A Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent
Readings: Jeremiah 31:31-34 Hebrews 5:7-9 John 12:20-33
Can something be beastly and beautiful? St. Anselm, the 12th-century archbishop of Canterbury, is famous—and now often ridiculed—for his theory that Christ had to die to restore a debt we owed to God. But the saint’s thoughts on the death of Christ went deeper than that. He rather audaciously insisted that there is “a certain indescribable beauty to our redemption as thus procured” (Cur Deus Homo, III).
Can something be beastly and beautiful? Evidently, yes. Who of us has not been drawn to the beauty of a crucifix? Entering the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, Donatello was said to have dropped the eggs, fruit and cheese he was carrying in his apron. So moved was he by first sight of Brunelleschi’s crucifix.
Granted, we often look past the pain of the crucifix to the refinement of the human image. But are we not, in moments of deep reflection, like so many of the saints, captivated by the terrible beauty of Christ’s death?
Knowing that he would also be crucified, St. Peter is said to have insisted that he be hung upside down, deeming himself unworthy to imitate his crucified Lord.
A dying St. Francis of Assisi begged his brothers to lift him from his pallet and place him on the floor. He wanted to expire on wood, as his savior had.
His fellow Carmelites said the customary penitential psalms as St. John of the Cross lay dying. He asked them instead to recite the Song of Songs because, for John, death meant nuptial bliss.
Are these saints necessarily artists who see beauty where others cannot?
We cannot comprehend the death of Christ as a mere circumstance. The Gospels do not give us that option. They present a Christ who goes resolutely to his death. He knows he has riled reactionary forces, but Jesus does not relent. He does not flee. Instead, he enters a Jerusalem swelled with Passover pilgrims.
Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover Feast
came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee,
and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus” (Jn 12:20-21).
These Gentiles are in Jerusalem during Passover. As the Fathers of the Church suggested, this can only be explained by their attraction to the Jewish faith. And now, they want to see Jesus. This should be a moment of deep satisfaction, even triumph, for our Lord. Many of among his own people reject him, but his mission has touched Gentile hearts. They are drawn to him.
Yet Christ seems to brush off the allure of acceptance, concentrating instead upon the comeliness of cruelty. He speaks of what is to come as something necessary, even beautiful. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (Jn 12:23). Comparing his coming death to the inevitable dying of a seed, he then insists:
When I am lifted up from the earth,
I will draw everyone to myself (Jn 12:32).
The Greek verb ελκω (elkō) means to drag or draw against a naturally resistant force. St. John uses it metaphorically, just as we do. We will be drawn to the beastly by the strength of its beauty. Christ crucified passes into what Immanuel Kant would call the sublime. The universe is laid bare as we are stirred by a sight we are unable to comprehend.
If Anselm is guilty of masochism by speaking of an indescribable beauty, is Christ as well? We need a deeper understanding of what the archbishop of Canterbury meant by “satisfaction for sin.” His critics are far from the core of his thought if they reduce it to commercialism, a transactional debt: Sins cost more than we can pay to God.
A man of the medieval age, Anselm tended to see the true and the beautiful as synonymous, at least as each emerges from God. Thus, for him to see beauty in the death of Christ is a subtle confirmation of its necessity. As the saint sees it, creation comes forth from God pristine, utterly captivating in its beauty. It is our free movement away from God that introduces a disruption, a distortion in this delicacy.
If human freedom ripped the fabric of creation, then the same freedom, turned again toward God, restores its luster. Christ rightly fears the beastly, yet he sees in it the beauty that he himself has come to restore.
I am troubled now. Yet what should I say?
“Father, save me from this hour?”
But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.
Father, glorify your name (Jn 12:27-28).
How can death be beautiful? In itself, it certainly is not. The beauty of Christ’s death lies in a creation—specifically that part of creation endowed with freedom—once again willing to be what God desired it to be. As Dante put it in his “Paradiso,” “In his will is our peace” (‘n la sua volontade è nostra pace) (III.85).
For Anselm, even on the cross—especially on the cross—Christ is what the Scriptures say of him, the comeliest of men, the one who restores the luster of our freedom.
You are the fairest of the children of men
and graciousness is poured upon your lips:
because God has blessed you for evermore.
O mighty one, gird your sword upon your thigh;
in splendor and state, ride on in triumph
for the cause of truth and goodness and right (Ps 45:3-5).
For St. Anselm, when we conjoin our wills to the Father of Jesus, we join Christ in restoring the charm of the cosmos.
And when the being chooses what he ought, he honors God; not by bestowing anything upon him, but because he brings himself freely under God’s will and disposal, and maintains his own condition in the universe, and the beauty of the universe itself, as far as in him lies (XV).
Immature Christians, contemporary Gnostics, will resist this conjoining of the beastly and the beautiful. They will say it is unworthy of God, at least the one they fashion for themselves, an evolutionary-minded, progressive fellow. Yet to create a God more reasonable to them, they must set aside innumerable Scriptures, especially our Letter to the Hebrews.
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him (Heb 5:8-9).
But if the true, the good and the beautiful are one in God, then it is true that Christ chose to suffer to restore a goodness he alone could repair. And this is indeed beautiful.
