God's Beautiful Extravagance

As far as divine beauty is concerned, if the "measure" of beauty is outgoing love for the sake of the other, it will not be long before we are forced to come to terms with excess or uncontainability, the intratrinitarian life being one of a ceaseless overflow of self-giving. There is still proportion and integrity, but it is the proportion and integrity of abundant love.

Creation, by grace, is given to share in this "excess" - indeed, creation's very existence is the result of the overflow of divine love - albeit in its own creaturely ways. So God's beautiful extravagance takes creaturely form in the oversupply of wine at Cana, the welcome Jesus shows to outcasts and sinners, the undeserved forgiveness in the first light of Easter Day. This is how creation's deformed beauty is remade, not by repair or "return to normality" but by a re-creation exceeding all balance, by a love that is absurdly lavish and profligate, surplus to all "requirement", overflowing beyond anything demanded or expected, generous beyond measure.

~ Jeremy S. Begbie, in The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts