Monday, February 5, 2018
586 - We Are Gathered Here ...
Spirituality Column #586
February 6, 2018
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
We Are Gathered Here
…
By Bob Walters
We were talking last week about how little specific
instruction we see in the Bible regarding weddings and marriages.
Oh, the
Bible says plenty about relationships – that’s the main drama of God, of life, of
the whole thing, isn’t it? – but we humans forever have been more or less on
our own to figure out the optics of nuptial ceremonies and the operation of matrimonial
existence. Only in the last couple
centuries has “love” been the primary driver of who marries whom, and really
only in western culture at that.
Marriage
from ancient days across all cultures carried a far broader relationship
dynamic than merely that of two people “falling in love.” Marriages were arranged, property assigned,
assets allotted, cultural judgments made, and dowries paid. Maybe you courted each other, maybe not. Sometimes the big reveal was exactly who was
being married to whom. When it came to
“choosing” a spouse, men often had little say and women had even less. It was sober fulfillment of family/community duty.
So at an olden-times altar love
likely hadn’t yet entered the equation. “Love”
was something that grew – hopefully, maybe – in the marriage after the wedding,
not before. Our modern template of
“marrying for love” and figuring everything else out later would – back then
and even in many parts of the world today – seem strange indeed.
Marriage was specifically a family
contract and a community covenant: basically a property transaction and an
unarguable device for the continual creation and replenishment of the
generations. It was a cultural template
so universal that “you just did it” – a man, a woman, a home, children, family,
community … and usually some divine component of purpose, i.e., God, or maybe
gods, holding it all together.
We still do a contract – the
marriage license – and we still involve the community – witnesses to the
marriage covenant. Whether God attends
the ceremonies depends, I think, on whether He is invited. “What
God has joined let no man put asunder” (Mark 10:8) is Jesus underwriting
true and divine covenant relationship.
Yet in our freedom we often ignore God and foolishly fashion our own
marital-relational guardrails.
We must understand: God is better at
loving relationships than we are, and our real-world example is the life, love,
humility, and sacrifice of His son Jesus Christ.
What we should but often don’t
learn from the Bible are the enormity and mystery of God’s love expressed in
Jesus. We read 1 Corinthians 13 – The
Love Chapter – at weddings but that is Paul describing divine love, not
romantic love. Where Paul compares
husbands and wives with Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:22-23) and talks of
submission – seen today as fighting words – he’s using accepted matrimonial
practice to describe ecclesiology (Christ and the church), not the other way
around.
Sexual practice? Well, the Bible has a whole bunch to say
about that both inside and outside of marriage, none written more elegantly
than by Paul. Read 1 Corinthians 5-7; it’s mostly
backwards from modern secular convention.
But before rejecting the advice ask yourself: Why is it in there? Also note the equality of husband and wife in
verse 7:4 – they each own the other’s body: a radical first century notion.
Marriage is what we make it, but
Jesus – if we let Him – makes it complete.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes the Bible is true; all of it. Just so you know.
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