Leithart
In Christ we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us. In all wisdom and insight He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth (Ephesians 1).
We praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You hid Your plan from the wise and prudent and in the last days revealed Your secret in Your Son. We praise You because you are at work to sum up all things in Christ, and that You are directing all things to be consummated in the great mystery of the marriage of Christ with His church. Give us grace to manifest that final marriage today, for the glory of Jesus our Lord. Amen.
“This mystery is great,” Paul says of marriage in Ephesians 5. “But I am speaking with reference to Christ and His Church.”
This is not the first time Paul uses the word “mystery” in Ephesians. A mystery is something hidden, a secret, that’s later revealed, and Paul says that in the gospel God tells the secret He’s been keeping for millennia. Through Jesus, God has made known the “mystery of His will,” namely, God’s plan to “sum up all things in Christ.” As the letter progresses, Paul becomes more specific. In chapter 3, the mystery is that “Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (3:6). God’s secret is that Gentiles along with Jews are to be “summed up” in the Jewish Messiah.
When Paul gets to chapter 5 and describes marriage as a mystery, all this is in the background. Marriage is an earthly symbol of Christ’s relation to His church; it also tells the whole gospel story. In marriage, God discloses the secret of the gospel, hidden from before the foundations of the world and now revealed in Jesus Christ.
It’s difficult for us moderns to grasp the notion that marriage divulges a cosmic secret. It’s often said that we live in an age that has cast morality out the window. That’s not quite accurate. We haven’t tossed out morality; we’ve tossed out mystery. We don’t like mysteries, and we are suspicious of secrets. And that’s because we live in an age of technique. We have our morality, but our morality is guided by abstracted, standardized rules, and aims for quantifiable results. Our culture is not amoral; ours is a culture that puts a premium on efficiency.
The problem is not rules per se. Christians have rules. But for Christians rules are signposts that mark the path of the good life. The rules symbolize the highest good and nudge us toward that good as the final end of human life. By contrast, the rules of our culture have no overall purpose in view. We prize efficiency, but nobody knows exactly what the end or goal of all our technical expertise might be. We follow rules to get who-knows-where as quickly and with as little clutter as possible.
Our cult of efficiency is particularly damaging when applied to our relations with other humans. An ethics of efficiency may work when we’re talking about the production of pins or widgets or computer chips. When you’re talking about raising children, or shepherding a church, or teaching Latin or Irish literature, or singing, or writing a poem, or talking to a distressed friend late into the night – then efficiency is not only inapplicable. It’s inhuman.
Today’s culture is so obsessed with efficient technique that it even attempts to apply this paradigm to marriage. The shelves at Borders groan under the weight of how-to books on marriage. “How To Save Your Marriage Alone” is the title of one; “How To Save Your Marriage Before It’s Too Late” promises another; another bears the title, “How to Survive Your Marriage,” which seems a rather minimal aim. And a personal favorite: “Love in the Present Tense: How to have a High Intimacy, Low Maintenance Marriage.” Talk about a good cost-benefit ratio – intimacy with minimum investment! Most tragically, even Christian marriage books are like this. One of the titles I’ve mentioned is by a Christian marriage counselor.
Applied to marriage, the reign of efficiency makes persons as interchangeable as standardized parts. But this perverts the essence of marriage. As the late Pope John Paul II said, maleness and femaleness never exist in the “abstract, but only in a concrete human being, a concrete man or woman.” In the natural course of things, sexual attraction is not an attraction to the “opposite sex,” but attraction to a particular human being. Only when sexual desire is “directed towards a particular human being” can it “provide the framework within which, and the basis on which, the possibility of love arises.”
Marital efficiency, the Pope also notes, is essentially egotistical, yet, paradoxically, turns each person into an abject instrument for the other. Husband and wife are each “mainly concerned with gratifying his or her own egoism, but at the same time [each] consents to serve someone else’s egoism, because this can provide the opportunity for such gratification.” The husband uses the wife as a tool for satisfying his own desires and aims; the wife willingly allows herself to become his tool because she hopes that she can satisfy hers in turn.
This is not marriage. This is mutual manipulation.
If you want to establish a Christian marriage in a culture like ours, you’re going to have to stand strongly against the tide; you’re going to have to take up a counter-cultural stance. You’re going to have to resist the demand for efficiency, the demand for standardized rules and procedures without any end in view, the notion that marriage can work like a machine with calculable inputs and outputs.
You need something deeper than this, however. You need a transformation of imagination. When modern Americans imagine a “perfect” world, that world is orderly, regular, clean, sleek. It’s all smoothness and shining surfaces. It’s not only our morality that’s distorted by utilitarianism, not only our marriages that are damaged by the how-to mentality. It goes deeper than that. Our imaginations have been emptied out.
Instead of perfection as symmetry, think of perfection as polyphony, the harmony of simultaneous voices. Instead of perfection as geometric, imagine perfection as a Gothic cathedral, which is nothing less than stone straining to become weightless spirit. Instead of a quantifiable perfection, meditate on the perfection of the fold-swirling-on-fold in Baroque painting and sculpture. Christian imagination does not reduce the rich radiance of the world to monochrome. Christian imagination does not package creation in boxes. Christian imagination, inspired by the unutterable beauty of the Triune God, receives the world in all its wild beauty, and imagines perfection not as taming but as the completion of both its beauty and its wildness.
Only when we’re equipped with such imaginations can we even begin to grasp and live the “great mystery” of Ephesians 5. For the mystery is not just marriage, and not just Christ and His church. Both of those are mysteries, and great ones. But the greatest mystery of all arises from the interplay of these two mysteries, the great mystery that human marriage, the marriage of one all-too-human man to one all-too-human woman, that marriage, in all its complexities, challenges, failures, and ragged edges, reveals the world’s dest
iny, the summation of all things in Christ. Your marriage, with all its flaws, imperfections, frustrations – your actual marriage, not some idealized perfect marriage – discloses the secret drama of human history. That, indeed, is a great mystery.
This is my exhortation to you: By all means, develop patterns and habits of life; by all means set up rules and procedures. But as you do that, resist the reduction of these rules and procedures to the cultural standard of efficiency. And resist by cultivating a Christian imagination, an imagination that sees God’s grandeur in a grain of sand, that knows the face of God in the face of a beggar, that rejoices in God’s good creation in all its layers, that discovers nothing less than the secret of the universe in the way of a man with a maid.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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