The Beautiful Body of God
No matter how many times I hear it in hymns like Beautiful Savior or in any of the contemporary Christian pop songs you find on the radio with similar words, something feels strange about calling God “beautiful.” To be clear, this isn’t a matter of gendered language. I think I would have a similar aversion to calling God “handsome.” God deserves words like “glorious,” “awesome,” and “magnificent.” We talk about humans being “pretty,” so God must be far above that. Words that describe human attractiveness seem unfit to describe God, but furthermore, it seems wrong to talk about God as being attractive at all. This isn’t to say that God is ugly, but we aren’t supposed to be drawn to God because God looks good. We are drawn to God by love and glorious power. God is a spiritual divine being, not some good-looking object of desire.
Maybe not everyone shares this problem, but for those who do, we must wonder why. At its core, this is a problem of speaking about the body of God. As the emerging Christian movement came into contact with the Greek philosophy that had garnered so much respect in the ancient world, theology adapted, bringing God more in line with the abstract logical construct that existed in the minds of philosophers than the personal embodied warrior and defender of the poor that had been worshiped in Israel. This process continued over time, such that now we struggle to imagine the “body of God.”
Certainly, God has been portrayed in various forms of art. God can be portrayed with a deep booming voice, white hair and a thick beard, or riding a flaming chariot through the sky. God has been portrayed by Morgan Freeman, among many others. And even irreverent cartoons portray God as a bearded man on a cloud. However, when we are thinking deeply about it, many of us reject these images of an embodied God. They can stand to make a statement, but God doesn’t have a good-looking body. God is abstract and spiritual. We wouldn’t understand God even if we saw God. God is a timeless, spaceless, disembodied mind. God is not a body.
And yet, our brief passage from Isaiah for this Sunday (Isaiah 52:7-10) speaks clearly in bodily language. The first body part referenced isn’t necessarily about God, but given how frequently New Testament writers quoted Isaiah as pointing to Jesus, one could argue that Jesus is the one who comes bringing good news. In that case Isaiah would be pointing out that Jesus has beautiful feet. I think most people would agree that feet aren’t all that attractive, especially the feet of a messenger. These feet have gone through sand and mud, probably haven’t been washed in days, and may smell pretty bad. These feet aren’t beautiful by any standard. This is poetic language to capture the joy felt by people receiving this message. When the dirty, dusty body before you has traveled a long way to tell you that God has brought peace to you and your people, that body is beautiful. How the body actually looks isn’t nearly as important as what the body does. The message makes the body beautiful, even the feet.
We could imagine other ways to receive this message that would be less beautiful. It could have blown into town by chance, a strong wind bearing a dusty papyrus into a nearby thorn bush by accident. Deeply impersonal. Similarly, the Gospel could be delivered today by way of mass email. It would certainly reach a lot of people, but it wouldn’t be beautiful. Disembodied, the message is just a message. It beautifies no body. I may be able to admit that the stinky feet of a messenger could be beautiful, but cannot say the same for a gmail screen, no matter how much you customize it. Beautiful isn’t really a category that should describe an email homescreen.
At the end of the passage, Isaiah says that God “has bared God’s holy arm.” This isn’t described as beautiful, but it is an arm. God has a body, with real arms. God has rolled up God’s holy sleeves and displayed the muscle underneath. By the end of the verse, these holy arms are closely tied to salvation, as if to say that this salvation is accomplished by God’s arms. One could perhaps point to the cross and say that this is darkly fulfilled in the crucifixion as so many other passages in Isaiah are. Without dismissing that, we can focus on something that is perhaps even more important to our context today. Salvation is embodied in God. God saved with holy arms, not with pre-eternal logic and reasoning, not with abstract spiritual ghostly breathing. God accomplished salvation with arms.
A critic may say that I’m literalizing a metaphor here, focusing too much on the bodily language, but that bodily language is key. Due to our long history of abstracting God in theological tradition, belief becomes difficult for many people. What exactly are we supposed to believe in? What do we cling to? When the storms of life assail, I can’t hold on to a purely spiritual, holy, presence. I need to hold on to—and be held by—those mighty arms that accomplished salvation. When I’m going through a hard time and need to hear a good word to inspire me to keep fighting, a distant, mystical, perfectly rational mind doesn’t do it for me. I need the beautiful, dusty feet of a messenger who has gone through hell to come tell me it's going to be okay.
When we abstract God to the point of being a disembodied mind beyond timespace that functions perfectly rationally, we experience a disconnection between body and spirit. Our bodies become temporary vessels, something to be shed when we die, so we can float through the aether as immortal ghosts. But this negatively impacts our presence here on earth. Religion becomes purely about spiritual realities, with physical material realities being separated into a different category. Bodily trauma, poverty, and pain become unimportant matters, relegated to this temporary world that is passing away. But that trauma, poverty, and pain is exactly what God is fighting with those holy arms. The holy beautiful-footed messenger proclaims liberation from the pain and grief we experience around our own sins and around the systems that hurt us and our fellow humans. As much as it may seem strange to intellectually tether God to a beautiful body, it is much worse to strip God of any semblance of a body and cast the Holy Presence into the depths of the universe. God is here. God is working to save us from our sin and pain. God is embodied in this work, and wherever that body appears, it is beautiful.
