Marriage is not our mission 2

Is marriage between a man and a woman an essential part of God’s Reign, and thus Christian witness to Jesus Christ as Lord of that Reign? 

The most distinctly Christian understanding of marriage comes from Jesus' declaration that, "But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage." (Luke 20:35) 

In the eschatological dimension marriage simply isn't a thing. Marriage is bound to the times and spaces of the current human ordering of creation. The teachers of the law want to show the foolishness of believing in the resurrection. Jesus shows them the folly of taking the things of this world and projecting them into the next. 

This explains why Jesus speaks of marriage and divorce only in terms of their inner, relational meaning. These are the principled aspects of human relationships related to God's Reign. The foundations of God‘s reign as taught by Jesus Christ are principles of relationship rooted in the (non-sexual, non-gendered) Trinity. This foundation of Divine Love is not tied to transient social structures that happen to have appeared at some point in human history. The witness to the Reign of God by Jesus through his ministry, death, and resurrection is the same the witness enjoined on the church in Matthew 25 and Acts 1. It does not include a witness to marriage at all. Marriage isn't a feature of God's Reign as it will be established in the New Jerusalem.

But this leaves another question. Is marriage between a man and a woman a feature of a distinctly Christian life on earth, such that a faithful marriage between a man and a woman witnesses somehow to God's Reign as made present in Jesus Christ? On the face of it this is a strange claim, since the one thing completely absent in all accounts of Jesus' ministry and that of his apostles are wives. If being part of a marriage is an essential to witnessing to God's Reign the writers of scripture certainly don't show any awareness of it. 

Such teaching as we find in the New Testament regarding the conduct of husbands and wives in a Christian community relates solely to enacting distinctly Christian principles governing all human relations for the sake of witnessing to the faithfulness and love characteristic of God's Reign. 

Even the apostle Paul, who is clearly concerned about how the relationship between husband and wife functions in relation to the witness of the Church to God's Reign, believes that with the coming of that reign it is better to not marry at all. Marriage for Paul isn't a foundational witness to God's Reign, it is a way of avoiding the distractions of lust and the guilt of sexual sin to get on with the mission.

And for those who are married, what is Paul’s teaching about the standards for marriage within the Christian community? Well these standards are gendered to be sure. Indeed they were based on a gendered hierarchy. But this makes it hard to see how one can reject the hierarchy (so women can speak in church and do not necessarily have to obey their husbands) and keep the gender. If the hierarchy, which for Paul is clearly central to marriage, isn't normative then its hard to see why gender should be.

 

But again, in the end, for Paul as for Jesus, marriage isn't a feature of God's Reign. Its shape is determined by the prevailing culture, which in Paul's time and place is gendered and hierarchical. Strip away the culture and neither gender nor hierarchy are left.  

Two things follow, and neither is easily accepted by those married to cultural traditions rather than the study of scripture. 

First: Marriage is not a Christian institution. A marriage that takes place before either partner becomes Christian remains a marriage. A marriage of two people who are never Christian is still a marriage. Marriage is a human institution shaped by the distinctive culture in which it is found. The fact that Jesus showed up for a wedding in Cana of Galilee and worked a miracle hardly raises marriage to a level above the many other events that Jesus attended. As Protestants we have never accepted that marriage was a sacrament. Our pastors are witnesses for the state of a civil union, and offer a blessing on behalf of a congregation that blesses many aspects of human life. 

Marriage draws its special character in church life solely from the scriptural analogy of human marriage to the relationship between God's people and God. That relationship is neither gendered nor sexual in nature. The Body of Christ is simultaneously the Bride of Christ, a clue that gender is not at stake in this relationship.

Second: The claim that marriage is only between a male and a female is not a witness to God's Reign. It is not a distinctly Christian witness. The same thing is true of witnesses that same-sex marriage should be allowed. This is also not a distinctly Christian witness. A witness involving marriage is distinctly Christian only when it points to a marriage as an  example of general Christian principles of human relationships.

So what should be our witness, in this place and time? If it doesn't concern marriage, then what are the signs of God's Reign relevant to the world around us? I think we need to urgently address what the teaching, death, and resurrection of Christ have to say about the existential threats to our lives right now that are clearly an extension of his teaching 2000 years ago. And two of these tower above all others: 1. the increasing oppression and marginalization of those in our societies whose personhood doesn't conform to social norms, 2. climate change. The first is destroying individual lives, while the second may well destroy us all.