Jesus doesn’t lament the church he has rescued or look for another to capture his attention. Christ welcomes the church as his beautiful treasure and joy. The church isn’t just about organization, leadership, function, and vision. Jesus sees more. His gaze reveals the beauty of our Father, the sufficiency of his cross, and the fulfillment of his mission in the world. He sees sinners being rescued, redeemed, and renewed.

In an age when so many pastoral failures, missteps, and sins are posted for public exhibition, it’s easy to allow our warmth toward the church to grow cold. Through a scrutinizing lens, many scowl at the church with suspicion and sheer amazement that anyone would want to be part of such a seemingly dysfunctional family. Sometimes, the church can seem to be anything but beautiful.
Does Jesus look at the church with the same scowl?
“You Are Beautiful”
John Gill, an eighteenth-century English Baptist pastor, helps us answer this question by drawing our attention away from our introspection to the words of the bridegroom in Song of Solomon 1:15: “You are beautiful, my love; behold, you are beautiful.” Interpreting Song of Solomon as an allegorical portrayal of an exchange between Christ and his bride, the church, Gill writes, “These are the words of Christ, commending the beauty of the church, expressing his great affection for her; of her fairness and beauty” (An Exposition of the Book of Solomon’s Song, 57). Jesus sees his bride through a lens of love, not disdain; beauty, not disgust.
How can beautiful be the adjective Jesus uses to describe the church? After all, she’s composed of sinners — forgiven sinners, yet still sinners. She’s plagued by division, is besieged with scandal, and sometimes appears to have lost her first love. Even the apostle Paul reminds us that only at the end of the age will she be found “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing” (Ephesians 5:27). What does Jesus see in his bride that would cause him to exclaim, “You are beautiful, my love”?
1. The Beauty of His Father
God’s beauty is most radiantly displayed through the biblical concept of glory. Moses experienced this glory when God passed by him, revealing only the afterglow of his splendor (Exodus 33:12–23). When God’s glory engulfed the temple, the priests were unable to perform their service of worship (2 Chronicles 5:14). The prophet Isaiah was prostrate in the dirt when he witnessed God’s glory radiating from his eternal throne (Isaiah 6:1–5). Jonathan Edwards, eighteenth-century pastor-theologian, identified God’s beauty as the differentiating feature of God himself: “God is God, and is distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above ’em, chiefly by his divine beauty, which is infinitely diverse from all other beauty” (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:298). God’s beauty isn’t derived from external sources but emanates directly from the perfection and holiness of his being.
The supreme expression of God’s beauty is his Son, Jesus Christ, who himself is the image and radiance of his Father (2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3). The incarnate Christ is how God most vividly expresses his beautiful love to sinful creatures. The culmination of that love is selecting a bride for Christ that she too might reflect the same beauty. Edwards believed that this bride, the church,
is the great end of all the great things that have been done from the beginning of the world; it was that the Son of God might obtain his chosen spouse that the world was created . . . and that he came into the world . . and when this end shall be fully obtained, the world will come to an end. (Unpublished sermon on Revelation 22:16–17)
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There is also an important redemptive-historical development from Isaiah to Jesus. John 12:41 explains that Isaiah “saw his glory and spoke of him.” This means either that the prophet saw the glory of the preincarnate Messiah, who is “high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6:1), or that he foretold the exaltation of the suffering servant, who reveals God’s glory as he accomplishes God’s redemptive plan (Isaiah 52:13–53:12). In either interpretation, Jesus is not merely another messenger from God but the glorious God-in-the-flesh, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). He is both the fulfillment of the rejected-prophet pattern and the one foretold by the prophets.

Isaiah 6 recounts one of the most stunning revelations of God’s majesty in the Old Testament. The prophet writes, “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1). The six-winged seraphim — fiery, flying heavenly beings — call to one another with booming voices, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isaiah 6:3).
Isaiah responds to this awesome theophany with distressed confession: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5). One of the fiery angels touches Isaiah’s mouth with a coal from the heavenly altar to remove his guilt, and then the Lord calls and commissions his prophet. Isaiah’s initial zeal — “Here I am! Send me” (Isaiah 6:8) — turns to confusion — “How long, O Lord?” (Isaiah 6:11) — when the prophet considers his challenging charge:
Go, and say to this people: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.” Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed. (Isaiah 6:9–10)
While Revelation 4 recalls Isaiah’s vision of the divine throne, Jesus and the apostles more frequently cite the prophet’s commission to preach to a recalcitrant people unable to hear or see spiritual truths. These verses feature prominently in all four Gospels (Matthew 13:13–15; Mark 4:12; Luke 8:10; John 12:39–41), the book of Acts (Acts 28:25–28), and even Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 11:8). Why? This Old Testament passage helps to explain how the rejection of Jesus and his followers fulfills the larger biblical pattern of the maligned messengers of God.
Let’s review the context of Isaiah’s prophecy and then consider Jesus’s use of this passage in Matthew 13:13–15.
Isaiah’s Startling Commission
Isaiah 1–5 establishes Judah’s chronic idolatry, hardness of heart, and lack of spiritual understanding. Though there are flickers of hope about what God will do “in the latter days” (Isaiah 2:2–5), these chapters repeatedly expose the people’s rebellion and announce God’s coming reckoning. The people are like unruly children who have despised the Holy One of Israel (Isaiah 1:2–4). In their idolatry and immorality, Judah resembles Sodom and Gomorrah, the wicked cities God destroyed with fire and brimstone (Isaiah 1:9–10). The beloved vineyard of the Lord has yielded nothing but wild grapes (Isaiah 5:1–7).
For five tense chapters, Isaiah decries their sins and warns of judgment. Then, in chapter 6, Isaiah beholds God’s glory and receives his commission to blind the people’s eyes, stop up their ears, and harden their hearts (Isaiah 6:9–13). The prophet’s preaching would not merely warn the people but would confirm them in their stubborn rebellion against God.
The biblical prophets often speak of Israel’s malfunctioning eyes and ears to illustrate their inability to respond rightly to divine revelation. This imagery reflects God’s earlier word of judgment in Deuteronomy 29:4: “To this day the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.” Moreover, pronouncements about the people’s spiritual blindness, deafness, and dullness reveal that they now resemble the lifeless idols they have revered. Psalm 115:4–8 unpacks this biblical logic.
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Masks confused the church because of their swift move from technical public health mechanism into ritual totem. What may have been an acceptable response to the former becomes a matter of disloyalty to God in the latter. Church history and lore are full of accounts of Christians who courageously refused such compromises in past eras—sometimes to the point of martyrdom. As the demands of a new pagan religion grow, Christians must again reject such rituals.

Do Not Let Health Pretexts Disguise a New Pagan Liturgy
Masks are returning. As public health officials raise alarms about “BA.2.86,” the latest COVID strain, it is becoming clear that masking is developing into something of a seasonal enthusiasm. A certain segment of the population stands eager to don the mask at the slightest whiff of a new viral strain—rejoining a few devotees who have faithfully worn the mask since 2020. Most ominously, mandates are also being reintroduced.
Many Christians instinctively resisted COVID mandates—both mask and vaccine—imposed by public health authorities. Yet Christian leaders have struggled to offer compelling doctrinal analysis of this subject.
When pressed, many pastors and Christian intellectuals sidestepped theological or ethical discussion of masks, while resorting to established religious liberty arguments—particularly the use of aborted tissue in pharmaceutical development—for some vaccine concerns. This has been the stated basis for many vaccine exemptions and challenges over the past few years.
But this is not what most Christians actually think. First, many resisted vaccines prior to any awareness of aborted tissue use. While they may have been troubled by that fact, it was not the driving factor. Second, these vaccine objections do not address concerns about masks that Christians recognize as naturally related.
It’s undesirable to center our argument on a justification that does not reflect actual prevailing beliefs. Doing so not only exposes Christians to charges of hypocrisy when the same standard is not applied elsewhere (e.g., to the many other medications that also use aborted tissue in development), but it can also cause us to miss a more salient factor that drives underlying concerns and has better explanatory power.
The real problem goes to the heart of these ostensibly public health-related practices. Christians intuitively sense that both masking and COVID vaccines have become ritual practices—totems in a new and non-Christian religion. We must ground our resistance to these rituals in a clear rejection of the broader liturgy.
What is ritual masking?
Joshua Mitchell, in American Awakening, describes a new religion of innocence and stain. His thesis was developed before COVID, yet COVID rituals fit seamlessly into his framework.
Mitchell described how wokeness is a religion obsessed with innocence and with moral stain, two theological-moral categories inherited (if now bastardized) from Protestant doctrines of sin. What are commonly called “virtue signals” are actually words and actions designed to signal innocence from the pervasive sins of racism and various other -isms and -phobias that pervade American society. When some “stain” nonetheless taints a community, that community responds with ritual scapegoating designed to purge the stain and return the community to innocence.
The COVID-19 virus provided a physical “stain” that perfectly mapped onto this system. Masks and vaccines became symbols of innocence—totems reflecting faith in and allegiance to “The Science” as mediated by the priestly class of anointed experts led by “Dr. Fauci.” COVID exposure became not merely a health risk, but a sin exposing one’s community to this stain. The rhetoric of devoted adherents made this clear, complete with laments laden with guilt when one caught COVID (regardless of the severity of the actual infection) despite great efforts to protect against it—reminiscent of when sin is found in a community despite numerous purity rituals. Those who refused to follow such protocols, regardless of the scant evidence that these measures actually prevented transmission, were seen as wantonly tainting the community and were then scapegoated for broader ills.
Masking is particularly evocative of this concept: face and head coverings have a long history as religious symbols, often explicitly designed to protect a community’s innocence. When radical Muslims take over a given locale, one of their introductory policies is the imposition of female head coverings (the more radical require the face also to be covered). Christians too, have recognized symbolism in head coverings, though this was grounded less in protection from sin or stain than in the order of creation. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul called for wives to cover their heads while praying. Though the meaning of this has been debated, many churches throughout the ages have practiced various forms of such head covering.
In another parallel, the Old Testament had a litany of restrictions and obligations that touched diet, skin infection, the timing of sexual relations, and more. Christians have broadly understood those ostensibly health-driven requirements to be an aspect of Israel’s ceremonial law that passed away in the New Covenant. This underscores the difficulty of parsing a practice to distinguish health and ritual elements, and how the two can often be commingled.
Such a health-related pretext can be particularly insidious by making a ritual harder to recognize. Many people may accept masking as a medical precaution, with the purported health benefit serving as a rationalization to obscure the fundamentally religious impulse behind the practice. Mask wearers may even develop a false consciousness regarding the act, convincing themselves that their motives are health-related when their behavior has all the hallmarks of religious ritual.
How then do we know today when masking falls into this ritualistic category?
As Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”
The hallmarks of ritual protection and innocence signaling are obvious. Are masks conspicuously displayed as symbols of compliance with The Science? Are they worn even in environments where any perceived utility is obviously absurd, such as outdoors or alone in a car? Are they discussed with a moralistic tone? When such practices are common, it’s reasonable to assume that ritual masking is pervasive.
Obviously, any particular circumstance requires a degree of judgment. The line is not always clear. When masks are questioned in a given circumstance, many will immediately ask whether a valid health consideration exists.
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