dereliction. The brutality of the cross and all its ostensible ugliness belong
to the beauty of God. 37
In his passion, Christ, the promised suffering servant, “literally allows
himself to be disfi gured in order to do the will of God.” He “sacrifi ces his
visage—he allows the effacement of his ‘image.’” 38 And it is precisely in
this way that he most completely manifests God’s beauty, because there his
consent to the Father is most fully enacted. 39
But not only his consent to the Father—the Son shows also his abso-
lute dependence on the Spirit , who is the sanctifying beauty as well as the
justifying freedom of the Father. In the light of Edwards’ description, we
can see that because of this dependence, Christ’s worldly experiences—
including his teachings and his miracles, in all of their glory, as well as
his temptations and his paschal sufferings, in all of their dreadfulness and
horror—are beautifi ed, his humanity transfi gured eternally as the genesis
of the renewed creation. 40 Following the Spirit, Christ “renarrates the
human form entirely, and ... his particularity at once claims and sets free
every other, in the power of the Holy Spirit, who binds all things together
in love and releases all things into the particularity in peace.” 41 But we
cannot stop with that confession of God’s identity and accomplishment.
We must also go on to confess that the scriptures , in their special charism
as canonical witness to Christ, share in his Spirit-baptized and Spirit-
baptizing mission. 42 This, then, is the form of our confession: because
Christ is the ikon of the invisible God just as the all-desirable, altogether
lovely one who in our eyes has no beauty, nothing that makes us desire
him, 43 the scriptures are all-at-once undesirable and enticing, threatening
and charming. 44 Or, to say it differently, the scriptures bear the marks of
Christ’s passion, and do to us what the cross of Christ did to the body of
Jesus and to the nature of created reality itself. 45
D ESIRE, MEANING, AND TRANSFIGURATION
Precisely because the scriptures as the elect witness to Christ share in
his undesirable desirableness, they have the power to conform us to the
cruciform glory of the Lord. How? By overthrowing our imagined com-
mon sense and awakening in us transfi guring desires. As Rowan Williams
explains, glossing the apophatic trinitarianism of St. John of the Cross,
there is an “eros of the created self for God,” a “longing for communion
with the Word” in whose image and for whose company we are made.
BEAUTIFYING THE BEAUTIFUL WORD: SCRIPTURE, THE TRIUNE GOD... 109
