Sitting in the dentist’s chair while your teeth are being
cleaned isn’t the best of places to start expounding on the meaning of
marriage anyway, but even so, this one caught me a bit off guard.
It was a new dental clinic for me—we’d only recently
moved to the community—so the dental hygienist and I were just getting to know
one another. Mostly, of course, I was
getting to know her. It was, after all,
hard for me to do much of the talking, what with that spotlight in my eyes and
my tongue pushed back by a dental mirror; but no matter, she was valiantly
keeping up enough conversation for the both of us.
“What did I do?”
Between rinses I explained I was a pastor. This intrigued her, and she shared some of
her perspectives on the church.
“Did I do weddings?”
My tongue held back by the dental implements again, I did my best to
indicate I did.
And before I knew it, my newly-acquainted dental
hygienist was sharing the story of her first marriage that didn’t make it, and
why it failed—not sharing any details unbecoming a professional, to be sure,
but certainly more than I was expecting.
And then she described her new partner, and how different he was from her
first.
Between rinses I said something or other about her “new
husband ” before propping my mouth open again for inspection.
“Oh, we’re not married,” she said, peering in. And then quietly, but more resolutely, she
added, “I don’t need a piece of paper to prove I’m committed to this
relationship.”
Like I say, the dentist’s chair isn’t the best place to
start in on a theology of marriage; and she was scraping my teeth with steel at
the time, so I didn’t feel much able to contradict her, even if I’d wanted
to. But if I could have spoken freely, I
probably would have said something like:
“I agree with you that marriage is
far more than just a piece of paper… it’s certainly
more than that … but still, it’s not
less than that, is it?”
And then, if we were sitting over coffee, maybe, and we’d
gotten to know one another better than you can, really, in a dentist chair, and
she’d asked me: “Well then, theologically
speaking, what is marriage?” (Because, after all, aren’t these the kind of
questions everyone asks over coffee?) I
would have said: “Well, as a Christian, I believe that marriage is a kind of
prophecy.”
This might catch both of us off guard—Christian marriage
is a kind of prophecy—so I’d hasten to explain. In the Bible, when the prophets
want to talk about God’s love for his people, his faithfulness to them and his
determination to stick with them through thick or thin—with them as a people, mind you, not as individuals—one
of the regular images they use is of a husband’s faithful love for his
wife. In Jeremiah it says it like this: “Return to me, says the Lord, for I am
married to you..” In Isaiah it says it
like this: “Your Maker is your husband, the Lord of Hosts is his name.” And, of course, the whole entire book of
Hosea is built around this picture. The
Lord is, spiritually speaking, betrothed to his people.
This prophetic tradition, of using marriage imagery to describe God’s love for his people, gets picked up and amplified in
the New Testament, where one of the central images is the Great Wedding Feast
at the End of the Age, when Jesus returns and is intimately united with his
people. Jesus uses it in his teaching,
asking us to imagine the Kingdom of Heaven like a King who gives a wedding
feast for his son. Paul uses it, like
when he tells the Corinthian Church that he has promised them to “one
bridegroom” and will do all he can to present them to him, holy and pure. And of course, the great, final crescendo of
the Good Book uses it, when John of Patmos hears the angels in the Book of
Revelation say: “Let us rejoice and give him
glory, for the Wedding of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself
ready!”
In the Scriptures then, the exclusive, permanent,
faithful covenant bond between husband and wife is actually a sort of prophetic object
lesson for that final day. Prophetic, in
that, whenever we glimpse a man and a woman sticking by each other for better or
for worse, it points beyond itself, to God’s greater, higher, purer
determination to stick by us for
better or for worse. And prophetic too,
in that, as imperfect and human as the marriage covenant is, it is
still, at its best, a reminder of the coming consummation of all things,
when the faithful in Christ will take their place in the Wedding Banquet of the
Lamb, and God’s covenant love will reign beautifully and fully in every heart.
In their daily, mundane, earthy growing together in covenant
love, the married couple is actually, biblically, a prophetic couple, reminding us, even if incompletely, of what is
(God’s covenant love) and what is yet to be (the consummation of all things in
Christ).
I’m not really sure what my dental hygienist would have
said to all that, if I’d managed to squeeze it out between rinsings, but more
and more these days I think Christian husbands and wives would do well to
regain the prophetic aspect of a godly marriage, and with it a conscious awareness that
their life together can, at its best, bear witness to something true about God’s
heart for us.
If we did, I think we
would not only find deeper, more profound meaning in our daily decisions to
make it work when making it work takes all we’ve got, but more than that, we’d
find ourselves with a prophetic word to speak to the broader culture. Because this is about a different way of being as much as it is about a different perspective on marriage; it's about being "us" centred and focused on the "yet to come," in a world that is increasingly self-centred and focused on the instant gratification of the here and now.
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