Leithart
Today, you are entering into the covenant of Christian marriage. David, you?re swearing in God?s name that you will love Alisha as Jesus loves the church and gave Himself for her. You are promising with an oath to give your life for her sake. Alisha, you are swearing in the name of God to submit to David joyfully, and in love and fear, obeying him as the church submits to Christ and obeys Him. You are becoming one flesh, and you are called to work out that unity in your daily life as husband and wife. David, you are called to be Adam, and Alisha, you are called to be Eve. And together you are called to make your home a small restoration of Eden. The covenant you make today calls you to a level of devotion, sacrifice, love, and self-giving that you have never yet attempted or experienced. You are entering unexplored territory. And as you cross this threshold, it is important that you understand something of the challenge of the promises you are making.
The two verses I?ve read point to a central problem that every marriage has faced since the fall of Adam. Prior to the fall, Adam and Eve were naked, exposed to God and to each other, and yet experienced no shame. After the fall, things are radically different. Adam and Eve recognize that they are naked, and throughout Scripture, shame and nakedness are closely linked. When the Lord threatens to judge His faithless bride Israel, He says He will shame her by exposing her nakedness: ?I Myself have also stripped your skirts off over your face, that your shame may be seen?E(Jer 13:26). In some prophetic passages, nakedness is associated with the shame of defeat and enslavement: ?the king of Assyria will lead away the captives of Egypt,?EIsaiah says, ?young and old, naked and barefoot . . . , to the shame of Egypt?E(Is 20:4). Genesis 3 does not say that Adam and Eve were ashamed after the fall; but it does say that they recognized their nakedness, and in the Bible that is as good as saying that they were ashamed.
Besides, they act in all the telltale ways that humiliated people do. They are fearful, as Adam explicitly confesses to Yahweh: ?I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked.?E Their sense of naked exposure before God leads to isolation from God: Because he is afraid, Adam says, ?I hid myself.?E Adam?s shame not only expressed itself in his relation to God, but in his relation to Eve. Confronted with his sin, Adam does not accept the shame, confess it, and seek reconciliation. Instead, he attempts to deflect the shame from himself to his wife, making her a scapegoat who will bear his shame: ?The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.?E Adam and Eve were created to be one flesh, to express in bodily form the unity that exists among the persons of the Trinity. Sin brought shame, shame brought fear, and fear brought isolation. Shame means exposure, and Adam reacts to his exposure by attacking his wife. Instead of being one flesh, man and woman go to war. And all this arises from shame.
It is no accident that the first institution of postlapsarian culture, the first human invention following the fall, is clothing. Clothing is the first institution of postlapsarian culture because the shame of exposure, the shame of nakedness, is the first experience of fallen man.
These verses are profoundly relevant to marriage. By its very design, marriage strips away clothing, removes the fig leaves; at its core, marriage means a return to primordial, prelapsarian, pre-fall nakedness. This is not simply a point about sex. The nakedness and exposure involved in marriage is far broader than the physical nakedness of the marriage bed. As two are made one flesh, barriers are withdrawn, masks are torn away, and the two who are made one stand exposed before each other in emotional and psychological, as well as physical nakedness. Marriage is by its nature a return to prelapsarian nakedness, but it is not a return to prelapsarian shamelessness. Here is the dilemma and the danger of marriage: David and Alisha, You are going to be exposed to one another in ways that you?ve never experienced, and you WILL be ashamed.
There are few things as damaging to marriage as shame that is not handled properly. Some results of shame are obvious and easy to see: A man beats his wife because she makes him feel small and stupid. But the more subtle operations of shame are the more common, and in some ways more dangerous. A wife tells her friends at a dinner party about her husband?s incompetence on the computer; on the drive home the husband lashes out because of the public humiliation. Stung by her husband?s anger, the wife withdraws, and after the outburst, they don?t talk to each other for a week. After a series of similar episodes, they start sleeping in separate beds. Exposure begets shame, which begets anger, which begets withdrawal, which begets estrangement. Or, a husband asks his wife when she is going to go on the diet that she?s been promising, and the shame of her husband?s comments twists her into depression. Or, parents contemptuously and publicly ask their son why he can?t do anything right, and by the time he?s sixteen he is responding to years of shame with rage and uncontrollable rebellion.
When shame is not handled rightly, the result is a marriage that looks a lot like the marriage of Adam and Eve after the fall: Husband and wife isolate themselves from one another to escape continual humiliation; they lash out verbally, physically, and sexually in vengeance for the shame they have endured; they ?hide themselves?Ebecause they know they are naked, and they are afraid.
So, is marriage possible after the fall? Is it possible for two people who have been shamed by sin to be exposed to each other in the ways that marriage requires, without the whole thing spiraling into anger and resentment, withdrawal and isolation? Is it possible for two sinners to be one flesh? Is it possible for two shamed people to be naked and not ashamed?
The answer to all these questions is Yes. But this Yes comes only as the Yes of the gospel, the Yes that is Jesus, in whom all the promises of God are Yes and Amen. Fulfilling, joyful, productive marriage is possible since the fall only insofar as husband and wife, naked and exposed before one another, are at the same time clothed, clothed in Christ?s righteousness, clothed in glory. And this is possible only because Jesus has been clothed with shame. The Psalms frequently speak of the wicked being clothed with shame, but the man who is most fully covered with shame is not a wicked man but the one Good Man, Jesus Christ. He was stripped naked, beaten, ridiculed, spit upon, nailed to a cross, and publicly executed. He is clothed with shame, and yet He does not open His mouth, does not lash out, does not attack the bride who shames Him, does not fear, does not hide Himself from his Father. And He endures and even despises this shame for the joy set before Him, the joy of resurrection and glory, the joy of union with His bride, which bride we are.
The first institution of postlapsarian culture, of post-fall human life, is clothing. But fig leaves do not remove shame. Fig leaves only hide shame. Even the aprons that Yahweh made for Adam and Eve from animal skins do not solve the problem of shame. But ?Eand this is the gospel ?Ethe first institution of Christian life, of post-redemption culture, is also clothing, the clothing of glory and beauty that is from Christ, the clothing of righteousness that IS Christ. This clothing is the only solution to shame, and therefore the only basis for a peaceful, vigorous, joyful, fulfilling, fruitful marriage.
You are entering new territory today, and you can only succeed in this endeavor by faith. But your faith cannot not just generic confidence that things will turn out all right. If you marriage is to flourish, your faith must be in Jesus Christ, trust that the Father has clothed You in the Son th
rough the Spirit. That faith is the only way that you can truly be one flesh. That faith is the only way for you to be a new Adam and a new Eve, naked and not ashamed.
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