Ezra's Attitude to His Job

In Ezra 7, there's an interesting incident. Ezra the scribe is sent from Babylonia to the small and struggling community in Jerusalem. Ezra is an expert in the Law of Moses. His official remit is to offer lots of sacrifices and (real reason) to teach the Law and appoint judges, to impose the rule of law, both God's Law and the laws of the Persian empire. For this service, he's allowed to take along lots of gold and stuff.

And this is Ezra's response to his commission:

Blessed be the LORD, the God of our fathers, who put such a thing as this into the heart of the king, to beautify the house of the LORD that is in Jerusalem, and who extended to me his steadfast love before the king and his counselors, and before all the king’s mighty officers. I took courage, for the hand of the LORD my God was on me, and I gathered leading men from Israel to go up with me.

Ezra 7:27-28, ESV

Ezra sees his mission primarily as to beautify the house of God. That's interesting. The NIV doesn't get it - it is a bit incongruous after all, and translates it "bring honour to". But Ezra sees his mission, including the teaching and in Ezra 10 the calling the people to repentance, as beautifying the house of God. Now that's an interesting thought.

Edwards on Beauty

God is not only infinitely greater and more excellent than all other being; but he is the head of the universal system of existence; the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty; from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; of whom, and through whom, and to whom is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is as it were the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain and summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day.
Jonathan Edwards

There's a fairly easily accessible piece on Edwards' views of beauty here.

Christian Beauty

I've been thinking about this a bit recently. I think one of the implications that we (or me as a conservative evangelical at any rate) often miss of Christ is that he transforms our notion of beauty via the renewing of our mind (Rom 12:2). So part of what it means to be living as a Christian is to be displaying this sense of beauty (and to be becoming more truly beautiful ourselves as we come closer to Christ).

It would be easy to make one of the mistakes Hillsong are sometimes characterised as making here and then using the world's notion of beauty to inform how we should be becoming, but it's rubbish. And it's easy to criticise them as they are stereotyped, but at least they got far enough to realise there was an issue of beauty to be considered!

Here are a couple of quotes that illustrate something of what I mean?

But when the church puts belief into practice, in relation to man and to nature, there is substantial healing. One of the first fruits of that healing is a new sense of beauty. The aesthetic values are not to be despised. God has made man with a sense of beauty no animal has; no animal has ever produced a work of art. Man as made in the image of God has an aesthetic quality, and as soon as he begins to deal with nature as he should, beauty is preserved in nature.
Francis A Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man

Grasped in its proper Trinitarian depth, the gospel narrative not only breaks down all human perceptions of beauty, goodness, and truth, but reorients these broken perceptions around the centre to which it bears witness, and in this way reconstitutes and perfects them. Jesus' cross and resurrection are like a magnetic point around which history and culture take on a shape which could not be anticipated from any perspective they themselves provide, and which they could not otherwise have assumed...
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama

So what does this Christian conception of beauty look like?

The obvious answer is "Jesus", but it's also surprisingly deep. Do we think of Jesus as beautiful? Do we think of the woman's costly and humiliating devotion to Jesus (Matt 26, Mark 14) as beautiful? Do we think of the preaching of Christ as beautiful (Rom 10:25)? Do we think of the gentle and quiet spirit (1 Pet 3:4) as beautiful?

There's some more thinking that needs to be done here...