I think perhaps beauty and justice are one,

Entwined inextricably

Both having to do with good or right ordering of things

Ordering that both demonstrates

and defends

life and thriving

An arrangement of the material

and embodied

which implicitly communicates purpose

And thrums with the Creator’s appraisal:

“It is very good”

A dance can do this

A painting

A sermon

The service of first responders

Equitable governance of a metropolis

A symphony

A latte and the social interaction that generates it

Things in good order

All of these can be beauty

and justice at the same time:

things in good order

Creation singing

So also these:

The play of dolphins

And migration of birds

The silent roar of the expanding cosmos

The daily rise of the sun

And the playful deluge of colour

That celebrates it’s settling in for the night

The laughing and crying of children

The celebration called

A wedding

Which every culture instantiates in

Such diverse fashion

(And so also does every couple, for that matter)!

And so also are the good deeds of the

Children of God

At once justice and beauty

Even when,  – or perhaps especially when –

They are done

In the context of

And in contention with, injustice

Injustice, injustice

Un-beautiful and disordered behaviours

Warped systems

Cascades of violence

Accelerated by greed

And twisted narratives

Told by one of the “other”

These visitations of violence

Sometimes worthy of absolute horror

While yet seeming good

In the eyes of blinded tribes

Against these horrors,

— instantive or continuous

Interpersonal or systemic —

Against these horrors:

Love,

and the remembrance

Of the dignity of every person

Against horrors:

Love in en-fleshed action

Is astonishingly beautiful

Love lived in the grit

and scarcity

Love lived in the fall

Against horrors is beautiful: forgiveness

Against horrors is beautiful: mercy

So I appraise this

Extol this as beautiful:

In the moment we killed our Creator,

nailed to the monument of our pseudo-justice,

He said: “Father, forgive them,

they know not what they do”

I call beautiful the self-offering sacrifice of my King

And his appeal for us to be:

Reconciled!

— For indeed the forgiveness of God

is not simply an impassive legal exchange

But also a full-hearted

Passionate,

Restoration of the wrongdoer,

(the unjust! The spiritually ugly!)

to communion.

It is complete reconciliation 

and it

is beautiful —

I find it beautiful that Jesus Christ

submitted himself to our injustice,

our ugly disorder,

And exposed the futility of it.

By the death of Christ,

The systems of the world

were put on trial

and put to shame

because

In their fierce need to keep

the status quo

— The balances of power

that preserved the counterfeit good

of the of tribes and empires–

They,

We,

Crucified goodness itself

And it was horrific

And embarrassing

And absurd

But the cruciform love

Of that man crucified,

Was beautiful

His surrender and abandon and

Complete commitment to the plan

— Because he loved

and loved completely —

His generous self-offering 

is beautiful

And beautiful is his vindication by the Father

His resurrection into all authority

And his reign above every power

In which he is in all and through all

He is,

Viscerally in tune

With the injustice of the world

But working for beauty and justice always

He stands with the grieving

Downtrodden

Least of these

He is in the mess,

Prepping the ground

For the landing of heaven on earth

When the strong will recline with the weak

With neither knowing shame or threat

When the vulnerable

Are given equal dignity the with strong

When abundance is assumed

And there is no people threatened by another

When the stories we speak of one another are true

And always informed by the persistent,

Forgiving compassion of our Father

When the leaves of the tree of life go out

For the healing of the nations

The name of God is distinguished in all the earth

as good and just and beautiful

The Lamb that we executed

to defend our pseudo-sovereignties

is our King now

And we belong the Restoration

And Reconciliation

Healing

And celebration

Take us through the night, King Jesus

And make us like you

Confound the world by your unthreatened

Security

And perfection of justice

Christ in all and through all!

Beauty and justice are one in you.

When our story was young,

Our very first chapter strung

On the rungs of history and earth had just begun to breathe.

Breathe, then, from the mouth of God

filled the lungs of his clay-made image bearers,

the wearers of a legacy they could not yet understand

and a tragedy they would yet demand by doubt

and descent into

Attendance to the criticism of

A dragon speaking scarcity and deficit

Maleficent, the serpent’s anti-benediction

Wreaking the dislocation of the

Bearers of God’s face from their souls

And from the Father’s light,

Exiling them from Eden

Adam and Eve become the

Progenitors of scattered and divided

Tribes, suspicious of each other

And disordered within themselves

Empires locked in strife over wealth

And nation-states gripped with corrupted entitlement

Fighting erupting by the assumption of scarcity

Generations consigned to their darkness

But hearken, open, welcome, listen

To an echoing insistence that

That the mission of God has not been broken

And that it will restore as chosen, these

The exiles of Eden;

Penned in pining, aching, they await

Their God

The Father spoke in promise

Presciently electing their descendent

To confront the dragon bent on their dissuasion

This descendant, sent by God

To dwell on earth

And crush the serpent’s head

God designed to arch the story back

To peace and wonder

Wheel the fray around to clasp

The rivets of eternity complete

And reconciled

Wondrous words he spoke to the

Keepers of promise

Abraham and Sarai selected

For the blessing of the scattered nations

Their descendant son

Predicted

Like David: king,

like Melchizedek: priest

Of whom the poor will sing,

With whom the freed captives will feast,

One

Anointed King to seek and save the lost

And recall the scattered to the temple,

Built by heaven,

Which is Eden which is reconciliation,

Which is peace

To a people living in darkness,

Grim prospects their inheritance,

To those thought forgotten

A light was promised

A man to cease the clamour of hammers chiseling idols

And a prince of peace to devastate the engines of war

A man to sever the principalities from their powers,

And make obsolete the zero-sum stratagems

Of scarcity fueled humanity

To scared and divided children of the Exile

Scatter shot across an earth that groans in anticipation.

The Son of Man would come.

When cruel imperialism bit down

in Roman incisors

upon the children of covenant

Who were bound concurrently by local self-righteous legalism

When the poor languished under their substitute shepherds’ negligence.

The Exile of Eden having strayed so far from their genesis.

When the world had lost its center

Into the mess would enter Christ.

When the world was lost to darkness,

Then came – at last – the light.