Readings October 4, 2009

Sunday's readings have the obvious theme of human marriage.

"This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh ... That is why a man leaves his father and mother ... and the two of them become one flesh."

"Blessed are you who fear the LORD ... Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine"

"What God has joined together, no human being must separate."

Of the four scriptures used, including the Psalm, only the New Testament epistle (Hebrews 2) does not specifically speak about marriage.  Instead we hear a teaching about Christ's suffering and humiliation, how he was made "lower than the angels" in order to bring us to "glory".  It's this text I want to talk about, to weave it back into the theme in the other readings.  Enlightened by the greater context of scripture and tradition, we can understand this as having to do with the spiritual marriage between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5), which meshes nicely with Paul's theology of uniting ourselves to Christ on the cross in order to join him in his resurrection (Romans 6).

• As in marriage, we must become "one flesh" with Christ the Bridegroom.  We become a part of Christ's body in baptism, and we receive his body in the Eucharist.
• United with him in suffering, we come to share in his glory as well, just as married couples follow the same path together through life.
• Just as Jesus teaches that no human being must separate those joined in marriage, we are told in Romans 8 that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, ... will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." It is notable that the stronger phrasing is reserved for the heavenly marriage - our bond with Christ is greater than human marriage, which ends with death.

All this makes the connection between human marriage and the bond between Christ and the Church very clear, so it is fitting that in order to arrange this union to occur, God had Jesus take on a human nature as a man, the bridegroom.

I find I am interested in the line, "Therefore, he is not ashamed to call them brothers."  Before the crucifixion, Jesus extended his friendship to his disciples; "I no longer call you servants, but friends."  After, that relationship is deepened even further in the similar-sounding "Therefore, he is not ashamed to call you brothers."  Both statements invite us into a deeper intimacy with Christ.

One the one hand, you might explain that this is where the metaphor breaks down.  Our relationship with Christ is not a marriage in exactly the same way marriage exists between two humans, and the word "brother" is in essence an additional metaphor to add more understanding.  On the other hand, while recognizing the dissimilarity between these two "marriages", we have not necessarily abandoned the metaphor even here.  In the Song of Songs, the human bridegroom addresses his spouse as "my sister, my bride".  If Christ the bridegroom can say to a Christian woman "my sister, my bride", then it follows that his address to the Christian man as "my brother" is of one and the same quality -- in the realm of the spirit, the sexual falls away and for all of us, men and women, brotherhood with Christ is fundamentally a spousal relationship.

Again and again, as a man or woman return to their spouse at the end of each labor, our souls return to Christ in worship.  Again and again we return to him, and weave our lives into his life.  So much could be said of the similarities between spousal love and our relationship with the savior.  But fundamentally, at the end of it all, the ties that bind us to him remain, when every other bond breaks and falls away.  It is that cord that preserves us from the sucking abyss that will take even the ground beneath our feet.  Tethered to the cross, we are swept up into the glory of he who was "for a little while" made "lower than the angels".

Here below the angels, we ponder the man of whom such a thing needed to be said.