What does covenant love look like? We explore marriage in the Bible through a range of people and through the relationship God has with his world.
In the Scriptures, marriage develops as a divinely ordained covenant between a man and a woman which sustains physical, emotional and spiritual intimacy. In John’s Gospel, Jesus performs his first miracle at a wedding feast in Cana in Galilee according to John 2:1-11, to which his mother and his disciples had been invited.
In Genesis 1:27-28, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The union of the couple is presented to us in the act of God breathing them into life and they are commanded to be fruitful and multiply. God also states that “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18-24) so humans are made for relationships. Since the symbolic imagery describes being of the same bone or rib and flesh, it alludes to seeing marriage as re-union of that bone and flesh rather than just as a new union, and of providing complementary roles and gifts.
This union based on the dynamic interrelationship of body, spirit and mutual self-gift will find its ultimate expression in the gradual revelation across the Scriptural tradition of God as Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit. There in the very nature of God we find a unity that does not erase difference or impose uniformity. We are invited to find our own deepest mystery in the depth of the relational life of God. Everything that God does through the different dimensions of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is always fulfilled in relationship to the other dimensions. By the time we arrive at 1 John 4:7-21 we are invited to “…love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.”
But sadly, we all fall away from this invitation to divine-human intimacy. After the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve have to renegotiate the call to union in the circumstances of everyday life and its challenges. From then on, relationships become complex until right up to the reconciled imagery of the wedding banquet of the Lamb in Revelation 19. However, slowly emerging is a golden thread of loving fidelity. This though expressed in various ways, remains at the heart of a living relationship with God and all fully human relationships. We observe this in so many figures with such different experiences of marriage such as in Abraham, Hannah and Ruth, Tobias with Sarah, Mary and Joseph.
Throughout Israel’s history, the relationship between God and his people is often described in terms of a special union or marriage. As the history of Israel unfolds, this model becomes central to God’s relationship with his people, expressed in both parts of what becomes a divided kingdom. The prophets Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah will call Israel back to their commitment to God and covenant faithfulness using stark images of marital fidelity and infidelity. Yet just as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, God will remain true to his loving promise and in time, rejoice over his people in Isaiah 62:5. This perfect integrity and its ultimate fruition in the life and death of Jesus, are what covenant love looks like from God’s perspective.
Jesus himself, by being born from a unique marriage, enriches the imagery and the values of many types of marriages when he encounters married men, women and their relatives who are in need of hope and grace. We see this particularly with the Samaritan Woman in John 4 and with Peter’s mother-in-law in Luke 4. This vision of Jesus’ ministry to all peoples revealed in the preaching of Paul, inspires the couple Aquila and Priscilla in their mission in the book of Acts.
This rich foundation, in Jesus’ own desire to protect the vulnerable within and out of marriage, forms the basis for the emerging theology of marriage of the Apostolic Letters. They reflect on the implications of God’s covenant, its imaging and reflection in the marriage of husband and wife. Paul will relate this to the original vision of intimacy and union in Genesis 2. He urges the new generation of believing couples to leave their parental homes and become one flesh, re-imaging the relationship of mutual love and commitment he describes between Christ and the Church in Ephesians 5. Marriage then becomes a prime way of restoring the fallen world. The graces of the married relationship extend outwards creating a reconciling circle of life in which others can find healing, comfort and renewed life. And the couple themselves, growing ever closer to each other within the divine life, become ever more fully the unique persons they are capable of being in the love and service of God.
Fleur Dorrell
Painting: The Wedding at Cana by Rodrigo Fernández, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Wikimedia Commons.
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