She has done a beautiful thing to me.
Are you now, or have you ever been, one of the Beautiful People? If you do not recognise the term, and therefore cannot relate it to yourself, then you are either too young, or perhaps even too old. I was actually seventeen at the time, and I can remember the curate of the parish church in my home town walking about the streets with a flower behind his ear. It was different, and it may have been his contribution to the so-called Summer of Love in 1967. It was rumoured that he subsequently contributed a little too enthusiastically to the Summer of Love, and he disappeared from the scene too rapidly for it to be put down as professional advancement.
It was ironic, really. The Vietnam war was at its height, and the Beautiful People believed that they could change the world just by sitting around and being beautiful, and by refusing to buy into the system that generated war and injustice. It was the Woodstock generation that came not to its height but to its end in an extremely muddy field in east coast America in the musical self-immolation that the band members of The Who described as "the worst gig we ever played".
I can remember sitting in the last French lecture of the autumn term of 1969 and a fellow student sitting next to me said, "Do you realise, Phil, that when we return it will be 1970, and an era will have come to an end?" It seemed too incredible to be true, and yet it was true. An end to being beautiful! Let's get on to the real, useful stuff.
Are beauty and usefulness inevitably in opposition to one another? The Victorian designer and poet, William Morris, did not think so. Writing in "Hopes and Fears for Art" in 1882, he coined one of his most famous sayings: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." His design, interior décor and furnishing products, sold through Morris & Co. to the moneyed middle classes, whose business and commercial drive had been so responsible for much of the ugliness of the industrial landscape of Victorian Britain, bore out his principles. Beauty and function were not in opposition.
Yet Morris dreamed of a return to the beauty of English society before the industrial revolution, but in most ways he was doomed to be as disappointed as those who thought that the Seventies could ever be like the Sixties. In "The Earthly Paradise" written precisely one hundred years before Malcolm Cowtan and I were mourning the passing of the Sixties, Morris wrote…
Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small and white and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.
Was Bethany "small and white and clean", and did it have gardens which, if they were not actually green, might have been beautiful and well tended? Was Bethany a middle-eastern equivalent of Morris' rural idyll at Kelmscott on the upper Thames? We do not know, but the story of the annointing of Jesus in the house of Simon the leper, prior to his burial, was one of those incredible moments where beauty fully meets function.
The moment was even more poignant, for here was a spark of radiant glory, before a descent into unutterable darkness. As the commentator, Theodore Robinson, perceived, even as early in the course of twentieth century biblical scholarship as 1928: "So terrible is the thing before (Jesus), that an act of affection by an insignificant, nameless woman is a beautiful thing." Against the chorus of those who would claim that money is always wasted on anything that manifests beauty without function, Jesus was absolutely sure of the deeper value of what had happened: She has done a beautiful thing to me. His simple assessment of the moment stands for all time and, of course, the beauty was not without function because here was the moment of the anointing of his body that could not take place on Good Friday, because by then the sun had set and the Sabbath had begun.
There are many things in the course of the life of each individual church that come under the description of "doing something beautiful for God". We think most readily of music, or of the arrangement of flowers, or of the care that goes into the general maintenance of the house of God. Perhaps we remember a child reading the scriptures in public, and recollect how that young voice touched our very soul. However, I always think of the art of the people, created, applied, and displayed within the house of God. Each offering is a beautiful thing for God, a simple offering of beauty without financial calculation.
You would expect me now to expound upon the stained-glass and statuary of Chartres Cathedral. I am tempted so to do, but I have in mind the work of the members of the Art Group of this church. Without discomfiting them too much, I hope, I walk around the room and am amazed at the beauty of their work. In the moment of their creativity, they become one with the unnamed woman of Bethany of whom Jesus said: She has done a beautiful thing to me. In their case, (they have) done a beautiful thing (for him).
Before we descend into the darkest places of Holy Week, cling now to such moments of beauty, and set those times against the times of trial and sorrow. Be assured – if you commit yourself to doing something beautiful for God, he will, in a time of his choosing, do something beautiful for you.