Marriage

    Some wag once remarked, “Love may well be blind, but marriage is a real eye-opener.” In Ephesians 5:31-32 Paul describes the union of a man and a woman as a ‘profound mystery.’ He also highlights the fact that marriage is a picture of the relationship between Christ and the church. I realised too, just how profound this matter was when I came to lead a Bible study on the first story in Mark 10.

    The Pharisees try to trap Jesus by asking him about divorce. This was a cunning plan because John the Baptist had been arrested for publicly criticising Herod Antipas’ loose interpretation of marital morality. Doubtless, they thought they could have Jesus silenced the same way, by getting him to paint himself into a similar political corner.  However, our Lord avoids the trap by referring them to Scripture – a habit we should always employ when tackling ethical issues – and then interprets it. First, he says that divorce is a God-given concession to humanity that both allows the abused partner a fresh start and exposes the ungodly behaviour of the abusing partner to public shame. Secondly, he upholds the high standard that God expects, which is faithful heterosexual monogamy.

    I anticipated the tendency for the study of this subject to go off at many tangents but had hoped to keep the group focused. No chance! I concluded that these verses should be taught in no less than six hour long studies! I jest not. No wonder Paul describes marriage the way he does. You will be pleased to know that I’m not proposing (sorry!) to do an exhaustive exposition of the passage here. Rather, I’m just going to make some of my normal banal comments on verses 6 to 8 that quote the Book of Genesis. There the Holy Spirit says that the reason for monogamous marriage is because God created the two sexes. That means that without two sexes, there is no such thing as marriage.

    Woman was taken out of man. You remember the story of how God put Adam into a deep sleep and proceeded to take flesh from his side to form Eve. Adam is now missing a bit of himself. Upon waking, Adam said of Eve that she was ‘flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.’ If a man has no wife then he is incomplete – he is missing a vital bit of himself: the Eve bit. It’s as though man were a jigsaw that is incomplete without the final piece.

    J John tells the story of a father who was once left alone to baby-sit his young daughter while his wife went to a Tupperware party (do they still have those?). Being somewhat daunted at the prospect he racked his brains as to how to amuse the girl. Finally, he hit upon an idea that would allow him some peace and quiet for a long time. He took a page out of an old magazine that had a photograph of the world taken from space. He cut it up into various shapes and challenged the girl to put it all back together in the right order. To the father’s dismay the girl came to him with the completed picture after just a few minutes. “How did you do that so quickly?” he asked. His daughter replied, “There was a picture of a man and a woman on the other side of the page. I thought that if I could put that picture back together again, then the world would be put back together too.”

    Being an excitable fellow, I was overjoyed recently when poking thorough the Chinese dictionary, as you do, in a quiet patch of the day. I’d long ago spotted that the character that places a woman under a roof means ‘peace’ (where do they get that one from?) and a pig under a roof means ‘family’ (seen the pig, kids?), but I’d never realised that the Chinese character for ‘good’ consists of two elements, one of which means ‘girl’ and the other ‘boy’. Amazing what you can miss if you don’t look. The Chinese had understood that the marriage relationship is the most important of all human relationships and used a pictogram of it to represent the concept of goodness. Interestingly their word for bad is literally ‘not good’ – it’s not good to be outside such a relationship.

    It is all too easy for the single Christians to worry about not being married.  But it might help when you consider that you are betrothed to Christ and are therefore, already in the ultimate marriage relationship. To those who have been divorced, if the OT Law allows the concession of separation for ungodly behaviour in one or both partners, then surely under the NT dispensation you should not be ashamed: getting, and being right with Jesus is far more important. And, to those who are quick to condemn any who fall below the standard Jesus pronounces, and who deny remarriage in church, shame on you: where the Law ends, so Grace begins, and we should reflect God’s grace, God’s inclusion of society’s outsiders. The legalistic hard heart is the root of all that Jesus condemns in the human attitude to marriage in this passage, and we should be eradicating that hard-heartedness. As Jesus said of the prostitute, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’  There are those in almost every fellowship who feel betrayed by the Church for the attitude of many to divorce and remarriage, who feel shame instead of love and forgiveness and understanding.

    I’d like to leave you with a couple of questions. Would you be more fearful of being unfaithful to your spouse or Jesus? I’m not sure we take the second particularly seriously, do you? How easily we bow down to our idols.