Real Beauty

Posted by Christian St John in Faithblogs | 0 comments

[audio:RealBeauty.mp3|titles=Real Beauty|artists=Christian St John]
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I came across this advertisement the other day and after watching it I thought to myself “no wonder we have a distorted view of what beauty is.”

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that all of us have been affected by the images of “beauty” that we are sold by the media. Images of “beautiful” people titillate and entice us like modern day sirens luring people to their doom. Okay, maybe I’m being a bit overly dramatic but the whole “you must look a certain way to fit in and be beautiful” ideal is a potentially dangerous trap. Husbands thinking their wives should be thinner, have long golden hair, and look like a super model all the time. Wives looking at their husbands and wishing he had a six pack and rippling muscles… oh and a full head of hair. Girls’ thinking that beauty is found in a bottle or the latest puke down the toilet, starvation diet craze. And even boys are affected by the imagery that is all around us telling us, scratch that, preaching to us what real beauty looks like.

Sometimes the message is so blatantly obvious. An advert on TV or in a magazine telling you what you should look like, “because you’re worth it.” And yet many times it’s not so obvious, although it’s still pretty much in your face. Have you ever noticed how movies usually star the “beautiful” people? Matthew McConaughey, J. Lo, Brad Pitt, Jessica Alba, George Clooney… all considered “beautiful” people. And we watch movies and TV shows filled with these “beautiful” people and dream of either being like them or with someone like them.

The media continually pushes what beauty should look like so that we will buy their products. Last week I was buying some shaving stuff and my daughter points out that there’s a new line of products for men and jokingly said, “Maybe you could eventually look like him.” The “him” she was referring to was cardboard standee of Patrick Dempsey (aka Dr McDreamy from Grey’s Anatomy) who is the new spokesperson for this particular brand of “manly” products. Obviously I laughed but it did get me thinking about the message this standee is sending out to male teens and young men.

Even in one of my favorite shows Stargate Atlantis I see the tendency to play up the “beautiful” whilst playing down the average. For instance, there’s Colonel John Shepperd, the eye candy of the show for the ladies. With his Clint Eastwood type voice, a full head of hair, a boyish smile, and consistent designer stubble he is often referred to by his teammates as the “Kirk” or ladies man of the team. On the other hand you have the nerdish Dr Rodney McKay, a slightly overweight man with thinning hair, quirky characteristics, and a demeanor that would make most women run the other way. In the show you have the other “beautiful” people namely Teyla and Ronon both warriors from other worlds and then you have characters like Zelenka and Beckett who would be considered nerds or average.

What’s interesting is that the usual pattern for TV and movies is that the “beautiful” people are often the heroes or main stars while the average looking Joe’s wind up playing the parts of computer geeks and nerds. See what I mean, even now I’m differentiating between those who are “beautiful” and those who aren’t.

Here’s a thought, what picture of Jesus do you have in your mind’s eye? Do you have the image of a “beautiful” Bee Gee type with long flowing hair that wouldn’t be amiss in a 1980′s hair band, a perfect smile that shows off his perfect teeth, piercing bright blue eyes, and blemish free, perfectly tanned skin? Well the Bible tells us in Isaiah 53:2 that the Messiah would have “… no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.”

Am I saying hat Jesus was ugly? Well by the standards of “beauty” we have set up in today’s world I think it would be a safe bet to say that we wouldn’t cast him as the next James Bond or next to Kate Hudson in the next romantic Chick flick.

What the text is telling us is that the Messiah would not be a “beautiful” person as we know beauty to be because 1) He didn’t want people following him for the wrong reasons and 2) He wanted people to see the real him, His inner beauty. Do you think that James and John followed him because they thought “wow look at his manly beard, his muscular build, and his fair complexion” or do you think they saw something else, something that cannot be explained by mere words but must be felt?

Jesus had no need for fleeting beauty as His beauty is eternal – We can read His beautiful Words today and see how beautiful he was with the people, and still be attracted to him today. Now that’s beauty, the kind of beauty that causes someone to be attracted to Jesus 2,000 years after the very first disciples were attracted to Him. And it’s this kind of beauty that makes people willing to give up their lives to follow; not a shallow beauty that will fade with time, but a beauty that endures throughout the ages, a beauty that will never fade.

I believe that if we want to see real beauty then we need to stop looking around and listening to the lies of the world and begin again to look in awe and wonder at the most beautiful person who has ever walked among us, Jesus.

Christian St John M.Div, BChM, ACS
August, 2009