A Profound Mystery

By Sandra Ostapowich

Much of the Christianity we talk about tends to center on living in a virtuous way and believing the right things. We don’t even think about it. We just believe and do things that we’re taught because they’re true or good, or have a beneficial effect on society. Having a Christian marriage is one of the big areas that gets a laser focus from this kind of Christianity. It’s easy to do, because it’s a major theme for faithful living in both the Old and New Testaments. But for Lutherans, all of our theology and practice starts and ends with Jesus, including when we talk about marriage.

And when we talk about marriage, the starting point is generally Genesis 1-2. In Genesis 1, we get an overview of how God spoke creation into existence. In Genesis 2, God gives us a closer look of the inner workings of Day 6, when He created Man, and then Woman for man.

I always thought Moses had made a weird narrative comment when he wrote Genesis 2:24. There we are, minding our own business, reading along in Genesis 2 about how God gathered up the dust of the ground and breathed into it the breath of life, making Adam. God then takes Adam on a tour of Eden where Adam names all the animals. Next, Adam naps while God removes his side and builds Woman from it. Adam wakes, meets Woman, and they have their first date/wedding. Tra-la-la.

Then, out of nowhere, as though the narrator lowers the 4th wall and gives the audience a private aside, we get to Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

Now on some level, we know this statement can’t be about Adam and Eve. Adam didn’t have a father or mother to leave before holding fast to his wife. But we breeze right past it anyway, figuring it’s just a lesson for us, telling us why we have marriage today and what God created it to look like. We probably would’ve figured that out without an obvious moral of the story tacked onto the end. But there it is, inspired by God Himself. Good to know. Thanks, God.

Centuries later, when St. Paul writes about the way God ordered men and women to be in intimate relationships in his letter to the Church in Ephesus, he clues us into an even more important ordering of male and female that creation reflects with marriage. That relationship isn’t ordered by God’s created work. It’s a copy of the relationship between Christ and the Church!

Reading Ephesians 5:21-33 as sinners in this fallen world, it’s easy to miss this point. We assume that Paul is just talking about regular human marriages, with regular human wives and husbands. After all, he tells wives to trust their husbands like the Church trusts Christ. And he goes into great detail to tell husbands to love their wives sacrificially, like Christ loves His Bride, the Church. Our usual takeaway from this? Be like the Church if you’re a wife, and be like Christ if you’re the husband. Just follow these simple rules and you’ll have a happy, Christian marriage.

In spite of our innate desire to sin, we sinners love rules. With a handy-dandy checklist in hand, we can measure how well we’re doing. When we read the second half of Ephesians 5 like it’s a list of what husbands and wives are to do in marriage, we can mentally check off the boxes and work on our own selfimprovement. And since we’re such great sinners, we take note when our spouses fall short on their list. Even better, when we think we’re doing a bang-up job on our own checklists, we beat our chests in righteous indignation when those “other people” don’t share our virtuous values. But this would be a really short-sighted way to read this passage.

Paul doesn’t clue us in on us what he’s really getting at, with all this talk about husbands and wives, until the very end of Ephesians 5. There, he quotes Moses’ (God’s) words from Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” And we, thinking that this makes a nice conclusion to a few paragraphs laying out the rules for Christian marriage, gloss over it as another reminder of how God created marriage in Genesis 2.

But, no…that’s not it at all! Paul, just as inspired by the Holy Spirit as Moses centuries earlier, continues, saying, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.” And we still miss this giant neon billboard statement and skim over this sentence, thinking that Paul is just summarizing the earlier stuff he wrote about how wives are to be like the Church and husbands are to be like Christ in their marriages. Let me repeat it for you so it sinks in…

It (Genesis 2:24, the “random” statement from Moses, which Paul “randomly” quotes out of the blue) refers to Christ and the Church.

Is your mind blown yet? Paul calls it a “profound mystery.” That’s about the biggest understatement I can think of! Not only have the instructions for husbands and wives in this epistle actually been about Christ and the Church, but so is Genesis 2:24! The “therefore” of that verse is not actually about Adam and Eve, it’s about Christ and the Church. Marriage itself, and even the very creation of humankind as man and woman, is a picture of Christ and the Church! Profound, indeed! When it’s all about Christ—and Christ for His Church— then it not only culminates on the Last Day…but precedes creation in eternity!

Now, lest we allow ourselves to be so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good…these “rules” about marriage between regular human men and women are good for us to follow. Husbands really should love their wives, and wives really should make sure they respect their husbands. But we sell ourselves short, as we do our relationships with one another, and God’s own Word, if we fail to see Christ and the Church at the center of it all. This isn’t simply an ordering in the created world, it’s an ordering of the cosmos in the image of Christ and His Bride into which creation gives us a shadowy glimpse of something beyond our comprehension.

Seeking (and finding!) Christ at the center of it all…now that’s how you dare to be Lutheran.

Sandra Ostapowich is the conference executive and deputy executive for Higher Things. She is a member of Faith Lutheran Church in Plano, Texas and lives in nearby Denison with her 15-year-old son, Isaac.