Beautiful Feet

My small group did a Bible study on Romans 10:14-21 last night.  Here is the introduction:

We live in a culture addicted to external beauty.  Appearance is everything (or close to it) in this land of plastic surgery, cray diets, and obsessive exercise.  The formula is quite simple – attractive people attract people.  We worship at the altar of our mirror burning incense to the fleeting god of beauty.  Our closets full of yesterday’s fashion that we spent countless dollars on testify to this fact:  We cultivate our outer man much more than the inner man.  The wisdom of the Bible urges us to turn our attention inside, to the state of our hearts.

Romans 10 is about true beauty.  Here, Paul writes about our responsibility to preach the gospel and the hearer’s responsibility to respond in faith.  This passage will motivate us to live purposefully with a sense of mission in our everyday lives (classes, homes workplace).  It will urge us to be beautiful people with “beautiful feet” to go as God leads and to be used as He wills.

I did not enjoy this introduction very much.  The first reason was, and is, me.

I do not have a closet full of yesterday’s fashions – er, check that – I do not have a closet full of unused clothes.  I have yesterday’s fashions, but I wear stuff until it outlives its usefulness.  My shoes have holes where they should not.  As do my socks.  I have one pair of shorts that may not have any of the original stitching because I’ve had to sew them together so many times.  Up until this year, I wore the D.A.R.E shirt I got in fifth grade (I haven’t grown that much since).  The reason is not because there was a gray fabric marker stain up near the shoulder that I got on the bus during sixth grade, nor because the blood stain near the bottom (that I got when I cut my finger while camping in the eighth grade and wrapped it in the shirt) made it an eyesore, but rather because I can’t find the darn thing.

I also cannot relate to plastic surgery, diet, or obsessive exercise.  My superficial hygiene is questionable:  I get a haircut once a year; and I recently had a beard-growing experiment which lasted so long I woke up with bed face (as opposed to the normal bed head, which happens to be minimized because my hair is fairly long and heavy at the present).

But the first real reason is that this introduction made me think about ‘me.’  Almost everything was man-focused and self-focused.

Reason number two is what I want to focus on.  THIS IS NOT WHAT THE PASSAGE IS ABOUT.  No matter how much truth the introduction contained, it is not the foremost message of this passage.  This passage is not about how we can become beautiful people by having a heart for evangelism.

The only mention of the word ‘beauty’ or any derivative is found in verse 15 – And how can they preach unless they are sent?  As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.'” Take a good, hard look at this verse and tell me why the first conclusion is that this is how to become beautiful.  Everything here is about the good news.  It is about the beauty of the Gospel, and being sent for the Gospel.

Let me explain.

When someone you know gives you good news, you are happy not because of the person, but because of the news.  When someone brings you really good news on which you have patiently waited, it does not matter if the messenger is ill-tempered or butt-faced or malodorous.  You want to hug this swamp monster of a man because you are elated about the good news.

But Paul (and Isaiah, from which he quotes) doesn’t stop there.  It’s the feet of the courier that are beautiful.  I think the reasons for this are twofold.

Firstly, feet are ugly.  There are many people today who hate feet.  Psychologists attribute the podophobia partly to the fact that parents constantly dress their baby in socks and booties, and so train the infant to dislike feet.  Others don’t fear feet, but think they are unpleasant.  Yet people who have this irrational fear and hatred of feet today have no clue how ugly feet can be.  Think of a time with little medical treatment, walking as the primary means of travel, lots of dirt and grime, high heat, and sandals.  That’s how bad feet can get.  The good news is so great, that even the worn feet of the messenger fleetingly get to share in a little bit of the glory.

But secondly, and I guess I touched on this earlier, feet were often the only mode of transportation.  They symbolize the fact that there is a message – that a distance has been traveled to give this good news.  It required a lot of sacrifice to bring the good news, and this pair of size tens did the work.  If you think about it, it kind of even depersonalizes the messenger.  A modern analogy might be a car.  Imagine that, for some reason, the communication network fails in this country, and the President needs to send a reassuring message from Washington D.C. to Los Angelas.  A car would be sent – a horse is archaically slow and the lack of communication would prohibit airplanes and trains from running.  A messenger (or pair, so one can sleep/navigate while the other drives) would motor on straight through the country, accumulating wear and tear from insects, dust and storms.  When the good news arrives in LA, imagine Isaiah writing, “How beautiful in the city of angels is the car that brings good news.”  Let’s get even more ridiculous and say things like, “How beautiful is the UPS man,” or, “How beautiful is the Gmail inbox,” or, “How beautiful is hoppy393.wordpress.com.”  It’s about the message, and, temporarily, the vehicle of the message.  ‘Bring’ and ‘sent’ are the terms Romans 10:15 uses describing that to which we should aspire, not ‘beautiful.’

Isaiah 52:7 reads, How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!”

I think Paul chose his reference verse very carefully.  From the beginning of Romans, he shows the heart he has for Israel.  Here I see his commission to bring the Gospel back to Jerusalem.  If Romans 10 is about true beauty at all, it is about the beauty of the heart of God in wanting to save Israel.

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Beautiful is not a word to describe us.  It depicts the word of God as perfect; an answer to the innermost desire given us by His creative hand.  It speaks of the unadulterated joy when the word passes through our filtering ears, is digested by the soul, and renews us.