Beauty and Harmony

My mom, her three sisters, and her brother sing gospel songs a cappella. They all have great singing voices, but they have a more special beauty when they are harmonizing together. I thought about this as I was reading Michael Reeves highlight the source of this beauty of diversity in unity in his book, Delighting in the Trinity:

It is from the heavenly harmony of Father, Son, and Spirit that this universal frame of the cosmos—and all created harmony—comes. To hear a tuneful harmony can be one of the most intoxicatingly beautiful experiences. And no wonder: as in heaven, so on earth. The Father, Son, and Spirit have always been in delicious harmony, and thus they create a world where harmonies—distinct beings, persons and notes working in unity—are good, mirroring the very being of the triune        

God (59)...

 

Bach’s young contemporary, Jonathan Edwards, was an ardent lover of music. One of his favorite words was harmony. Declaring that the Father, Son, and Spirit constitute “the supreme harmony of all,” he believed, like Bach, that when we sing together in harmony (as he often did with his family) we do something that reflects God’s own beauty (60)…

 

There is the deepest and most alluring beauty to be found in the heavenly-harmony of the Trinity. Karl Barth said: “The triunity of God is the secret of his beauty” (6-61).

Think about that while you’re singing your Christmas carols this holiday season. And while I was reflecting this morning on the harmony within the Trinity and Christmas, I was reminded of something J. I. Packer said in his book Knowing God:

Here are two mysteries for the price of one–the plurality of persons within the unity of God, and the union of Godhead and manhood in the person of Jesus. It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. “The Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this: the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation (53).

Two beautiful mysteries for the price of one. Harmony in the Trinity, and the harmony of God and man in the person of Jesus Christ. That is something I long to behold, the beatific vision of Jesus Christ. How will we even be able to bear his beauty?