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Jonathan Storment

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A Beautiful Gospel: A Gospel of Beauty

A Beautiful Gospel: A Gospel of Beauty

Last updated on: August 25, 2016 at 5:01 am by Jonathan Storment

A Beautiful Gospel: A Gospel of Beauty 2016-08-24T16:30:27-05:00 Jonathan Storment

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BG1 Once upon a time, a man loved a woman. He was smitten with her beauty and pursued her with a ravenous desire. He wrote her poetry and sang her music, dripping with promises of fidelity and everlasting love.

Yet, once his love had captured her heart, this man slowly began to lose the ability to see her beauty.

And this man slowly stopped being able to see what was right in front of him.

The Orthodox rabbi and counselor Shmuley Biotech works with a lot of marriages in trouble, and in his experience this is the major problem that marriages have.

We grow too familiar with one another. He points to the Old Testament practice of mikveh, in which the woman would separate from her husband during her menstruation cycle (which is not a topic I thought I’d ever be writing about).

To modern readers, this sounds incredibly mysogynistic and repressive. But Boteach says that most Christians reading this have misunderstood the purpose behind the commandment. According to Orthodox Judaism , this is not a practice concerned with a man becoming unclean, but for a different purpose all together.

It was meant to prevent the couple from becoming overly familiar with one another. It increases the mystery that the lovers feel for each other.

A Holy Jealousy

I know this will sound strange, but I have to tell you this story.

Once Boteach was counseling a couple in a lifeless marriage, and after a few sessions the Rabbi noticed that the husband took his wife entirely for granted. He no longer found her even vaguely attractive and they were considering ending the marriage. So the Rabbi proposed a, shall we say, somewhat radical experiment for an Orthodox Jew.

He told the wife that she needed to dress in her sexiest dress, head down to a local bar and sit at a table alone. Boteach then told the husband that he also needed to go to this bar, but enter separately and sit at a separate table and just watch her from a distance to see what happens.

The couple did as they were instructed. And after a few minutes at the bar, the husband began to see what he had grown blind to. Every other man in the bar was staring at the woman he had grown cold toward. Several men started making advances toward her, and eventually the husband charged across the room, his heart pounding with passion and anger, and he almost got into a fist fight with the man hitting on his wife!

Here’s the way Mark Sayers relates this story:

Suddenly the husband no longer saw the woman he had become so familiar with; instead, he saw this woman whom other men were trying to seduce. Likewise, the wife no longer saw a moan who had become bored with her; now he was a lover, fighting off other men just to have her.

The couple wound up making love in the car outside the bar.

I know this is an extreme parable, and potentially offensive for a variety of reasons, but I don’t know a better parable for Christianity in the West than this.

I’d wager that if you are reading this you have spent the majority of your life in church, you’ve heard all the stories, you’ve spent your childhood in VBS, and quite literally have drank the Kool-Aid

The way of Jesus has by now shaped your ethics and your imagination…all of which is well and good.

But there is a casualty to this kind of upbringing.

Slowly over time, we begin to lose the ability to see what is right in front of us.

You Don’t Know What You’re Missing

If you’ve followed my blog or preaching for any amount of time, you know that I love G.K. Chesterton, especially his great book The Everlasting Man. Chesterton wrote this book 100 years ago, in what was quickly becoming post-Christian England. The similarities between England then and America today are striking. But Chesterton wasn’t writing to get people to stop walking away from Christianity, he wrote this book so that they would at least have eyes to see what they were walking away from.

He said that if you could imagine Christianity like a massive city, so huge and majestic that you hardly could realize the scope of the city from within it. He said, to those of us who grew up within Christianity, that we are probably overly familiar with certain parts of it, like a child who knows their small neighborhood down to the very potholes on the street, but before walking away from the city, you should at least try to tour the whole thing. And if you won’t do that you should at least ask someone on the outside of the city just how they see it. Here’s Chesterton’s words:

It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.

I believe this whole heartedly.

Most of the people walking away from the movement of Jesus today have no idea what they are walking away from. They have no concept of just how much Jesus has shaped their desires, their ethics and their hopes and dreams.

They know the potholes but they can’t see the city. And since the problem that we are facing is not one of intellect it won’t be solved with more information. The problem we are facing is a more aesthetic one. We don’t need a more informative Gospel, we need a beautiful one.

We have grown blind to the beautiful thing that is the Gospel. What was once a breath of fresh air to both the religious Jews and the non-religious pagans is now thought of as nothing more than self-evident common sense.

We have no idea that those little churches that we berate and walk away from are stewards of this radical dream that (at her best) keeps Nazi’s at bay, reminds us racism is a problem, and offers condemnation and grace to the dehumanized and the dehumanizers. We forgot that human rights, civil rights, abolition and social justice and mercy movements al have their roots in and are animated by the people who follow this beautiful Gospel.

We don’t know what we are missing because we haven’t yet had to miss it.

And if we could just go off to some distant vantage point and see the city that is the Christian faith, if we could see the impact that this Rabbi from Nazareth has had on every part of human civilization, if we could step back from the Church that we have taken for granted and see again with fresh eyes just how beautiful others think she is, we would, I think/hope, once again be smitten.

You can leave the Christian faith, and for lots of people that’s probably the right thing to do. In the words of Dallas Willard, “If you can find a better way to live than Jesus, I think Jesus would tell you to take it.” But before you leave, you should at least make sure you know what you are leaving. Make sure you see it clearly.

Because before we can leave something we first have to name what we will miss in it.

And right now, we don’t know what we’re missing.

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