The Beautiful Life of Christ on Earth
The Beautiful Life of Christ on Earth.
And the people were astonished beyond measure, saying, ‘Everything He does is beautiful, and is done with excellence!” (Mark 7:37).
BEAUTY: The quality of outstanding excellence in appearance, in usefulness, in moral character, in creative expression; brings delight to the senses; well-designed and constructed; a harmony that reflects creation; extremely attractive; that which inspires awe, wonder, admiration, praise; profoundly pleasing; an act of pure goodness; the presence of loveliness and grace; something exquisite in form, function, and proportion; that which contains glory and splendor.
“Kalos” is the Greek term used in Mark 7:37 above. “Kalos” means beautiful, perfect, excellent, very good, well done, admirable, wonderful, morally virtuous and honorable. Kalos was used over 100 times in the New Testament in a variety of contexts. It was often translated as “good” in passages such as good fruit, good ground, a good tree, and good works. But when applied to a person, it often referred to the moral character and the overall beauty of someone’s inner nature and outer work. In Jesus’ case, kalos was referring to His whole personhood that was beautiful inside and out; His attractive purity; the beautiful excellence He demonstrated in His everyday life; the beautiful sweetness in His interactions with those in need; the beauty of His inner goodness and virtue; the excellent usefulness and practical wisdom of His demonstrations of power. According to the people surrounding Him and watching His every move, everything Jesus did was beautiful, excellently done, and profoundly useful.
The Perfect Shepherd. Kalos is the Greek term used in the much-beloved self-description of Jesus when He declared that He was the “good” Shepherd. The term ‘good’ here is perhaps a bit vague until we unpack kalos… Jesus is claiming to be the perfect shepherd who cares for His sheep. He is an excellent and able shepherd in all His ways. He is a beautiful shepherd inside and out, in His character and in His ability to attract needy sheep to Himself for care. He is a noble and uncompromising shepherd who fulfills all His responsibilities with excellence and grace. He is what everyone would want and is everything people might desire in a capable caretaker of souls. Jesus is a ‘good’ shepherd in so many ways, and looking at kalos helps us to understand how beautiful and wonderful a shepherd He really is.
The Beauty of Christ’s Good Works. “Jesus of Nazareth was anointed by God with the Holy Spirit and with great power. He did wonderful things for others in His acts of kindness and divinely healed all who were under the tyranny of the Devil; He traveled through the country helping people, doing good, and healing everyone who was harassed by the Devil.” (Acts 10:38). Everything Jesus did in His ministry was beautiful, excellent, and profoundly useful to everyone He touched. His ministry to overlooked children, unappreciated women, and His unerring ability to touch the untouchables all revealed a ministry of beauty and grace. The beautiful life of Christ also included His exorcisms, healing and storytelling.
Exorcisms. He powerfully and effectively cast out demons with grace and kindness, so that each exorcism resulted in a person transformed, spiritually whole, and changed for the better. Many scholars have noted that Jesus conducted more exorcisms than any historical figure on record. Casting out demons seemed to take up just as much of His time as physical healings, and in fact, His ministry usually included both forms of healings together. “That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons…” (Mark 1:32-34). Jesus beautifully revealed His authority over physical ailments and over spiritual possession. In the spiritual realm, not one demon ever successfully resisted the commands of Jesus. As soon as the demons saw it was Jesus, they knew their days were numbered. It is a beautiful sight, to see that Jesus was just as concerned with the spiritual world as He was the physical world.
Healings. It’s clear that, from the start of His public ministry, Jesus was a healer far beyond what the people had ever seen. The beautiful and effective healing ministry of Jesus reflected His inner beauty of love, of wanting the best for people, of wanting to make it personal and productive. His inherent nature is pure compassion, so He gravitated to love-in-action. If He sees someone broken, He jumps at the chance to bring wholeness. Healing was His natural form of self-expression as the Anointed One of God. “Jesus traveled throughout the region of Galilee, teaching in the synagogues and preaching the Good News about the kingdom. And He healed every kind of disease and illness.” (Matt. 4:23). Jesus proved that God is not distant or abstract. Through Jesus, God is intensely personal and in the flesh. He didn’t just want to talk about love, He wanted to beautifully demonstrate it. Jesus proved that long-distance interaction with God is no longer sufficient. And healing was the most kind-hearted, most personally helpful thing He could do. Jesus was all about making things whole, and healings of the body was a good place to start.
Storytelling. The master teacher, Jesus loved to express His vivid and inspired imagination whenever He could. He was excellent and effective at storytelling, and so He loved to tell stories, all kinds of stories, depending on the audience and the situation. At one point in His ministry, He evidently told nothing but stories to the crowds (Matt. 13:34). His favorite method of teaching seemed to be through parables, extended metaphors. These parables included simple, everyday realities, which had universal appeal and drew the audience in, wherever He was, whoever He was with. Jesus intended His stories to be provocative, and to shrewdly slip in a main point, or many main points. Sometimes His stories were like firecrackers, the indirection thrown into the midst of the hearers in order to stir things up, pointedly aimed at people who need to take the story personally. Other times, the story hits more like a smoke bomb, the main point being clouded over and confusing, forcing the hearers to dig deeper and try to figure it out. “Jesus was a metaphorical theologian. That is, His primary method of creating meaning was through metaphor, simile, parable and dramatic action rather than through logic and reasoning. He created meaning like a dramatist and a poet rather than like a philosopher.” (Kenneth Bailey). Some of His stories were simpler than others, but all of his parables were rich with kingdom meaning, and were in Bailey’s words, “serious theology.” Therefore, parables are deep theology, learned indirectly, through a divinely inspired imagination and a winsome, compelling personality. Jesus proved to be a seriously playful theologian who beautifully and effectively used His imaginative stories to teach the truth, throwing them into the mix of people he encountered.
Dwelling on His Beauty. It’s not enough to simply appreciate or admire the beauty of Christ. Instead, we need to fix our eyes on Jesus and His beauty, to gaze upon Him and worship His beauty, to allow His beauty to be formative in our lives. David exclaims in Psalm 24:7 that he has ‘one thing’ he wants more than anything else, there is one thing that would help form and direct his life… “to gaze with complete focus upon the sweet and delightful beauty of the Lord.” There’s a good chance that centering our life on the beauty of Christ, of worshiping His beauty, of allowing His beauty to change our lives into one like His, is indeed our ‘one thing most needful.’
Making Holiness Beautiful and Attractive. There is no doubt that Jesus displayed the beauty of holiness in His life and ministry. He was a living magnet, attracting people to His holiness through His beautiful life. It’s a wonder why there aren’t more people now attracted to His beauty. Certainly we can overcome the stiff competition from the world. His holiness was attractive when He was on earth. Why is holiness any less desirable now? Jesus is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. Through His Holy Spirit, Jesus can be worthy competition to the spirit of the age once again. It is still true that everything he does is beautiful. His holiness is still attractive. “In that day, the Branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious.” (Isaiah 4:2). Since the fallen world has developed a faulty and uninspired sense of beauty, and have even defiled beauty with pornography and ugliness, one can easily look around and say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But that’s a tragic mistake. We need to look no further than God’s creation and character to find our absolute standards of beauty. It’s true, beauty has a grid. The closer we get to those aspects of God’s beauty, the more beautiful we become. The stronger we are in harmony with the biblical absolutes of beauty, and the better we reflect those standards, the more beautiful our lives and creative expressions become.
Lauren Daigle – Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful + I Exalt Thee – Legendado em Português