Over the last several months, artists and theologians and authors and psychologists have come to Gordon to talk about one theme: Beauty and Justice. In these CFI events, we have heard all about painting and mercy ministry, lament, and celebration. We have wrestled with questions about whether or not it can be just to write a poem while children are starving or whether we should care about beautiful hospitals. I won’t pretend to tell you the answers to those questions, but I will offer you just one more thought in response (as well as an invitation to continue this conversation on Symposium Day and at the Jerusalem and Athens Forum debate).
A few days ago, I woke up and felt an immediate weight fall on my chest as I saw yet another thin layer of white snow cloaking the grass that had been desperately trying to make its appearance. But, a few hours later, I stood next to freshly planted daffodils that were waiting in the wings for their sunshine-yellow debut in a few weeks. Spring may be fighting tooth-and-nail with the dregs of a New England winter, but it is coming.
In one of my classes, we just finished reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov. At one point, Ivan Karamazov, ever the skeptic, makes his case against God. It is one we have all heard before—if God is good and just, what do we do with evil and suffering? Ivan, in all of his rationality, refuses to believe that there could be a way to justify or harmonize human suffering. Nevertheless, he cannot help but love life. He says, “though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in spring are dear to me.” In a sense, Ivan is asking the same questions that we have been this year—what do we do with beauty when faced with so much injustice?
Yet, while Ivan wants a syllogism, he gets springtime. But perhaps the answer to his doubt is exactly that, the sticky little leaves. We spend so much time as Christians talking about sin, as well we should. But we also live in a world where daffodils bloom. Human beings are broken and sinful and deserving of nothing but hell. And yet, year after year, snow after snow, there are sticky little leaves. Can this be justice? It must be because it is the hope of the gospel, the promise of a God who is making all things new. Our God died to redeem our sin and suffering, to exact his perfect justice, and then he gave us sticky little leaves, too, so we cannot help but remember. So, as we reflect on the season that holds both tulips and Holy Week, let us remember and proclaim this profound reversal of love, for the justice of God must be nothing less than the undeserved beauty of springtime.
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