That familiar language from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, recited thousands of times each week in various forms, presents a vision of marriage as a deeply Christian institution–even a necessary portrait of the love that unites Christ and His church. As marriage signifies this “mystical union,” it points to an understanding that takes us far beyond the relationship of the husband and wife. Do most Christians have even the slightest understanding of this?
It is bad enough that the secular world has discounted marriage into a quasi-legal contract that, like other voluntary contracts, can be made or broken at will. The greater tragedy is the failure of Christians to take marriage seriously. According to the Bible, marriage is not only designed by the Creator as an arena for human happiness and the continuation of the human race–it is also the arena of God’s glory, where the delights and disciplines of marriage point to the purpose for which human beings were made.
Marriage is about our happiness, our holiness, and our wholeness–but it is supremely about the glory of God. When marriage is entered into rightly, when marriage vows are kept with purity, when all the goods of marriage are enjoyed in their proper place–God is glorified.
Our chief end is to glorify God–and marriage is a means of His greater glory. As sinners, we are all too concerned with our own pleasures, our own fulfillments, our own priorities, our own conception of marriage as a domestic arrangement. The ultimate purpose of marriage is the greater glory of God–and God is most greatly glorified when His gifts are rightly celebrated and received, and His covenants are rightly honored and pledged.
I have been wanting to write more fully about this very topic, but resisting, probably out of fear of not doing it justice. This might just push me to it this weekend. For now, a few thoughts.
I have gained a great deal in my understanding of marriage as unto the glory of God through my own experience of failed marriage, legally lasting 27 years, several separations, and eventual divorce. This was followed six months ago by remarriage, to the same “wife of my youth.â€
The interim was filled with a period of prayer in which I distinctly heard God (something I am not prone to!) telling me to work on amending my life by reading the Bible, which I did twice, straight through over a 9 month span. I read with great profit Bp. Allison’s “The Cruelty of Heresy†I can to see marriage, not as something God designed as an accommodation for us, and a way to organize family life, but as a way to live a life that is reflective of the Holy Trinity (not confusing the persons nor dividing the essence). I began to see the recorded story through the Bible as a romance, as much as any Jane Austin invented. A story of initial love, separation and betrayal, infidelity, restoration without change, and ultimate break in Jeremiah. The lover, however never gave up on his beloved, there is an action of heroic sacrifice, and ultimately at the end of the Revelation, the marriage and the longed for union.
Marriage is very near the meta-story of the Bible, and not a perfect relationship, either. This relationship God wants so much is a deeply flawed one. Of course, the flaws are only on one side, but that’s the way we usually see our own. God deeply values this flawed relationship, pursues it, and will one day perfect it.
Marriage is, among all the other blessings, a way to live out, live into, and demonstrate to the world the life of the Triune God. One and yet plural, bound in love, each complete and yet together one, submissive yet not subordinate.
As I told my daughter and her husband, it kind of makes me wish that a standard part of preparation for marriage would be a requirement of at least an attempt at a paper on this topic:
“The doctrine of the Holy Trinity and how it affects our understanding of Christian marriage.â€
I did an essay on another of the reasons here [i][url=http://rericsawyer.wordpress.com/2007/04/11/sweethearts-in-heaven/]”Sweethearts in Heaven”[/url] [/i]
[url=http://rericsawyer.wordpress.com]R. Eric Sawyer[/url]