The Hidden Beauty of Jesus
It is interesting what can catch your eye when you just scroll mindlessly through social media. As I was looking through Instagram today, a post about Jesus really popped out at me. The post was this picture from evangelist Ben Fitzgerald's account that you see below.
The post says, "Take a moment.. remember how beautiful he is" (based on the context of the the post, the "he" would be Jesus). I wanted to write my blog post about this image because the more I thought about the phrase on it, the more I realized how interesting of a characteristic the beauty of Jesus is. This characteristic is something that I have often heard Christians sing about in songs like Beautiful One or pray about in church, but why do Christians say that Jesus is beautiful? We have never really seen Jesus so it can not possibly mean beautiful in the physical sense. Normally, the compliment of beautiful in my English language and Canadian culture is reserved for romantic partners or other women in our families for the most part. I even remember times in church when I was little and we would sing about how beautiful Jesus was and in my lack of understanding felt weird about singing that.
As I did what the post told me to and began to remember the beauty of Jesus I decided that the beauty had to do with Jesus' character, life and salvation. I believe that Christians say that Jesus is beautiful today because of the work that he did while he was here on Earth and because of what he continues to do now. Jesus was perfect, he was kind to the outcast, he bled and died for all people, and right now he is in heaven preparing a place for those who love him. This is what makes Jesus beautiful and knowing this allows me to truly appreciate his beauty as a believer.
One of my thoughts however after seeing this post was, "if this is a more abstract idea about Jesus even for believers, how would a non-believer take this photo." In the post there is an image of a man which could help people think about Jesus as a real person in their minds, but again no one has really seen Jesus. I could see many non-believers become quite confused by this post or even think that it is humorous that people would describe Jesus the man as beautiful. The only way I could see people who are not Christians associating beauty with Jesus would be if they at least believed that Jesus was a good teacher, a good person and was beautiful in how he set an example of decency for humanity to follow. Since non-believers would not have this concept of salvation however, I can see them missing a huge part of the beauty of Christ. I see this as another great opportunity to start conversations with people who are less familiar with Christianity. Asking someone how they think Jesus could be beautiful could start a great conversation with someone about God.
One lesson that I think Christians can take away from this is that we need to be mindful of the things we say. I do not know how many non-Christian followers Ben Fitzgerald has, and it does seem that his post was meant for Christians which is awesome and I have no problem with, but just in general, how is our clothing, social media and even lives actually portraying Jesus to the non-believers in our sphere of influence? This is what doing this blog project has really helped me think about. Christians really do have a lot of sayings, words, and images that we like to use that we all understand, but much of the meanings are hidden from the rest of the world. One of the most beautiful things about Jesus is his salvation but I would like to think that that does not come to mind when a non-believer is asked, "what is beautiful about the person of Jesus from the Bible?"
So what do you think? Why is Jesus beautiful to you? Do you think that this is an odd characteristic of Jesus, why?
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