fits the definition for sin because sin is mistaking what is evil (or lesser good) for what is good. But, nowadays the word “sin” does not have the kind of repulsion or revulsion that the word “addiction” has. Addiction does have a rather unsavoury connotation. Thus, addiction is when we get waylaid or distracted by a lesser or poorer experience and we mistake it for the good. For example, the “highs” [euphoria, ecstasy, joy] we get from gambling, over-eating, narcotics, pornography, violence, gossip, smoking, bullying, drinking, flattery etc, we mistake them for what is really good and true: God alone. Addiction is our search for beauty unfulfilled. But, our soul is not created for mediocrity; our soul is created for beauty.
Thus, beauty’s role is to draw us to what is good and true. But, the objective good and truth that lay claim to our heart is not a thing but a person who is good and true: the Christ Himself. Our Elect, those who are to be baptised are moving closer to their baptism. In a sense their journey is a journey for which they find themselves more and more infused and enveloped by the beauty of Christ’s message. The journey that they make does not end before beauty as it ends within beauty—who is Christ himself.
Furthermore, beauty is necessary to our cause for justice because when we are enamoured by beauty, it takes us out of ourselves. Our experience with beautiful music is a good example. And what is justice if not the removal of the “selfish” centre from the equation of things? Often, we begin to see a picture bigger only when the self is no longer the centre of reference. The willingness to step aside because of beauty displaces our ego for other things more important: someone who is sick, someone who is hungry, someone who is dying and etc. The lesson we should learn from this search for beauty is one of self-forgetfulness, self-effacement and humility. To serve truly, you often have to forget yourself simply because people will treat you like their servants or they behave as if you owe it to them to serve them.
This beauty we search for has everything to do with our self-offering to God. I have asked the servers to practise so that they will not “mar” or disfigure the beauty of the worship by their lack of coordination and attention. If the servers do not understand the seriousness of every action of theirs, then they have failed to understand that the beauty of their coordinated actions is crucial to the idea of self-donation—of giving the best to God what God has in the first place given to us. The same can be said of the lectors who do not practise their reading or priests who do not prepare their homilies and a choir that does not train its singing. But, the problem with our concept of beauty is that we are very utilitarian. We are pragmatic. Remember the move Titanic? The Titanic is sinking. Everyone is saving his or her life but the string quartet continues to play the music till the end. There you find two different approaches to life. The quartet represents the “beauty” approach to life. The rest just respresents the pragmatic approach to life. Why bother about “beauty” when we have more pressing questions like injustice or poverty to deal with. This approach to goodness and truth is pragmatic and not beautiful. “I am already giving my time to be an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion etc. What else do you want from me?” Likewise a person who dresses shabbily to Church who says, “I am already here, what else do you want”? Even our notion of beauty is at times closer to seduction than it is to God because people dress not for God but to draw attention to their bodies.
When our approach to goodness and truth is pragmatic and not beautiful, we cut God down to our size and we place him in a convenient place for us to worship, the way we like to and not the way that God deserves to be worshipped.
So, brothers and sisters, we want to do good and we all want to serve the truth but it is beauty that leads us there. Music, Servers, EMoHC, Lectors, Hospitality Ministers--everyone here is involved with beauty. For example, if everyone is lifted up to meditate on divine things because the choir’s singing gave wings to each one’s soul, then the choir has done what fulfilled its purpose. The beauty of your sound had led people to God. Your role is to be like John the Baptist: “He must increase and I must decrease”. John forgets himself in order to guide his followers to Christ alone.
This week, the liturgy opens our eyes to the beauty of the one mocked, the beauty of the one whipped and the beauty of the one crucified to attract us. Beauty is love made visible. Our efforts to let go of sin (or any addiction) are efforts to turn from the false beauty offered by fleeting temporalities and to turn to the true beauty of Christ. As we witness Christ tortured for our sins, let us be drawn by his beauty so that we will allow His grace to reshape our lives so that we reflect His Beauty mirroring His Truth and His Goodness.
