Word for the day

Is God beautiful?

Have you ever wondered if God is beautiful? When we speak about God, we may say God is holy, almighty, gracious, loving, forgiving, just, and merciful, eternal, but usually we do not say that God is beautiful. If we speak about God and beauty, we usually mean that God’s creation is beautiful.

But what does the Bible say? Let us also ask:  What is beautiful in God’s eyes? What does God see as beautiful?

Ecclesiastes 3:11 (English Standard Version, ESV) says:

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

Psalm 8 asks, when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals[a] that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.

This psalm does not say that God made people beautiful, but we can easily imagine that if God crowns people with glory and honor, it means that God also gave them beauty. And according to Ecclesiastes, God had made everything beautiful in its time. I think this suggests that everything that God has made is beautiful, people, animals, things, all creation has their inherent beauty, in its time. We may not always see it, for example, we may have a long list of animals that we do not consider beautiful, but the psalm reminds us that although we are like God, we do not always understand what God has done or what God is doing. But God can see beauty in everything God has made, because God can see things for what they truly are. Catholic theologian Richard Rohr says it this way: truth is on some level always beautiful–and healing–to those who honestly want truth. So, we could say that everything true, everything genuine, that God has made is beautiful.

But we also know that things are broken. Things are not the way God has intended. Things are not always true. And things are sometimes ugly.

In the Gospel according to Mathew, Jesus tells a parable about a merchant who searches for beautiful, fine pearls, and when he finds one really special, he sells everything he has and buys it. In this parable, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a beautiful pearl. And we can all imagine that if you find the Kingdom of God, it will be beautiful and lovely and everything best we can imagine. And we would really want it. But now think what Jesus was looking for. What was he searching for? If you remember the stories of Jesus, you see him always looking for those who are lost, for those who are ill, for those who are excluded. You do not see him accompanied by the most fashionable, beautiful people.  You do not see him surrounded by rich people. You see him accompanied by smelly firemen, you see him among the poor, among the prostitutes. Healing lepers with maimed bodies. So, I think it is fair to say that Jesus sees beauty and great value in them. In his eyes, they are beautiful. In God’s eyes, they are beautiful. Because Jesus can see them the way God intended them to be. 

Susan O’Dell writes about her trip to Guatemala in her article What Poverty Taught Me About Beauty: “Before arriving, I was poised for what I expected to see: suffering, pain, loss, desperation, poverty. I did see all of those things… but it was the beauty I wasn’t expecting to encounter that stayed with me—that changed me the most.”

Seeing the world in this way opens our eyes to a deeper beauty when we see the God given value of all people and creation. When you can see this beauty, the healing begins.

So, is God beautiful? I think the parable answers the question: finding God is like finding the most beautiful pearl.

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Rev. Tomas Pistora is pastor at Trinity United Presbyterian Church