Beauty and Brokenness

The Four Holy Gospels Frontispiece: Charis/Kairos (The Tears of Christ)

As the book of Psalms says over and over, beauty originates with God and personifies His being. While we tend to think of the obviously sublime—namely, the “pretty” and the pleasing—Scripture clearly shows beauty to be something much more complex, particularly in the person of Christ. From the tension of His birth to His bloodied and broken form hanging on the cross, the beauty of His life on earth transcended the surface layer of presumed reality, pointing to a reality far greater. It embraced both perfection and brokenness; both the darkness of suffering and the power of light.

If the four Gospels can be said to reveal a single thing, it is His incarnation—God coming to be with humankind, to identify with us and our brokenness, and to become its healing. Makoto Fujimura’s frontispiece for The Four Holy Gospels is titled Charis/Kairos (meaning “grace” and “eternal time” in Greek), words that suggest this mystery and miracle. As lofty as that might sound, the manifestation of this grace can be seen in Jesus’ astonishing embrace of human weakness: His tears. Fujimura writes about the significance of this humble image of divine love and its great beauty:

In John 11, Jesus weeps. His tears, shed in response to Lazarus’ death and Mary and Martha’s grief, are full of embodied truth, beauty, and goodness. Why did Jesus weep? He delayed coming to Bethany “so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (v. 4) and, when He arrived, informed Martha that He is “the resurrection and the life” (v. 25).

If He came to Bethany to show His power and the fact that He is indeed the Messiah with the power to resurrect the dead, why did He not simply wave His “magic wand” to “solve the problem” of the death and illness of Lazarus? There would have been an immediate celebration, and all the tears would have been unnecessary. Tears are useless, even wasteful, if you possess the power to cause miracles. Instead, He made Himself vulnerable, stopped to feel the sting of death—to identify with frail humanity, who struggled to know hope.

Jesus’ tears led to Mary’s later direct, intuitive act of devotion: pouring a jar of pure nard—worth a year’s wages—upon Him. Hauntingly, this provoked an opposite reaction from another disciple, Judas, who condemned her waste. Yet Jesus commended her sacrifice, and the only earthly possession He wore on the cross was the aroma of Mary’s nard.

What we deemed a waste, Jesus called the most necessary. To me, art resonates from the aroma of Christ, hung on the cross. Art depicts what is central by marveling in the peripheral, sometimes in non-utilitarian actions. Such art lights our paths, revealing what is truly beautiful and ugly at the same time. Every act of creativity is, in some way, a response to offer back to God what has been given to us.

Adapted from the articles “River Grace” and “The Beautiful Tears” by Makoto Fujimura (available at makotofujimura.com). Scripture quoted in this excerpt is taken from the English Standard Version.