Have you seen the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast?  Many parents might say yes; even more children would say likewise.  Hollywood animation techniques aside, the movie presents profound truths about redemption and restoration.  It tells us that we ought to look past the obvious and apparent to what, in a meaningful universe, the purpose that must always exist, to peer beneath the surface to see what, in a world of thought and intention, things really mean.
     Put another way, if we frame it rightly, Beauty and the Beast tells us that only as we agree to believe in each other and the fundamental worth of transcendent morality, we are make sense of who we are.  In its own way, Beauty and the Beast is suggesting that we all have value, and we all have purpose.  Furthermore, it argues that for this reason, we all can be redeemed, we all can be brought and restored to whom we can most be.
     This is what Belle believed then and, wonderfully enough, it is what God believes today.  Whoever we are and whatever we do, we remain remarkable, remarkable beings. Yet we would not be so unless we lived in a meaningful universe.  And it is only in a meaningful universe that we can even consider, much less find redemption.
     Jesus would not have died for meaningless beings.