Reviews from the Pews: The Story of Everything

“The Story of Everything” and the Problem of Gratuitous Beauty

A Reflection on Mother’s Day and on the Gospel of Luke 24:36-48

What is beauty? Or, what does it mean when we call something beautiful? Have you noticed that we call all kinds of different things beautiful? People can be beautiful, but so can a work of art, music, poetry, a landscape, a sunset, an idea, even an action. So, what exactly are we describing when we call something beautiful?

Beauty is kind of hard to define isn’t it? It’s one of those things that’s like…Wow, that’s beautiful…we just know it when we see it. And when we see it, it demands our attention. It fills us with all sorts of feelings: it can delight us, exhilarate us, inspire us, console us, it can give us the chills. It’s like beauty has this power over us.

But where did beauty get this power? Is there a purpose for beauty, and if so, what is it? Do animals know about beauty? Or do only humans?

Lastly, and this is probably the question that many of you are asking yourselves right now, why am I talking so much about beauty anyway?

Well, I decided I was going to talk about beauty last Sunday. It was while I was at the movies watching, “The Story of Everything” that I was inspired to write about the topic of beauty. Beauty is discussed during the movie, but its framed as a problem. Have you ever thought about beauty as a problem? “Woah, this thing is way too beautiful. We’ve got a problem here!” It almost sounds absurd, “the problem of gratuitous beauty.” How could beauty, or gratuitous beauty, or if we want to use a more biblical word, how can “prodigal” beauty, be a problem?

Simply put, the problem of gratuitous beauty is not a theological problem, it is a scientific problem for scientists who don’t believe that the world was created and designed and is maintained by Almighty God. They believe that the universe and life arose without any mind, purpose, or guiding intelligence. Reality is the result of blind physical necessity, chance interactions of matter, impersonal natural laws, and chemical and biological processes that unfold over time. Such a system doesn’t know how to deal with the observation that the world contains far more beauty than survival or biology require. Sunsets, music, mathematics, sacrificial love, the face of a child — none of these are necessary for reproduction or evolutionary advantage. They are excesses, gifts, lavishness built into reality for no utilitarian reason.

In other words, science can explain how beauty happens, but it can’t tell us anything about why beauty matters, which is the kind of question a child would ask. “But WHY…why is there beauty.”

So, what does the problem of gratuitous beauty have to do with the Gospel of Luke or mother’s day. First, motherhood reveals the same truth. In fact, a mother’s love is one of the greatest examples of gratuitous beauty. It is not efficient or required by biology alone. It is tender beyond necessity, sacrificial beyond logic, creative beyond function. A mother’s love is gratuitous beauty in human form — love that overflows.

Second, in Luke 24:36–48, the Risen Jesus does something similarly unnecessary. He doesn’t just rise from the dead and go to His glory in heaven. He sticks around for forty days, He shows His wounds. He eats fish. He speaks peace into frightened hearts. He puts to rest the heart of those who abandoned Him during His passion.

In a world that could have been merely functional, God gives us beauty.

In a life that could have been merely biological, God gives us a mother’s love. In a salvation that could have been merely transactional, God gives us the tenderness of the Risen Christ.

So, with all this in mind, I would simply raise the question one more time for you to consider. Beauty…what really even is beauty anyway?