****FAIREST LORD JESUS (Beautiful Savior)

For over forty years, from the late 1930s, the Breck Shampoo Co. enjoyed the longest-running and most successful campaign in advertising history. The centerpieces of the ads were the romanticized pastel portraits of over 300 girls and young ladies, which idealized the perfect, wholesome look of the American woman for several generations.

The iconic pictures of the Breck Girls blended feminine beauty with purity. They were all delicately portrayed with a subdued focus, soft halos of light, and warm colors. The artists did then, with oil pastels, what photographers do today with Photoshop. They portrayed their subjects with unblemished skin, smiles accented with bright, perfect teeth, and they all had beautiful, radiant hair. In short, the portraits were stunning; they seemed to leap off the pages of the magazines to command the attention of casual browsers. Everyone immediately recognized, and paused to gaze at, the Breck Girls.

Throughout the last 20 centuries, artists have portrayed Jesus in similar ways: the soft warm glow of a pleasant countenance, the halos, perfect features, blue eyes, a commanding stature, and that long, beautiful, glorious hair. In most illustrations and movie clips, whenever He is portrayed in a crowd, unlike Waldo, His image is immediately discerned; everyone recognizes Him. He stands taller, His robe is whiter, and His hair is longer. They have tried to portray Jesus like a Breck Girl. But no matter how skillful the artists, their best efforts produce nothing more than imaginary caricatures.  

The truth is, we don’t know anything about His physical appearance. In God’s wisdom, He didn’t give us a description. But there are some things we can presume from what we read in scripture.

We know that Jesus was a Middle Eastern man; not a blue-eyed, Northern, fair-skinned European man. And He didn’t have beautiful, long, soft hair; it was probably coarse, wiry, short, and dark. If we could obtain a real picture of Him, we would not recognize Him at all.

If there is anything we can learn from Scripture, it is that His physical appearance was unremarkable and unimportant. He was probably an average-looking Galilean Jew. He blended into the crowds. In fact, Judas had to point Jesus out to the soldiers who came to arrest Him. He didn’t have any unusual physical attractiveness. Isaiah prophesied that "He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him and no beauty that we should desire Him."

“No beauty that we should desire Him.” And yet, in this hymn, "FAIREST LORD JESUS," He is described as the most beautiful of all who have ever lived. So how can that be?

Well, Peter gave us a clue as to what is real, godly beauty, when he told us not to be overly concerned about our own outward attractiveness, but rather to "let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious."

Did you catch that?  According to God, that inner beauty is very precious.

The word “fair,” occurs many times in the Old Testament and it means beautiful. It was used to describe both women and men. One of those references occurs in the Song of Solomon, The bridegroom says of his beloved: “You are all fair…there is no spot in you.”

Christ’s beauty was not in His physical appearance; it is in His holy character. This hymn is a devotional text focused on the “fairness” (or the beauty) of Jesus Christ as something of great value to be carefully treasured. He is more precious, more beautiful, and more glorious than anything else in the world. Jesus Christ is above everything. And regarding that kind of precious value, the Apostle Paul said, “I count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.”