Recently, I officiated a wedding in downtown Kansas City that happened to be in the same place my wife, Taylor, and I were married. Being in that place again felt like a deja vu moment for me. I wondered, “Uh, wait. Aren’t I supposed to be one of the people getting married? Where are all my family and friends?”
At the same time, it was a gift and a privilege to be back in the exact spot where, nine months ago, Taylor and I said our vows. The experience of officiating a wedding in that special place sparked a time of reflection on love and marriage.
On Love
While most people no longer believe in an arranged marriage, these types of marriages were once very common only a generation ago. Today, people get married on the basis of the “love” shared between them. What is love? Throughout human history, many have sought to define and describe love. Is it just a feeling? An emotion? Some type of metaphysical experience? At risk of being reductionistic, philosophers have actually identified two types of love: first love and second love.
First love is passionate love. One author (David Brooks) has described it as the yearning heart. First love humbles us and reminds us we are not in control of ourselves. This love plows open the hard crust of our hearts and exposes soft flesh below. With first love, we are more likely to suffer both deep pain, and to experience deep joy. First love de-centers us; it causes us to realize our riches are not in ourselves, they are found in another person.
But philosophers also say there is another type of love called second love. Second love is the disciplining of that first, passionate love, into long-term commitment over time. Ultimately, second love is the fusion of two people into one. Here’s what one author beautifully and honestly wrote about this second love:
“This kind of love is private and it is particular. Its object is the specificity of this man and that woman, the distinctiveness of this spirit and that flesh. This love prefers deep to wide, and here to there, the grasp to the reach. When the day is done, and the lights are out, there is only this other heart, this other mind, this other face, to assist in repelling one’s demons or in greeting one’s angels. It does not matter who the president is. When one consents to marry, one consents to be truly known, which is an ominous prospect. And so one bets on love to correct for the ordinariness of the impression and to call forth the forgiveness that is invariably required by an accurate perception of one’s self. Marriages are exposures. We may be heroes to our spouses but we may not be idols.”
The image we are supposed to get of second love is the slow process of two trees becoming one tree with one root system. Marriage starts the movement from first love to second love, and it does that because it’s a covenant.
On Covenant
Generally speaking, most people believe that marriage is held together by the thing that got those people to the altar: their love for one another. But, biblically, that’s not quite it. In fact, marriage in the Bible is far more than love shared between two people somehow codified in a contract. The biblical idea of marriage is that it is a covenant.
Leading up to the altar, a relationship might primarily be held together by a couple’s love for one another. But this is where the word covenant enters. If marriage is indeed a covenant, then the couple’s love will not be the tethering point of the marriage. In other words, marriage being a covenant necessarily means that the relationship takes a different form.
At a wedding ceremony, there is a moment where the couple joins hands, exchanges vows, and the pastor declares over them, quoting Genesis, “What God has joined together, let no man separate.” At that moment – a shift happens. Side note: study the philosophy of language for more on how just saying or pronouncing words changes physical reality and relationships. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer sums it up by saying, at that pronouncement, at that moment, God is adding his yes to the couple’s yes to each other… and this changes everything.
The only reason Bonhoeffer says this is because he understands marriage is actually a covenant. And the marriage covenant isn’t simply a contract between two people in love, the marriage covenant is also made with God. Because marriage is a covenant made with God, marriage does not have the couple’s love for each other as its foundation… God gives a better, more solid love as its foundation: His own love.
Here’s the definition of love in Scripture: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us…”
What does that mean for marriage? It means this: just as Jesus laid his life down for the world that he loved, each person in a couple is to lay down their life for the spouse they love. Just as Jesus sacrificed his good for the world he loved, couples are to sacrifice their good for the person they love. And just as Jesus forgives and remains faithful to those he loves, couples are to forgive and to remain faithful to the person they love.
In the marriage covenant, God puts himself as the foundation, and He gives us His son as our example.
On My Experience
The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar gets at something interesting in his theological framework on love. Von Balthasar suggests that people who do not experience the love of God in Jesus Christ cannot also fully experience human love. The poet Christian Wiman translates von Balthasar this way, “God obstructs man, pursues man, haunts him with ‘a love that runs after him, pulls him out of the pit, casts aside his chains and places him in the freedom of divine and now even human love.’”
Wiman does not agree with von Balthasar, but I think I do. Doesn’t the experience of covenant love point someone to divine love, the love of God in Jesus Christ? Isn’t it possible for human love to lead to an encounter with divine love, which then, in turn, opens the door to a deeper version of human love? Might the experience of sacrificing one’s good for the other point you to the God who loves that same way? I think so, because I’ve experienced it.
Sometimes folks tentatively ask Taylor and me how our first year of marriage is going. I understand the hesitation around the question, and I’m grateful for their sensitivity to understand year one could possibly be very difficult. When asked that question, Taylor and I have found ourselves responding, “Our marriage has been the easiest part of this last year.”
This may seem too good to be true to you, but we don’t answer in this way because everything inside our marriage has been smooth sailing or because everything outside our marriage has been difficult. At both extremes, this is not the case. Our reason is that what we have each encountered is a deeper love, a deeper joy, and a deeper peace. We’ve encountered a strong tether. A sturdy foundation. A covenantal love. A love that only happens when God adds his yes to a couple’s yes to each other.
We both believed in Jesus heading into our marriage, and we had both experienced his love for us, but our marriage has been an opening into an even deeper love. Perhaps we’ve experienced the beginnings of what von Balthasar suggests: human love leading to the experience of divine love, which in turn only deepens and enriches human love. If that’s true, then it’s why there is rich pleasure in giving oneself for the other’s good, why there is deep joy to be found in regularly sacrificing for each other, and why there is real peace in being forgiven and offering forgiveness. Covenantal love is a kind of love that is a doorway that opens slowly over time, and in greater and greater ways, into a deeper experience of God’s love in Jesus.
