Do Christians Still Care About Beauty?

I sat in front of my laptop. The sun was still snoozing under the horizon and I was reading Exodus, one of those books from the front half of the Bible. Actually, I wasn’t reading. I was floating half-conscious over paragraphs about alters, oil, and priests and wondering why I had left the land of sleep for this. 

But, then my eyes snagged on something. “And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty.” (Ex. 28:2, ESV). 

Wait, I thought, beauty matters to God? 

Photo courtesy of Jan Erik Waider via unsplash.com

After all the years I spent in Sunday school, I felt pretty good about how well I could predict God. If he was selecting qualities he wanted in worship—his first draft pick would be glory. Subsequent rounds he’d choose things like love, faith, and obedience. But, it had never crossed my mind that God’s idea of worship wasn’t complete without beauty.

The idea of beauty being central to worship seemed so foreign to me that I checked the verse in five other translations—NIV, NASB, NKJV, NLT, and the NET Bible. All of them use the word “beauty” or “beautiful” except for the NIV which translates it “honor”.  The Hebrew word is תִּפְאֶ֫רֶת (tipe-ret). Apparently, a lot of really smart people—who are more expert in Hebrew than I am at eating ice cream—believe the best translation for תִּפְאֶ֫רֶת is beauty.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to see a sunset spilling into the ocean or a baby girl peeping through her eyelashes. But, beauty just doesn’t fit with the keep-it-moral, get-it-done approach to God that characterizes much of American Christianity. 

For a couple of days, the phrase, “for glory and for beauty”, kept passing through my brain like a kid on a rope swing. Finally, it launched itself into Matthew 26—the story where a woman pours expensive perfume over Jesus’ head. The disciples criticize her because the perfume could have been sold and the money used to serve God in “better” ways. Like me, the disciples didn’t understand how God feels about beauty. 

“Why are you bothering this woman,” Jesus said. “She has done a beautiful thing to me…wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” (Matt. 26:10, 13).

Clearly, beautiful worship matters to Jesus.

And this leaves me asking: What happened to beauty? And, how can we—as individuals and as the church—bring more beauty back to God in worship?