Marriage is impossible. Christian marriage is also impossible, only more so.
Marriage is impossible because it demands that two people devote themselves to each other, no matter what, for the rest of their lives. Christian marriage demands more: Husbands are to be like Christ, wives like the church, and together they are to form one flesh – again, no matter what, for the rest of their lives.
Whose idea is this? To take two young people who are as unsteady as cooling jello, who don’t even quite know who they are, and ask them to commit themselves in lifelong faithfulness to another wandering soul.
God calls you to be one flesh, but ask yourself, Am I one flesh, one self, just by myself? Each of us is a cluster of identities, and each identity places us in a different community. Walt Whitman was boasting of his unique breadth when he wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” but his boast is a truism. It’s the song of every self.
How can we forge these complex identities into a single person, a single life? We might try to do it by sheer force of will. We might decide that one of our many identities is going to be our defining identity: I am going to be nothing but an American; a North Dakotan; an Episcopalian. But these choices are not iron-clad. They change as regularly as we change social settings. Today, at the wedding, you’ll choose to identify yourself in one way, appropriate to this setting: “I’m Rachel’s second cousin’s half-brother’s wife’s aunt’s friend,” for instance. Monday, in a different setting, you’ll introduce as a minister of the gospel, as a salesman for an international corporation, as an attorney, as the head of a team of surgeons, as somebody’s Mom.
Today, you’re all witnesses to a paradoxical, if not a plainly contradictory, experiment. Today things get more complicated for both of you. As you watch, an identity is going to be added to each of them, several in fact. God complicates your identities, and then says, “Be one. Not, Each of you be one; but, Be one together.” He adds new components, and then exhorts you, “Simplify, simplify!”
It’s hardly remarkable that the divorce rate is rising. The remarkable thing is that so many marriages remain comparatively intact. All the natural forces tend toward fragmentation. This is what makes marriage impossible. If you see a marriage that’s a success, you’ve seen a miracle.
“Comparatively intact,” though, is not what we’re expecting,n or what God’s expecting, from the two of you. God calls you to something better than lumbering through. He calls you to something grander and more daring than simply remaining legally married and living grudgingly under the same roof for the rest of your life. He calls you to cultivate a unity that He describes as “one flesh.” You’re supposed to combine your divided selves, and make one thing out of it.
How can this happen? If an individual is going to find personal integrity and unity, something’s got to join his various identities; there must be something “between” this identity and that, something that corrals his swirling desires or her cavorting interests when they try to bolt in different directions. When so many forces are pulling here and there, what is it that stands in-between to keep your marriage from fracturing in two, into a thousand little pieces?
For Christians, the answer to that question is the Holy Spirit. Jesus, to be sure, is the One who breaks down and fills the division “between” Jew and Gentile, and He’s the One Mediator “between” God and Man. But it’s the Spirit who carries on Jesus’ work of binding many into one. The Spirit is and always has been the One Between, the One who fills and closes the gap between this and that, the One who unifies two or three or three billion.
As Augustine recognized, the Spirit’s position in the Trinity is a position “between.” The Spirit is shared by the Father and Son, and goes between the Father and Son as the love that binds them. The Spirit is the Father’s gift to the Son, and is the Son’s return gift to the Father. As the One Between, He’s also between the ascended Christ and ourselves, uniting the bride to her heavenly Head. As the One Between, the Spirit draws those of us who are in Christ to give us access to the Father. As the One Between, the Spirit makes us “one spirit” with Christ.
As the Spirit joins Father and Son, so He joins fathers and sons across the gap of generations. No generation can be healthy if it is dominated by one spirit. A generation dominated by the spirit of sons breaks from the past in revolution, and a generation that drinks only of the spirit of the fathers is hidebound, and tyrannical. A healthy generation partakes of the spirit of the fathers and the spirit of sons, and must learn to join these spirits into one spirit. The Holy Spirit is the One Between who unifies the past and future. As the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son, the Spirit joins the hearts of the fathers to sons, and of sons to the fathers.
The Spirit is the One Between your multiple selves, who joins the you and you and you that makes you who you are, joins them into one complex whole in Jesus. And of course the Spirit is the one who joins the two of you, the One Between who will spend a lifetime pulling you together in one flesh. He is the gravitational force of your marriage. Paul points to this in 1 Corinthians 6. He is talking about sexual sin, but what he says has a wider application to marriage. He quotes from Genesis 2, they shall be one flesh, and then picks up this phrase to describe the believer’s relationship with Christ: “the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him.” By the Spirit, we are brought into a quasi-marital relationship with Christ, a marital union sealed by the Spirit who dwells in each of us and consecrates us as the temple of God. Being joined in Spirit to Christ is also what unites husband and wife in one flesh.
The future of your marriage, the unity and health of your marriage, doesn’t ultimately depend on you. It depends on the Spirit who is between you. Insofar as it does depend on you, it involves doing everything you can to keep in step with the Spirit who joins you together. Paul gives one specific hint about this in the passage I’ve read: Sexual purity is essential to unified married life. You must constantly remember that your bodies are not your own but belong to the God who consecrates you as holy space by His Spirit.
Preserving the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace also means avoiding all the habits that are so hideously common to married couples, the perilous commonplaces that grieve and drive away the Spirit. Grumbling – about your husband, your wife, your finances, your car or your house or your kids – grumbling grieves the Spirit. So does anger, and so does lying, and so does rotten speech, and bitterness, wrath, clamor, slander, and malice. If you want to cultivate the unity of your marriage, put off all that is of the old man, and by the Spirit put on kindness, tenderness, forgivingness. Be harmonious, sympathetic, kindhearted, humble in spirit. Above all, if you want truly to be one flesh, each of you must remain closely bound in one spirit to the Lord Jesus. Your marital union with Him as a member of His bride is the rock on which to build a marriage that the tempests and winds cannot destroy.
On a wet and windy night near the end of C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, Mark and Jane Studdock, “but lately married,” wait in the house at St. Anne’s with Ransom, Merlin, and others for the Pentecostal desc en t of the gods. After Mercury, after Venus, after Mars comes “a greater spirit,” a spirit who inspires music and dancing and makes the small gathering cavort like men filled with new wine. With the advent of Jupiter, the king of the planetary gods, the kitchen appears to be “filled with kings and queens” dancing with a wildness that “expressed heroic energy and [in] its quieter moments seized the very spirit behind all noble ceremonies.”
Lewis considered Jove the spiritual symbol of kingship, evoking not warfare but “a King at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. The Jovial character is cheerful, festive yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous,” and his influence brings “halcyon days and prosperity.” Jove is, in short, a symbol of the Spirit of God, who descends from heaven to dwell among and in and between us. As the One Between, the Spirit moves and joins us in a jovial dance of stately wildness.
Our prayer for you, on this Saturday after Pentecost, is that the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the true Spirit of joviality, the One Between, will fill the gaps in you, in your marriage, and in your home, drawing you into the unity of the Son and the Father, from this day to your lives’ end. This is our prayer, because the success of your marriage depends entirely on the grace of God, the grace that is the Gift of God, the Gift that is the Spirit of God. You’ll find, if you are honest, that marriage is impossible, but our prayer is that that you will also find that with God the Spirit, the God in between, nothing is impossible.