TeamDavis

Touchstone magazine had a recent article by Peter Leithart titled When Marriage is Dying. He talks about the decline in the rate of marriages over the last decades (a third of children today grow up in a home without two parents), which is a sort of dying. But more importantly, he discusses how marriage is designed to be a dying:

Marriage is dying because we have forgotten that marriage is always about dying. When a man and woman appear for the marriage ceremony, they have usually spent the better part of their lives under the oversight of their parents. Parents have provided them with physical necessities, loved and cared for them, instructed them, and set an example for them in ways that no one can fully understand. At the wedding, that world dies. And when that world dies, the couple dies too.

This wedding marks the end of the former man and woman. Before vows are exchanged and they are pronounced man and wife, they were a single man and a single woman. When the rites have occurred, they will no longer be single ever again. They came separately, but go out as a couple. Two become one flesh.

Two become one. Something must die in order for this new life to spring forth.

In a similar vein, Walter Wangerin (one of my favorite authors), says that it is impossible for a man and woman to truly know one another before marriage. Once married, they become new people – no longer their former single selves but now a husband and a wife. So the first task of marriage is to get to know this new other – and the new self!

But this is only the beginning of the new death and life:

The wedding is only the beginning of death. A man and woman who go through the ceremony and then live as they have always lived have not really understood what their marriage requires. Death at the wedding is a call to continual dying. At their wedding, a man and woman die to singleness, to the old relation with parents, to old habits and plans, and that death has to be worked out throughout the course of the marriage. After being married only a short time, most married couples discover just how self-centered they are, and they are called to die to that self-centeredness.

…

Marriage is about dying because, as the Bible says, marriage is a covenant, and death is always a prominent feature of a covenant. Every time a covenant is made, an old arrangement comes to an end and a new arrangement of things comes into being. When Israel came to Sinai, they did not have the Torah, a tabernacle, a priesthood, or Yahweh dwelling in their midst. When they departed from Sinai, after entering into covenant, that old Israel was gone and a new Israel had come into being. For Christians, this is the significance of Jesus’ death, which brought an end to the order of the first covenant in order to bring a new order and a new creation. Covenant-making normally requires bloodshed because covenants always mean death.

If the covenant of marriage necessarily requires death and sacrifice, then why marry at all? On a surface level, romance and desire play a large role. But is there something deeper at the core of our being that longs for a death and newness in marriage?

Getting married is either an act of supreme folly, or it is an act of faith (which may also be supreme folly).

More precisely, it is an act of faith in resurrection, in the possibility of new life, hope that a new and better life lies on the other side of this death. At this point, we see that secularism is profoundly ill-equipped to support marriage. Secularism promises that marriage will be a means of self-realization, and people are astonished to find that it demands continual self-denial. Secularism sends off the newlyweds in a shower of birdseed, without warning that together with the happiness of marriage they will face heartache and a thousand natural shocks. Secularism sends them unsuspectingly to death, and refuses to offer any hope of resurrection.

A Christian couple, by contrast, comes willingly to die at the wedding altar because they believe the gospel that says that Jesus is risen indeed. Because he is raised from the dead, Christians hope that we too will one day be raised, but we also hope that all the little dyings that we experience in life will lead to resurrections. An old world and an old self dies on the wedding day, but the gospel promises that a new self and a new world will be born. Christians can welcome the death that marriage brings, because they follow a master who said, “Whoever seeks to save his life shall lose it; but he who loses his life for my sake will find it” and “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Read the last quote again slowly.

This seems to me the heart of the matter. We all come into marriage with the best of thoughts and intentions. But at the root, what we ultimately long for and expect is that marriage will bring happiness, self-realization, an end to loneliness. More specifically, we expect that our new spouse will do these things for us. And they, in turn, expect the same from us.

No human being can meet such high expectations. We soon feel let down, wondering why our spouse doesn’t fill our emptiness, provide for all our needs. And we begin to withhold love and trust in response. As they do the same. The obvious end of this sad cycle is a cold peace between housemates, a sorrowful settling for less, and sometimes divorce.

The alternative, with a higher view of marriage, is that we both recognize the need to die – to selfishness, to demands, to expectations, to putting ourselves first.

Parodoxically, the way to a life-giving marriage is not striving to provide life for ourselves, but rather dying and giving life to the other. Both spouses, constantly dying, give life to each other and build a marriage that attains to reflect the glory of God. That is a high calling indeed.

Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.
Jesus, Luke 11:33