Marriage

Gen 2:18-25 Mark 10:2-9

The Question: How does God define marriage and how does that correlate to the many loving relationships that people have in our society that do not qualify as being married because they have not participated in a human ceremony, but does God see their loving relationship as marriage? Is a couple living together in happiness not more of a marriage than a legal marriage that is unhappy?

A kidzone attendee was asked what does God say about marriage? The boy thought about this for a moment and then responded with the words Jesus spoke from the cross, “Father forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing.” I guess that’s true for most of us who have entered this sacred relationship. We may not know what we were doing, but surveys tell us that we do have some idea of what we want. For women it’s affection, conversation, honesty and openness, financial support, and family commitment. For men the list is different – for us it’s sexual fulfillment, recreational companionship, an attractive spouse, domestic support, and finally admiration. I should point out these were American surveys so it’s probably different here! But with such different expectations it’s little wonder that marriage is fraught with difficulties and challenges.

Marriage however is a relationship that is fundamental in our scriptures. In the creation story from Genesis 2:18-25 we have a statement that ‘it is not good for the Adam or earthchild to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him’. This state of loneliness is the one thing in creation that is not good, for it seems humans are created to live in relationship. I need to say that we need to have a little caution here because it has often been assumed that the term helper used here denotes inferiority. This is not so. God is described as a helper using the same word in Deuteronomy 33:29, and the term essentially means one who provides what is lacking in the other. Human beings it seems are not complete and whole by themselves but are created in such a way as to benefit from the close relationship of another to provide companionship and enhancement for both individuals. We need the close partnership of others to fill out our shortcomings. What the creation story does not do is spell this out in specific roles. Similarly the making of woman from the man’s rib does not suggest subordination but precisely the opposite. Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh suggests equality and kinship of a very unique kind.

The uniqueness of this relationship is spelt out in two ways. “Therefore a man leaves his mother and father and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” (Gen 3:24) Firstly there is a marital leaving. There is a disengaging from the family that brought us up and gave us our beginning to launch a new unit of family. This message of letting go for us has to do with the leaving a childlike state of dependency and taking responsibility as an adult for loving and respecting our partner and shaping this new unit of life. The second message is about marital union which raises the question of how do spouses become intimate. This I think is a continual process in which none of us are expert. To be united is something far more than the intimacy of sexual encounter but this is obviously important. It also involves many everyday skills of friendship, listening, appreciating, communicating affection and affirmation. It is why good friendships so often lead to secure and satisfying marriages. At the heart of becoming one flesh is the hard work of love. Many couples I think work on the assumption that marital intimacy is some sort of gift that sort of just happens, but at the heart of becoming one flesh is effort and work. I often talk of this when I conduct wedding services, quoting one of my favourite authors, Scott Peck who claims that the opposite of love is not hate but is laziness. Love is essentially hard work as we commit to the growth and well being of another, but it’s very very easy to slip into lazy patterns and routines in our relationships that treat our partners as part of the furniture.

We no longer see the special-ness and sacredness that God sees, and we take the other people in our lives for granted. We forget to affirm, appreciate, and communicate affection. Sadly we seem to easily accept that there’s nothing to be done for a marriage that has slipped into boring mediocrity. But that is simply not true. Often there is a desire for a better marriage and if that is so for you, let me simply push that desire button a little harder. Do something – confront the laziness or whatever it is that is standing in the way!
I want to encourage you with an image. I actually don’t know much about the French sculptor, Rodin, who sculptured these hands from stone in 1908. The work is called The Cathedral, but it shows two separate and different right hands about to clasp. It is the space between them that intrigues me, and speaks of the work of marriage. I see in that space a soul or life dream. The two hands are nurturing something sacred together. A marriage isn’t just about a practical arrangement of living together, or about fulfilling one another’s needs, but it is participating in a new dream, nurturing a new sacred entity through which God is served. A good question to ask for those of us who live in the gift of marriage is, “what are we nurturing in our relationship, and how are we serving God?”

This is why I remain rather hesitant about the new phenomena which have grown up in our lifetimes of couples choosing to live together often in a trial marriage sort of arrangement. I know within many of these relationships there is a deep sacrificial love, although I also note that young love is often rather superficial and fueled by all sorts of immature forces. To quote Scott Peck again, “People fall in love and eventually fall out of love. It is then that real love begins to take root.” To talk of marriage as a trial arrangement however is a contradiction of terms. Marriage is a risky business, but it does involve total life long and life deep commitment which is why I believe a public ceremony involving the sharing of lifelong and life deep vows is so important. To enter into marriage with the thought that we can experiment and see how it goes implies that commitment is not complete, and if it doesn’t suit we can back out. We now see the consequences of these ideas in a record high number of failed marriages with huge costs on the partners who have to deal with the failure in so many ways, the cost to the children, and to society as a whole. Before those with marriages intact sit smugly back however, I agree with the questioner who suggested that many marriages that are so called “intact” because they have lasted the distance are far from ideal. Lasting the distance isn’t anything to be proud of if the dream of God and the life giving sacrificial love has gone from the relationship. If the light has gone out of a marriage it has to all intense and purposes become dead no matter how long it may have been in existence. Jesus as we know had much to say about skin deep appearances. It is the quality of the commitment however it is made that is important.

The Christian ideal of faithfully working together to nurture the life of God envisages a couple living together in faithful love. In some traditions such a relationship is considered to be a sacrament – a living and visible sign of God’s presence. This is why divorce is not a step that should easily be undertaken in the Christian tradition. Jesus himself supports this view very strongly as we heard in today’s reading from Mark although in other passages he clearly is open to the idea of divorce. However I also want to acknowledge that Jesus is someone who believes in the second chance. All of us fail in life, and all of us are offered the deep love of God which does not give up on us. How we hold up these two ideals varies from church to church. Orthodox churches take the view that marriages die as well as people, and churches like our own take a similar view. If this happens the marriage ceases to exist and ministers are sometimes asked to lead a funeral for the marriage that is no more. We are also free to solemise another marriage. Churches like the Roman Catholic Church uphold a more rigid view of divorce and only recognize the dissolution of a marriage under certain criteria which are more restrictive.

I want to end with a simple picture of Christian marriage from a book by Robert Selzer called Mortal Lessons. A surgeon is in a hospital room with a young woman and her husband and we follow his observations.
I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth has been severed. I had followed with religious fervour the curve of her flesh, I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumour in her cheek, I had cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening light, isolated from me, private. Who are they I ask myself, he and his wrymouth I have made, who gaze at each other so generously, greedily? The young woman speaks. “Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks. “Yes”, I say, “it will. It is because the nerve was cut.” She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. “I like it”, he says. “It is kind of cute.” All at once I know who he is. I understand, and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.

Dugald Wilson 29 May 2011