Marriage: A Reflection of the Image of God, Part I
No one plans to divorce. No one would consciously stand at the altar saying, "I'll give this a try for a day or two, and if I don't like it, then I'll just get a divorce." Yet many couples begin the divorce process well before the marriage begins. It can happen as simply as both parties believing that a marriage is forever but also highly disposable like a diaper or a used car. Or it can begin soon after the marriage, when one person assumes, He or she is supposed to make me happy. And if I'm not happy, it is always and fully the other person's fault.
Marriage, like a journey, can get just a few compass points off, and in a fairly short time it will stray from the path we are meant to follow and miss the destination we are designed to pursue. It may be as simple as this: if you don't know how to get there, then even knowing where you are meant to go will do you little good. We need to know God's destination or goal and the process by which we can arrive there.
The Goal of Marriage
Consider this rather normal interchange between a husband and wife.
HUSBAND: I find you thrilling to the eye and arousing to the touch...
WIFE: Are you kidding? Do you know what I've got to get done before the guests arrive? You are mad. You are a raving lunatic.
HUSBAND: Look, I'll help get the house ready, and frankly it won't take forever, and we haven't made love in a week.
WIFE: It won't work to make me feel guilty; plus I expect your help whether we have sex or not.
HUSBAND: Are you saying there's a possibility?
WIFE: Yes, one in a million.
HUSBAND: Excellent, at least there's a chance.
In every interchange between a husband and a wife, especially when there is tension, conflict and disagreement, there is the possibility of division. The goal of marriage is intimacy, union, oneness. And at every moment a couple is moving either toward intimacy or away from it.
Obviously there doesn't need to be agreement for intimacy to occur. But it is in the middle of conflict or in moments of potential hurt and disappointment that it is crucial for a couple to know what the goal is -- what the abiding and controlling point of marriage is.
Genesis 1-3 gives us a framework and names a number of goals. It is from the matrix of marriage that children are to arise. Children are to be born and grow out of the fundemental fecundity of a loyally committed couple. But the text of Genesis 2 moves us toward a far more relational goal. God says with raw simplicity: It is not good for a man to be alone. Marriage is a union of fundementally similar beings who couldn't be more different. In the interplay between like and unlike, something occurs that dispels lonliness. [That something is what this book is about]
So far the goal of marriage has been named in solely horizontal terms. From the womb of marriage we are to have children and to grow an intimacy that banishes or at least minimizes lonliness. It would unwise to minimize these human dimensions; however, only in the vertical meaning of marriage does the horizontal find its truest grounding.
Marriage is the human relationship that most reveals the being, character and purpose of God. This key human relationship is designed to make known who God is and how he relates to the world. In marriage we discover who we are, how we are to relate, and what we will one day become. The appropriate categories are immenseL marriage is trinity, ethics, and eschatology.
Let's take a look at Marriage as trinity.
[Now, most people are bored to tears by theological language because it immediately reminds them of school. We have all spent ghastly hours reading a book or attending a lecture that seems as removed from our day-to-day life as Mars from Earth. Frankly, who cares? If we are in the middle of a nasty fight with our spouse, we don't care that the way we speak is meant to reveal something about ethics or "the good," or that all our language reflects the promise we made. We just want to know how to get our point across and , if we are honest, to get our spouse to agree.
What difference does it make that marriage is the lens we are to look through to ponder ontology (exploration of the core essence of reality), epistemology (the study of how we know what we know), ethics (the study of how we live out character in relationship), or aesthetics (the study of beauty)? We think it makes all the difference in the world and beyond.
To the professional philosopher or theologian, the claim we have just made is absurd. It is simply not sufficiently academic or intelligent. To the lay reader, it seems too grandiose or abstract. Why bother? It is because marriage is bigm really big.
If marriage is indeed the major lens God offers for us to see God's nature and learn how we are to live and what we will one day become, then it is one of the master metaphors to contemplate the enormity of life. When a marriage goes bad, it doesn't just affect a couple, their children and their friends -- it is an assault on the very nature of reality, thought, and life. Further, if it is accurate to say marriage is this big, then even when we don't fully understand its immensity, we can seek to fathom how marriage is a lens to see well beyond what our naked eye can perceive.]
Marriage as Trinity
The goal of marriage is to reveal God. And God has revealed himself in Trinity. He is love. He is relationship. He is truth.
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are coequal in their being and yet reveal their distinctiveness through their different relationships to creation and each other. The Father plans; the Son executes the Father's plan; and the Spirit applies the Son's act in a heart transforming fashion. They are distinct in being, coequal and different in function. Yet they are one God and not three. The mystery is great, but the simple significance is that all truth is at core relational. Truth not only is relational in that it is connected to all other truth, but truth is always revelatory of the heart of God's love for himself and his creation.
It is beyond comprehension, but the core of all reality, God, is a relational being, that is Trinity. Therefore all things in the universe -- cows, unicorns, the second law of thermodynamics, the substratum of the planet Mars, the cure for acid reflux, seminaries, travel agencies, governments, artists, poetry, tractor pulls -- are to serve and reflect the ultimate reality of God in and through relationship.
In fact, our ability to know truth is a relational enterprise. We can't know the meaning of 2 + 2 = 4 outside of relational matters. All of our testing of truth and expansion of the true requires a social context to be sensible and meaningful. If God is the core of the universe, then it is no wonder that truth is ultimately a servant of love.
In the above dialogue about sex, the husband is not wrong to want to make love. If he didn't, not only would he be an unusual male, but far worse, he would be divorced from the calling of trinity. A trinitarian view of sex understands that we are meant to merge not merely for physical pleasure but also to enter the great mystery of the many and the one. In the sexual moment a husband and wife ener the holy realm of indwelling, incarnation, flesh and spirit, and the unity and diversity of the Godhead.
Is that meant to make an orgasm better? In some sense yes, but far more, it is meant to help us understand more clearly why evil hates sex -- and why God thought of it and loves it. It is intended to help us grasp the importance of asking for sex, wanting sex, and engaging honestly and kindly when we don't. It is not so much that sex needs to be elevated to that it becomes more spiritual; it is that sex is meant to be even more important -- teaching us, pleasuring us and bringing us a taste of God.
The wife's response is wonderful. She defers by calling the context to mind for both. She prods the husband with the unliklihood and the silliness of his request. Of course her tone could be punitive and contemptuous, in which case her response violates love. But couples can banter, tease, play and unnerve each other and still remain gracefully in a truthful, kind context.
Desire is not
Originally published September 15, 2005.
