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Revolutionising Marriage

Coronation of the Virgin : 19 August 2012  : Ephesians 5: 21-32

The Welsh poet Owen Sheers has enjoyed considerable success for such a young man of letters. Not only has his poetry been reviewed well and sold well, but he has also published an historical novel that has been turned into a film. To cap it all off, the BBC commissioned him to produce a series on a Poet’s guide to Britain. But there is one area of his life where he has experienced painful failure. He married young, and divorced young. This morning’s front-page Pebble poem "Inheritance", is a wistful reflection on the strength of his parents’ marriage, and all the good things that it gave him. He wonders about the ingredients that made it as enduring as the product of a blacksmith’s forge.

There is a paradox about contemporary assumptions about marriage in western culture. On the one hand, we congratulate ourselves that love and justice are the prized values of how it ought to be, with an equal sharing of burdens and power. On the other hand marriages are failing in worryingly high numbers, to the point where many don’t bother marrying at all, but just cohabit with others, often in a series of non-lasting temporary relationships. It would seem that just as people’s expectations of one another have risen in terms of the emotional goods they can expect from marriage, just so have they disappointed one another in equal measure. The result is a pervasive cynicism about marriage, and often the breakdown of stable patterns of child rearing, with all the follow on consequences for their emotional and relational well being. Dr Edric Baker told me during his recent stay in the Vicarage that the thing that concerns him most during his periodic returns to New Zealand is the apparent diminishing and evaporating of the family.

We should bear this in mind as we approach this morning’s difficult text in Ephesians 5, with its embarrassingly hierarchical assumptions about marriage. So offensive is it to notions of popular feminism that it is hardly ever read out at marriage Services now, and my guess is that most preachers will pass over it in embarrassed silence today. But one of the strengths of liturgical religion that uses a lectionary is that preachers, and their listeners, are confronted with texts that don’t suit their favourite themes and private prejudices. And as the first great theologian of the Church Origen commented, when you come across a text that is difficult and unpalatable dig deep, for there is treasure to be found there.

Commentators have offered ingenious explanations to soften the offence of Ephesians 5. They point out that it counterbalances Paul’s preference for celibacy as the preferred state for Christians, by giving it a higher value and estimation. It is also argued that the text represents a kind of organisational flow chart for the way a family business ought to operate, since most small businesses in the Greco-Roman world were family affairs, just as they often are in Asian families now, and in such an enterprise, everyone clearly needs to understand their roles and duties. Such an explanation cleverly incorporates the follow on teaching about children obeying their parents, and slaves obeying their masters, since they were both labour units in these all hands to the pumps family businesses.

But we will have to do better than that I think in order to find this a useful piece of guidance for wise living.

At the centre of this piece of Scripture is a powerful notion of the relationship between Christ and his Church. "It is his body - and we are its living parts." The Church isn’t just a loose collection of individuals who come together from time to time to do Christian business. It is rather linked to him in an intimate union so that it can reflect his character and do his work. Just as sexual union between husband and wife is said to make them one flesh, an almost mystical view of human sexuality at its best, so Christ and his body the Church are closely related in like manner.

This explains why God has privileged marriage, above all other human relationship configurations, as the human relationship that most clearly represents the way Christ relates to the Church. At its best it is a microcosm, a small-scale demonstration, of how Christ and his Church commune with one another.

What the author of Ephesians has done is to take this dynamic understanding of the Christ and his Church belong to one another, and to lay it end on end with the institution of marriage as it was understood in his time, so as to transform it from within. Outwardly a Christian marriage in the Ephesians’ Church would look like a traditional patriarchal marriage as the Greco-Roman world understood it, but inwardly its ethos and emotional tone would feel very different, because the marriage partners would be giving way to one another in love, putting the other person’s needs ahead of their own, and treasuring one another as the most important person in their life, after God. Of course, we can notice that this is an idealised view of marriage that doesn’t take account of potential difficulties, such as marriages where one partner isn’t a Christian, or where persistent relational failures are caused by human sinfulness, and a lack of emotional intelligence and relationship skills. But what the Church needs in every age is for a standard to be set, and an ideal to be proclaimed.

And what the Church also needs to do in every age is to revolutionise the contemporary understanding of marriage as it is offered in the surrounding culture, and to critique it, transform it, and re-agenda it, just as the Ephesians did. Looking at Ephesians 5 we find that elements of their transformed understanding of marriage just wont do now. We pick out the essential and valuable elements of their version of Christian marriage, and discard the rest.

But we need to be aware that later ages of the Church will do the same to our understanding of Christian marriage. In fact the critique has already begun from the third world sector of the Church. We may be patting ourselves on the back that blokes are now expected to change nappies, cook meals, do housework, and share financial decisions - but third world Christians say that our notion of marriage is selfish because it concentrates on the couple only, and the satisfaction of their emotional and relational needs.

They point out the other dimensions of marriage - that it is a building block in the larger collectivity of the wider family, and of society itself. Marriage is a public relationship, not a private one, and we have relationship obligations through it to the families we marry into, and to the surrounding society, which expects the family to be a kind of foundation stone that stabilises its wider life.

They also point out that we have to some extent forgotten the procreative aspect of marriage - that one of its primary functions is to bring children into the world, and to effectively socialise them to be useful citizens. The introduction to the Marriage Service gives three reasons for the existence of Christian marriage, companionship, sex, and children. It is interesting that in 30 years of preparing couples for marriage that is pretty much the ranking order most couples have opted for. Earlier ages put children higher in the batting order. It is all very well to go on about overpopulation in the world, but the reality is that most advanced western societies aren’t producing enough children to pay the future tax burden, and to look after the elderly sector of their societies.

I think later ages of the Church will critique our current notions of Christian marriage too from the perspective that the current emphasis on equality and power sharing has sometimes resulted in sterile arguments about rights to individual fulfilment. And we might not do well in the assessment of our commitment to marriage discipline. As the African Bishops said to the Atlanticist Bishops at a recent Lambeth Conference - "We’ll stamp out polygamy in our dioceses when you crack down on the serial monogamy you practise through divorce and remarriage." An interesting exercise for us in the week ahead is to think, if I was writing an epistle to the south Dunedinites on the subject of marriage, what would I put into the eight sentences equivalent that would relate our understanding of Christ’s close relationship to the Church with our prescription for wise living in the contemporary Christian understanding of marriage?