A few minutes spent watching the evening news should be sufficient to establish—to the satisfaction of all faithful Christians—that we live in sexually confused and troubled times. From issues like the demand for homosexual marriages to women in combat, from women in combat to the demand that women be ordained to the Christian ministry, and from that demand for ordination to a feminist insistence that authority and submission in marriage be a strict 50/50 proposition, it is very plain that we live in muddled times. I bring this up at a wedding because as Christians it is in our marriages that we have a golden opportunity to bring clarity to a culture that desperately needs it.
Our society has gotten into this muddled state because the Church has allowed herself to drift away from God’s revelation of Himself to us in creation, and His more pointed and specific revelation of Himself to us in Scripture. As we seek to order our marriages in such a way as to honor Him, we must return to the fundamentals of the gospel.
When God reveals Himself to us, He does so by giving Himself to us. And when He gives Himself to us, we are not in a position to pick and choose what part of Him we will receive. Because God is triune, and because this triune God is the one who spoke the heavens and earth into existence, the way He actually is can be found embedded in everything. We cannot parcel it out. This is particularly evident in man and woman together, the image bearers of His glory.
In the created order, and in the gospel which is engaged in restoring that created order, there is no tension between hierarchy and equality. But because of sin, rebellious men and women have come to think that their party, their faction, has the right to pick one of these and reject the other. Those who pick hierarchy and reject equality create hellish societies, towns, families, and marriages. Everything is thought of in terms of power and dominance, and the one at the top of the hierarchy wins. Those who pick equality and reject hierarchy create envious and carping societies, characterized by frustration, complaints, confusion, and many other related discontents.
Within the nature of God, however, we have three eternal persons, each characterized by self-sacrifice, deference and obedience, and selflessness. Each person of the Godhead is an ultimate person, a self, and yet one of the characteristics of these three ultimate selves is the God-like attribute of selflessness. That is what a self is really like. Each gives to the other, each sacrifices for the other, each indwells the other, each defers to the other, and each loves the other. All three are equal, and yet all three bestow (in the goodness of eternal agape love) all the equality they have on the other two. All give completely, and not one of these persons lacks anything.
The way this looks in our world can be seen in how a God who is like this set about our salvation. St. Paul tells us in Philippians that Jesus did not consider His equality with God something to be grasped, but rather He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant. This is crucial for a right understanding of the gospel. Jesus, the Son of God, was fully equal to the Father and to the Spirit. In the words of the creed, He was very God and very man. The fact that He had become man did not diminish or alter the glory of His divine nature. And yet, He is the one who went to the cross, suffering the indignity of it, ending His life with a cry of despair that was full of faith, and overflowing with it. This is our gospel. This is what we respond to when we cry out to God in repentance.
But notice that for Christians, the submission that Christ rendered to His Father when He submitted to Him in the Garden of Gethsemane (“not my will, but thine”) was not a submission that annihilated His equality with God. Rather, it was a submission that highlighted and glorified His equality with God. Hierarchy and equality are bound up eternally in the very nature of God, and exhibited in the very nature of the gospel.
Now stated as an abstract proposition to the unbelieving world, this is all so much nonsense. “Either equality or hierarchy—you Christians need to choose between an authoritarian view of the world or a democratic view of the world.” No, we do not need to choose, and furthermore, we must not choose. Even though this view is nonsense to them when reduced to letters on a page, it is quite a different thing when a man and woman come together with this understanding, and live next door to them, exhibiting gospel freedom in everything they do. They exude the aroma of headship and authority—both of them. They radiate the glory of submission and sacrifice—both of them. He exhibits these things in distinctively masculine ways, and she does so in distinctively feminine ways. He is the head, and she is not, but the result of this is glorious equality, not a truncated and bitter “equality.” In Christ there is neither male nor female, but the result of this is a glad rejoicing in authority, not a grabbing after personal privilege, not a lust for power.
The husband and wife are not interchangeable. Their love is the same love but their roles are not at all the same. He bows and she curtsies. He initiates and she responds. He offers his hand and she takes it. The way the world actually is reflects the fixed landmarks of God—we have no authority to remove them, and, ultimately, no ability to move them at all. For those who are exhausting themselves by their futile efforts to make the universe a different kind of place than it actually is, we as Christians are called to live out the good news of the gospel in front of them.
Kent, in just a few moments you will be making a vow, taking an oath. As a Christian, you have already taken this same oath in a general sense—every Christian is called to be like Jesus, every disciple is summoned to imitate Him throughout the course of life. But you are about to take on the responsibility of laying down your life for a specific person. You have come here as an individual man, and you have come here to die. The solitary and individual responsibilities that have been yours are about to be crucified. But what God puts to death, He always raises, and He always raises it in greater glory. The apostle tells us that the man who loves his wife loves himself. When Christ summons you to die in this way, He is not asking you to do anything that He has not done. Moreover, when He did it, it was for the sake of the joy that was set before Him. Imitate His sacrifice and love, and imitate His motives—imitate His desire for greater joy and pursue it like a Christian man.
Alyssa, recall what I said about how each person of the Trinity is like this. It is not true that only Jesus sacrificed while the other two persons of the Trinity watched. Kent has taken the initiative, and you are to respond to him, responding in kind. He offers himself completely, and you, gladly, offer yourself completely in return. Kent bows in sacrificial death and so you curtsey in sacrificial death. He then straightens and stands upright in resurrected life, as do you, and then the dance is joy, the joy that is set before the two of you. Follow the Lord Jesus, and follow your husband.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.