The Crucible of Love (The Meaning of Marriage, Part II)

In metallurgy, a crucible is a heat-resistant container that’s used to melt down and purify metal—copper, iron, gold or what have you. It's made of material that can withstand the extreme heat necessary to melt whatever's placed in it.  The metal melts, the impurities are burned off, and the crucible is left intact.

Inasmuch as it is a vessel designed to withstand high temperatures so that its contents can be purified and/or transformed, the crucible is, I think, a powerful analogy for Christian marriage.  For a Christian, marriage is meant to be a crucible for discipleship—a vessel, of sorts, designed to withstand extreme conditions, so that its contents—the man and woman who have covenanted together before God—can be purified and transformed as followers of Jesus.

Let me get extremely concrete here.  I remember one of the first “heated discussions” my wife and I had as newly-weds.   She was expecting me home at a certain time, and I wasn’t going to be home then but didn’t call to let her know.   She expressed to me her concern, and I (I confess) countered with indignation—I never had to “check in” with anyone before—and a while later we were cooling off and apologizing.   This, on the surface, sounds like a pretty ho-hum, mundane thing, the kind of domestic “sorting-out-of-expectations” that every newly-wed couple needs to work through. 

Hardly gold-smelting material. 

Unless you’re working with the definition of discipleship that I’m working with: that being a disciple of Jesus is about being increasingly “Christ-centred” and “others-oriented,” so that the “self” makes room for Jesus, and he, once he’s at the centre, turns the heart out towards others.  Sin, as Augustine said, is the self curved in on itself.  Discipleship, I’d add, is about having that curve turned inside out.

To the extent that I was learning to surrender the freedom I once had to come and go at whim without regard to how it might impact others; and to the further extent that I had no choice but to learn this, because the “vessel” that held my wife and I together wasn’t about to dissolve, just because the heat had turned up—to that extent—our argument over the call I’d neglected to make was, in fact, a profound discipleship moment. 

So are the disagreements about how to spend money, or how to parent the kids, or who ought to take care of the vacuuming, that every married couple will have in different ways at different times.  None of these things, on the surface, seem like profound discipleship moments, but these domestic, day-to-day, ho-hum activities present us continually with the choice to keep the self as the axis of life, or to allow Jesus to be there and have him turn us out towards others.   And perhaps it’s because these mundane, terribly “unsexy” things have such power to shape us spiritually, that they also happen to be the things that most often cause the most melt-downs in marriage:  money, parenting styles, housework.  The warp and woof of life together.

As a crucible for discipleship, then, marriage is meant to shape us into “Christ-centred,” “others-oriented” men and women, because it holds us together when the heat heats up—the argument over the cost of that golf game, the spat over indulging the kids too much, the frustration over the unvacuumed floor, whatever it is—so that the impurities of selfishness can burn off and the gold of an "others-oriented life" can be refined.  This particular crucible was especially designed to withstand the heat of the soul-smelting process.

If it feels like I’m beating this metaphor to death, it’s only because, once you imagine marriage as a crucible for discipleship, some very important points come into focus that start to challenge some cultural assumptions about marriage, even assumptions held by the Christian sub-culture.

For starters:  marriage is not about me, or for me.  Culturally, our view of marriage is increasingly self-centred.  It’s about fulfilling the felt-needs of the individual and only worth working on so long as it does.  I’ve blogged about this before, but the thing is: marriage is actually about Jesus and for Jesus.  Of course, I’d argue that a marriage which genuinely brings glory to Jesus will be the most fulfilling kind of marriage, in the long run; but self-fulfillment, itself, isn’t the goal. 

Secondly (and here’s where the “crucible” image starts to speak to the Christian sub-culture):  Marriage itself is not the highest ideal of the Christian life.  It is, actually, a crucible for discipleship, not the crucible for discipleship.  In fact, if you read the Scriptures closely (like in Matthew 19:10-12, or 1 Corinthians 7:8-31) it sort of looks like marriage is not even the best crucible.  But that’s a blog post for another day.  The point for today is just that:  God’s goal is not, necessarily, “married Christians”; His goal is disciples.  Marriage is a framework he provided for achieving that goal—a vital one, a beautiful one, a sacred one, an indispensable one—but not the only one.

Sometimes churches, in their well-intentioned urgency to keep marriage vital and beautiful and sacred, can elevate it to a place the Bible never puts it, making it sort of the ideal expression of a Christian lifestyle.  As a pastor, my concern is that, if we do this, a church can unintentionally marginalize the unmarried Christians in their community—the single Christian who for whatever reason never married, the divorced Christian who’s picking up the pieces, the widowed Christian in grief, the Christian who’s chosen the path of celibacy—telling them, in effect, that they are somehow or other “incomplete” in Christ because of their singleness.

It is possible to put the family into such sharp focus that the other crucibles for discipleship that God has given us—celibacy, spiritual friendship, singleness lived out in the context of Christian community and so on—can blur out of focus, creating a sadly distorted depth of field.  Viewing marriage as one among other crucibles for discipleship helps us bring the picture back into proper focus.

I am a pastor, but I’m not naive.  I realize that there are times when the crucible may be cracked irreparably, and there are other times when the heat that’s there is not at all purifying but only destructive.  Marital abuse or spousal abandonment, for instance, is not a purifying fire, but a sign of something gone wrong deep down in the heart of things, and it needs to be addressed as such.  But even in recognizing all that, I still see in this image—marriage as a crucible for discipleship—something compelling, and inspiring and worth the effort.  

If nothing else, it's challenging me to rethink my prayers when it comes to my marriage.  Am I asking God simply to give me "a happy marriage"?  Or am I asking him to make me a serious disciple of Jesus, and then giving him my roles as a husband, a father, my wife's best friend, to use in the process?