Meeting Mr. and Mrs. Prophesy (The Meaning of Marriage, Part III)

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.