“Marriage:  A Picture of Christ and His Church”

Mark 10:2-16  

10/4/09

 David writes, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.”  The Apostle Paul writes that God’s “invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”  According to these words, God has left His mark, His imprint, upon His creation, so that wherever you look in this world or in the universe you see something of His character.  You can see something of God’s glory, for example, in the beauty He displays at Yosemite or the Grand Canyon.  You can get a sense of His power when you consider the stars and galaxies of the universe.  You can contemplate His wisdom as you wonder at the complexity of your own body and how each of its members functions.  All of these works and many more reveal something about our Creator (whether it’s His omnipotence, omniscience, or omnipresence).  But it’s in His gift of marriage that God shows us something about the relationship that we have with His Son, Jesus Christ.

Marriage is meant to be a living picture of how our Lord Jesus gives Himself completely to us, His Bride, in love and how we respond to such love with trust and submissiveness.  The mystery of earthly marriage, where man and wife become one flesh, points us to the mystery of the spiritual marriage that exists between Christ and His Church.  In his epistle to the Ephesians, Paul uses the same Scripture reference that Jesus uses here in today’s Gospel text:  “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”  Paul calls this a profound mystery, but then says that it refers to Christ and the Church.  He writes that just as Christians submit themselves to Christ, so wives are to submit themselves to their husbands as to the Lord.  And just as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her, so husbands are to love their wives.  

In perfect marriages husbands would give their lives for their wives, doing everything that they do for them, nourishing and cherishing them as they would their own bodies, and wives would have no trouble submitting themselves to such loving husbands as the head of the household.  The more husbands and wives live this way towards one another, the more they illustrate the marriage between Christ and His Church.  But alas!  There are no perfect marriages.  Even the marriage between Christ and His Church is not perfect, not because of any imperfection on the part of our Lord, but because of our imperfection as sinners.  And this is the way it has always been between Christ and His Church.  Even in the O.T. God’s people were spiritual adulterers, always going after other gods, even though God had done nothing but good to them, releasing them from their slavery in Egypt, bringing them into a land flowing with milk and honey, providing them with everything they needed, especially their need for atonement and the forgiveness of their sins.  At one point God told Hosea the prophet to go marry a prostitute and love her in spite of her adultery, in order to illustrate the kind of love God had for His wayward people.  Though Moses had allowed a man to divorce his wife if she had committed adultery, God was not willing to divorce His people, even though they were unfaithful to Him over and over again.  He kept pursuing them, trying to woo them back with His love, warning them of the consequences of spurning His love.  But they wouldn’t listen.

And we Christians aren’t any better than they were.  We like to think that we don’t go after idols as they did, and yet though our idols might not be gods made of gold and silver, gold and silver themselves are often the gods that we end up trusting in more than the one true God.  In spite of His love for us, we often spurn that love and follow after our lusts, whether it be in the area of sex, drugs, money, entertainment, or leisure.  As Luther puts it, your god is whatever you look to for all good and in which you find refuge in every time of need.  To have a god, he says, is nothing else than to trust and believe him with your whole heart.  I often ask my confirmands how much time they spend texting or sitting in front of the computer or the T.V. compared to how much time they spend reading God’s Word or praying.  Usually, there’s much more devotion to the former than to the latter.  Though we may say our God is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our actions will show just how much or how little we truly love Him.  What would you say of a married man who spent more time with a girl friend of his than he did with his own wife?  In her marriage to her Husband, Christ, the Church spends much less time devoting herself to Him than He does to her.

Consider what the Lord has done for us.  According to the Apostle Paul, out of Christ’s love for us, He gave Himself up for us, so that He might sanctify us, having cleansed us by the washing of water with the Word, so that He might present us to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, so that we might be holy and without blemish.  In spite of the sin that is still attached to us and the adultery that we fall to all the time, in God’s eyes we are Christ’s beautiful bride, clothed with Him and His righteousness.  By nature we are prostitutes, wandering after other lovers who offer us many earthly pleasures.  But our Lord runs after us, calling us to repentance, forgiving us our sins, cleansing us of all unrighteousness, nourishing us and cherishing us as the precious pearl of great price that He considers us to be, a treasure which He purchased with His own blood.  And yet, we constantly take that love for granted.  And so we must live under our Lord’s mercy and forgiveness on a daily basis.

It is, then, by forgiving each other’s sins that a husband and wife also illustrate the relationship that exists between Christ and His Church.  When spouses (and all Christians for that matter) forgive one another their trespasses, they mirror the forgiveness that we have in Jesus.  Even when it comes to adultery, though a husband or wife has the right to divorce their spouse, God would rather there be forgiveness and reconciliation, because that’s what He does for you when you commit adultery against Him.  So Paul writes, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”

When God joins a man and woman together in marriage they become one flesh bound by love.  That love is manifested not only in living for the other person, but in forgiving that person his/her sins.  Much more is this true when God joins us to Christ.  We became one with Him, bound to Him by His love for us, when He gave Himself to us in Baptism.  That love continues to manifest itself as He forgives us our sins and feeds us on His body and blood in His holy Supper.  And though our love for Him may fail, His love for us never will.  If God wants no one to separate what He has joined together in an earthly marriage, how much less does He want anyone to separate us from the love of Christ?  Even though many earthly marriages have failed, because someone has separated what God joined together, Paul writes, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?  Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?...  No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.  For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  

You may leave the Lord, but He will never leave you.  Some use Christ’s love and forgiveness as license to continue to practice their spiritual adultery.  “He’ll always forgive!  He’ll always run after me!  It’s okay if I live in sin.”  The Apostle John writes, “No one who abides in [Jesus] keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen Him or known Him.”  And yet he also writes, “I we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  On the one hand he gives a word of warning to us, if we take advantage of Christ’s love and forgiveness and insist on living by the lusts of our flesh.  On the other hand, he gives a word of comfort to us, when we fall into sin, as we do daily because of the weakness of our flesh.  When that happens, we don’t need to despair of our Lord’s forgiveness, but as Paul writes, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

And there’s yet another way in which marriage illustrates our relationship to Christ.  In a marriage the husband no longer belongs to himself; he and his body belong to his wife, just as the wife belongs to her husband.  In a greater way, our Lord Jesus no longer belongs to Himself but to us, His Church, and we no longer belong to ourselves but to Him.  And because of this, a glorious exchange has taken place:  What was ours has become His, and what was His has become ours.  What was ours was our sin, our spiritual adultery, our disobedience to God’s commandments, as well as the punishment we earned for that disobedience, including both temporal and eternal death.  But Jesus took our sins upon Himself at His Baptism and then carried them with Him to the cross where He bore the wrath and condemnation that we deserved in our place.  Now, in our Baptism and through His Word and Holy Supper, He gives us what belongs to Him - His righteousness, holiness, and blessedness.  The status He has with the Father as His Son He gives to us, so that we are now called sons of God, with all the privileges and inheritance that goes along with that.  Even the honor and glory that are His by nature He shares with us, His Bride.  In the book of Revelation, John records his vision of the Church in her glory when he writes, “And [the angel] spoke to me saying, ‘Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.’  And he carried me away in the spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.”