Covenant Marriage as Ascriptural Event (Part Four)

Is it possible a significant question to be asked during the wedding ceremony, at the time of the exchange of vows, is do you pledge to always consider what is best for the other regardless of the cost to yourself? As a follower of Christ, can there be any other question? Maybe the ceremony is simply a beginning to a lifetime adventure to discover the depths of the vows that were exchanged. Marriage is an adventure that will entail learning how to be intimate - physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Is it possible marriage may be sustained by coming to a new understanding of commitment and faith? That is, the vow remains a promise that does not depend on the other person fulfilling certain conditions (as is the case in contractual relationships), and a relationship that looks to the sustaining of hope within the marriage by acknowledging God is sovereign.

One way to achieve these virtues may be by telling stories and by being formed by those stories – all in the context of a faithful community who accepts those stories as foundational and a community that, with the hope and promise of God, continues the conversations begun by those stories. We will presumably be trained to embody those stories in the concrete mundane of the every day. We can tell the story of Ruth and Naomi, for coming to an understanding of commitment. We can tell the story of Hannah, as recounted in the first two chapters of Samuel for both an understanding of commitment and vows. As well we may gain a sense of commitment from the story of Simeon and Anna at the time of the circumcism of Jesus in Luke 2:21-40. The narrative we know as Scripture is full of such stories all of which are the story of the life of the church founded by Jesus the Christ.

That such a community came to be shortly after the Cross may be seen in the So-Called Letter to Diognetus, dated from the 2nd Century or earlier, as translated in the Early Church Fathers at 216-17, “for Christians cannot be distinguished from the rest of the human race by country or language or customs.... Yet although they live in Greek and barbarian cities alike, as each man’s lot has been cast, and follow the customs of the country in clothing and food and other matters of daily living, at the same time they give proof of the remarkable and admittedly extraordinary constitution of their own commonwealth. They live in their own countries but as aliens.... They marry, like everyone else and they begat children, but they do not cast out their offspring [note that infanticide, particularly as to female infants was supposedly practiced]. They share their board with each other, but not their marriage bed. it is true that they are in the flesh, but they do not live according to the flesh.”

That such communities exist and can exist within our secular system may be seen in a number of examples. Of course, no community has it down pat and I suspect there are difficulties from time to time but the effort, if anything I have said has any merit to it, must be continued. One such community may be seen in the work of Donald B. Kraybill and others in Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy, and in this observation by Fumitaka Matsuoka (reflecting on the heroic stance of a Japanese-American community in California following the devastation to life and property and indeed the atrocity of the internment camps in this country during World War II) in his essay “Creating Community Amidst the Memories of Historic Injustices” in Realizing the America of Our Hearts at 39, “the incarnation of Christian faith is both deeply personal and deeply public at the same time. Japanese-American Christians remind us of a key that does bind the people of the Rashomon effect together. What manner of people are they? Refusing to flinch in the face of the painful and unjust experiences of incarceration, attacking the unjust system that had bound them, they reach out to those who betrayed their trust and inflicted injustice to them, offering to build together a new society.”

Marriage is more than contract or covenant. Marriage is not merely the proper context for sexual activity by faithful couples. Marriage is not simply the telos for those feelings of passion and romance (Matzko-McCarthy puts it well when he says, at 62, “marriage is untamed passion made safe”). Marriage may contain elements of all of these things but it is not and should not be held captive by any of them.