Seeing Dung As Diamonds

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. ³³ However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. (Ephesians 5:25-33) 

Today’s passage is another New Testament use of the quote about marriage from Genesis. Marriage between two people isn’t just marriage between two people. Marriage, as it should be, shows us what Christ and the Church look like. In today’s society, that’s not an idea that most people would find comfortable. We like to think that marriage is between equals, and not only equals but sames. As a woman, I have resented the notion that I should be considered “lesser.” I want to be like the husband. I want to be like God. At the moment, however, my interest isn’t in my pride, it’s in the parallel.
         If a marriage between a husband and wife is an illustration of the relationship between Jesus and the Church, then must be a relationship between differing entities. Jesus didn’t choose to marry God, He chose to marry the Church. The Church is made up of fallen, physical, limited people. For us to look at marriage as including male/male or female/female relationships, we would change the illustration to God marrying God or the Church marrying the Church – and that is not God’s intent. His relationship to the Church is an unequal match. Sorry, Ego. It just is. The problem isn’t God’s ego – if the Church were also God, there couldn’t be a marriage because there wouldn’t be two.
         Of course, some people will complain that it’s not fair that we should have to act as a metaphor. You don’t have to. You can reject God and deny His authority. What you cannot do is reject the metaphor while maintaining your relationship.
         A second way that we tend to reject this metaphor is in the notion that marriage is not “until death do us part.” Infidelity and divorce are attacks on the that metaphor. Jesus and the Church aren’t getting married for a few years, until the feelings die, for as long as they can get along…they’re getting married for eternity. 
            A third way we tend to mar the metaphor is by forgetting to love. We tend to think marriage is about the other partner meeting our felt needs. We start out claiming we love our partners just as they are – and after the marriage the battle begins, with each trying to make the other over in our images, to turn them into something that glorifies us. That’s not love. Love leads us to seek what is best for the beloved – sometimes it means helping the beloved to change to be a better, purer, stronger person (not just what we want them to be) and sometimes it means sacrificing our desires and our wishes. If he/she is not worth fighting for, working for, fighting with through the hard times or submitting to, then he/she is not the person to marry.
          Marriage is hard. It’s adulting 24/7/365/for the rest of your lives. It is also honorable and needs to be honored because God not only designed it, but He designed it to reveal Himself to us. The world may not accept such a lofty view of marriage, but a Christian needs not only to accept, but to honor that image. Don’t ask me to call something that doesn’t fit the metaphor a marriage, no matter what the law may say. It’s like asking me to see dung as diamonds. I’m not that crazy.