Wedding Sermon, June 2

Isaiah 62:1-5
For Zion�s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem�s sake I will not keep quiet, until her righteousness goes forth like brightness, and her salvation like a torch that is burning. And the nations will see your righteousness, and all kings your glory; and you will be called by a new name, which the mouth of Yahweh will designate. You will also be a crown of beauty in the hand of Yahweh, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God. It will no longer be said to you, �Forsaken,�Enor to your land will it any longer be said, �Desolate�E but you will be called �My delight is in her�Eand your land �Married.�E For as a young man marries a virgin, so your sons will marry you; and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so your God will rejoice over you.

Let Us Pray

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who out of Your great love sent Your Son to a desolate and forsaken world to rescue His bride and to rejoice over her with singing: Draw near to us through Your Spirit, we pray, and fill us with wisdom, joy, and thanks as we consider the love You have shown to us in Your Son; we pray this in the Name of Jesus our Lord. Amen.

Scripture makes it clear that marriage is a sign and image of the mutual love that exists between Christ and His church. This is explicit in Ephesians 5, where Paul instructs husbands to �love your wives as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her.�E In Paul�s mind, the parallel is very strong. He quotes Genesis 2 �E�for this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh�E�Ebut then goes on to clarify that, despite appearances, he is not talking about human marriage but about Christ�s marriage to the church.

But what kind of love does Christ have for His bride? What kind of love is marriage supposed to incarnate? What kind of love is your marriage, Brendan and Sharon, supposed to manifest?

Greek has several words for love: Philia, which refers to friendship and brotherly affection; agape, often defined as self-giving, selfless love; and eros, often defined as self-love or self-seeking love. Eros and agape have often been sharply contrasted (in the words of Alan Soble): �Eros is acquisitive, egocentric or even selfish; agape is a giving love. Eros is an unconstant, unfaithful love, while agape is unwavering and continues to give despite ingratitude. Eros is a love that responds to the merit or value of its object; while agape creates value in its object as a result of loving it . . . . eros is an ascending love, the human�s route to God; agape is a descending love, God�s route to humans.�E

On this account, if I love with agapic love, I love without regard for any satisfaction or pleasure that might come to me: agapic love is the love of the Good Samaritan for the victim on the road to Jericho, the love of the martyr for his persecutors, Jesus�Elove for sinners. If my love is erotic, I want, at least, to be loved in return, and I seek all the satisfactions and pleasures, often including sexual pleasures, that accompany requited love: Erotic love is the love of the courtly lover struck by the arrow of desire, the love of a thousand romantic films and novels, the love of the Platonic mystic who ascends from beautiful things to the contemplation of Beauty itself, the love that hopes to own what it loves. Erotic love seeks possession; agapic love freely dispossesses. Erotic love is self-seeking; agapic love is pure love for the other. Erotic love often seeks physical satisfaction, and verges dangerously close to lust; agapic love is spiritual. In the minds of many Christians, Christian love aims to be thoroughly agapic.

Not surprisingly, this contrast of eros and agape creates deep tensions in the Christian understanding of marriage. On the one hand, Christ�s agapic love for the church sets the pattern for a husband�s love for his bride; but on the other hand, marital love is irreducibly erotic. Isn�t marital love always self-seeking to some degree? Don�t husbands and wives quite naturally, and rightly, desire to be loved? Is marital love in the end doomed to be a corrupt or even perverse image of the true love of the Divine Bridegroom for His bride?

Some Christians address this dilemma by offering a more favorable assessment of eros. C. S. Lewis agreed that there is a �carnal�Eelement in erotic love, but refused to accept that eros could be reduced to sexual desire, much less reduced to lust: �Very often what comes first is [not sexual desire but] simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved �Ea general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. . . . If you asked [a man under the influence of Eros] what he wanted, the true reply would often be, �To go on thinking of her.�� Lust is quite different: �We use a most unfortunate idiom,�ELewis says, �when we say, of a lustful man prowling in the streets, that he �wants a woman.�E Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be a necessary piece of apparatus.�E Eros, by contrast, �makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman.�E In this view, Eros responds to the good, true, and beautiful in the beloved, and that means that Christ�s prohibition of lust is not an attack on Eros, but the opposite. It is a tragedy that �erotic�Ehas come to be synonymous with �pornographic.�E Christian condemnation of lust is, as John Paul II has argued, an appeal for a �true eroticism,�Ea desiring love that does not reduce the beloved to a sexual object but is attracted to the image of divine goodness and beauty in the person loved.

To this extent, you are called to express erotic love in the whole of your marriage. This eroticism, in fact, is at the heart of the vows you are taking today. You have committed to keeping yourselves only for each another so long as you both shall live. This is not merely a pledge of sexual faithfulness, though of course it is that; Brendan, you have promised to be preoccupied, not with �a woman�Ebut with Sharon, and Sharon you have pledged to delight not in �a man�Ebut in Brendan. By your vows today, you are setting out on the adventure of discovering and celebrating in each other the refulgence of God�s glory that is the image of God; you are committing yourselves to discover and celebrate that radiance in ever fresh ways so long as you both shall live. You are called, in short, to �true eroticism.�E

Yet, a basic question remains. Erotic love seeks for satisfaction, and therefore appears to be self-interested. Yet, God can receive nothing and hopes to receive nothing from us, and yet He loves us. Eros seems completely absent from God�s love for His bride, so how can you manifest God�s love in your marriage?

The answer is simple: God does desire us, He longs for us, He considers us His lovely and spotless bride, He does look for a response. God�s love for us is erotic, for He takes interest in each of us and loves us in order to evoke love from us. God�s love includes His desire to be loved. We must feel the full weight of this truth. The Triune God is eternal, and He is eternally full of all joy, love, fellowship, feasting, and life. He needs nothing, and nothing that He makes can add even in a smallest degree to the satisfaction of the Triune fellowship. And yet, this same God created a world and called it good; this same God assures us that He delights in His world and His people. Through the prophet Isaiah, Yahweh says that His exiled people will no longer be called �Forsaken,�Ebut instead �you will be called �My delight is in her�Eand your land �Married.�E For as a young man marries a virgin, so your sons will marry you; and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so your God will rejoice over you�E(Is 62). And again, �I create Jerusalem for rejoicing, and her people for gladness. I will also rejoice in Jerusalem, and be glad in my people�E(Is 65). The prophet Zephaniah says of Jerusalem, �Yahweh your God . . . will exult over you with joy, He will be quiet in His love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy�E(Zeph 3). And Jesus Himself says that the Father sent Him because the Father out of love �seeks worshipers�Ewho will worship in Spirit an in truth. That such a God would rejoice over us is, as Paul would say, a great mystery, but it is true.

What makes marital love a true image of divine love is not a renunciation of desire; what makes love truly love is the kind of desire it expresses and the kind of response it anticipates. True eros desires a particular kind of return, a return with difference. A true exchange of love is never an exchange of identical items. As David Hart says, �A gift that is exactly reciprocated is a gift that is returned, rejected . . . a tautologous return of the same, a violence, like a blow instantly returned.�E Had Sharon given Brendan the exact ring Brendan gave her, the message would be: The engagement is off. To hope that you will receive exactly the same love you give is the crudest form of self-love. You might as well gaze longingly and affectionately into a mirror. All givers give in hope of a return, but a return with difference; every lover hopes his beloved will reciprocate his love, but the wise lover knows that the reciprocated love will be as wonderfully different as the beloved herself. And the wise lover joyfully embraces that difference, even as he joyfully embraces his beloved.

Don�t lost sight of this in your marriage. Brendan, you are called to love, and it is right for you to want Sharon to love you. But Sharon is not called to give back exactly what you give her. If you want only what you can give, you might as well stay single and live with a bunch of guys the rest of your life or march off to live by a railroad track. Sharon is a woman, and will love you as a woman, which is not, I need hardly remind you, the way you love. Likewise, Sharon, you are pledging today to give yourself in love to Brendan, and you do that hoping and wanting him to give himself to you. But do not expect him to give back exactly what you have given him, for he will love you as a man, and not just a man; he will love you as only Brendan can. Once again, this means you are both called to express true eros. �True eroticism�Eis, Lewis says, a delighted preoccupation with each other; and, �true eroticism�Eis a delighted preoccupation with the otherness of each other.

And in this too, you are displaying the love of God, the eternal love of the Father, Son, and Spirit. For the Father pours out His love on the Son and Spirit, and He desires the Son and Spirit to love Him in return. And they do, but to the Father�s joyous paternal love the Son returns something surprising and fresh; the Son returns filial love. To the love of the Father and Son, the Spirit returns the love that only the Spirit can give. To the melody of the Father�s song, the Son and Spirit respond not by repeating the melody, but with harmonious counter-themes. Brendan and Sharon, as you love and as you hope to receive love from each other, as you give and reciprocate with delighted surprise in your differences, you will be imitating the love of God, the eternal round of love that is both eros and agape, the eternal polyphony of love that is yet is beyond both.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, July 03, 2004 at 10:52 PM

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