It hasn’t happened to me in Indiana, but when I served the church in Colorado, I used to get a lot of calls from couples (mostly from the female half) asking if I could marry them on Friday, or next week, or in two weeks, or next month. Often, the request was accompanied by prattle to the effect that they already had the reception hall, the musicians, the caterer, and everything else all lined up, and now all they needed was a church and a pastor for the ceremony. (Which, Colorado law being what it is, they actually didn’t need, but never mind that.) Sometimes, I instead got the explanation that they were on vacation in the Rockies and had just decided to get married. Either way, they were always surprised and unhappy to hear that I was neither interested nor, in fact, able to drop everything and marry two complete strangers at the last minute with no preparation and no idea of the health of their relationship; they wanted to get married, what more did I need to know? Trying to explain to them that I took their impending marriage far too seriously to marry them never seemed to work, somehow.
And yet, that was neither more nor less than the truth. Marriage is something profoundly serious and important, something which God created for reasons which go far deeper and mean far more than health benefits, or tax advantages, or two being able to live more cheaply than one. It’s not just a matter of convenience, or even of romance; rather, marriage is something that goes to the very heart of who we are as human beings, and even of who God is, because it has to do in a fundamental way with how we reflect the image of God.
You see, when we say God made humanity in his image, one aspect of that must be that we are relational beings—that his image is seen when we relate to one another in love, and when we work together to care for his creation—because that’s part of what it means to represent God; our ability to love one another and to live together in love reflects the love relationships between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Of course, when our relationships are broken, when they’re unloving, impure, or otherwise contrary to God’s will, then they don’t reflect him very well, but that’s all of a piece with our sinfulness; and even then, it remains true that we are only able to relate to one another as we do because we are made in God’s image.
This is truest in marriage, which God instituted with the first human couple. The God who is by nature in relationship among themself created humanity in his image, male and female, in order that they might be united in marriage—a point underscored, incidentally, by the man’s declaration, “This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman has argued that this is a covenant formula, a pledge of permanent and undying loyalty and commitment; we might describe this as the first man’s wedding vows, but that isn’t strong enough, because the first readers of this text took covenant a good deal more seriously than we do. Unlike our covenant ceremonies—mostly weddings—theirs included pledges and promises along the lines of, “May I be cut to pieces if I violate this covenant.” Nowadays, we try to make breaking a covenant as painless as possible, but that wasn’t God’s idea at all.
God takes covenants, including marriage, very seriously. That’s why Genesis 2:24 offers the comment, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”; the word translated “leave” there is often translated “forsake,” and is used elsewhere to describe Israel’s rejection of their covenant obligations to the Lord. It’s a loaded word, and the point of using it here is clear: the new husband is to set aside loyalty to parents in favor of this new loyalty, this new covenant, with his wife. In a patriarchal culture like that of Israel, in which loyalty to parents was one’s most important obligation, the statement that loyalty to one’s wife—or, reciprocally, to one’s husband—was to come first was a powerful one indeed.
What’s more, it had a powerful reason behind it, even if Israel probably didn’t get the point. For those whom God calls into marriage, it’s important to understand that marriage isn’t about personal fulfillment—that’s a benefit of marriage, not its purpose. Its twofold purpose is to be found here: first, to fulfill the command to be fruitful and multiply; and second, to display the image of God. In the union of man and woman in marriage, united in relationship, potentially to have children as God wills, and especially as they seek to follow God together, we see the image of God as we cannot see it anywhere else. God created us male and female in his image; in marriage male and female are united in a relationship of love, offering us an image of God who is love, for he exists in relationship among himselves, in the love that flows between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In marriage we can see the inner reality of God mirrored in a way that nothing else can show us; this, too, is part of the purpose for which he has ordained marriage.
As such, we as Christians should take marriage very seriously. Our society really doesn’t, unfortunately, and that affects all of our thinking and attitudes to some degree, whether we realize it or not; and we need to work against that in whatever way we can. For those of us who are married, that task begins in our own marriages; for those who aren’t but would like to be, it means keeping this in mind in your dating relationships; and it also means that all of us, even the most utterly single, need to take the marriages of those around us, and especially our family, church family, and other friends, very seriously as well. We need to do everything we can to help others build and nurture strong, healthy marriages that truly embody and reflect the selfless and self-sacrificial love of God; this is part of being faithful to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, and one of the ways in which we show the world his love for us.
(Adapted from “Created Male and Female”)
Photo: Wedding Day, © 2014 micadew. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.