You are all here in response to a wedding invitation . . . well, I trust that you are all here in response to a wedding invitation.
Now one of the striking things about wedding invitations, whether in the Bible or in our own experience, is that they are invariably received as good news. Times of peace in Scripture are described as times when people marry and are given in marriage, and invitations to such events are thought of as glad interruptions of general times of plenty and peace. But how this can be possible is quite interesting.
We are familiar with the word gospel, but this is our English rendering of a Greek word that literally means good news. This what the etymology of our English word is also—the word gospel comes from godspel. The god means good, and the spel refers to news or a story. So godspel refers to a good story.
Good stories frequently end with a wedding, and this good story of Scripture is no different. It is a story where a wedding invitation plays a key role in it. Jesus describes the advance of His kingdom in terms of a wedding banquet to which all kinds of people are invited (Matt. 22:2), and in the book of Revelation the climax of the whole story is a wedding (Rev. 19:7). The marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready. But this is curious. How is it possible for a wedding to be located there?
Human history can be thought of as ordinary time. The last day, the Day of Judgment, is an extraordinary time—by definition. When the islands flee from their places, and the skies are torn in two, and every man shall give an account of himself before the throne of Almighty God, we are talking about a time of crisis. How could a time of universal consternation be a wedding banquet?
Because of the reality of sin, and its pervasiveness among us, God did it by making it possible for us to enjoy a day like today. The most obvious characteristic of the Day of Judgment is the judgment. We are talking about God settling all accounts, putting every injustice right, and a moment of honesty will reveal that there are so many of them. That means we are talking about wrath and damnation as fundamentally characteristic of the end of history.
What God did was this. He took that essential element of wrath from the end of history, from the extraordinary time, and placed it in the very middle of history, in ordinary time. He did this by pouring out the fullness of His wrath at human iniquity in the cross of Jesus Christ. God’s wrath poured out was thereby made the cornerstone of ordinary time, which we mark with every anno Domini. Whenever we declare the gospel, we are declaring this.
But note what this does. By putting God’s wrath in the middle of history, satisfying it on the body of Jesus nailed to a tree, it transforms the end of history from a crisis of unimaginable proportions into the greatest wedding banquet that could ever be. The wrath that properly belonged to that day will be, by that time, then part of an ancient and glorious past. Only God could say of the future end of history that it used to be this way, but now, because of something that happened outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, it is designed to be that way no longer.
That is why this wedding is also a wedding invitation. Every Christian wedding is a wedding invitation. If you look at the bottom of the card, you will see that you are being asked to RSVP this very evening, in the name of Jesus. Address all responses to God the Father.
And so we preach the gospel to every creature, inviting them to build their ordinary time on the extraordinary cornerstone of God’s wrath satisfied. That is what we are doing here, right now. This Christian wedding rests upon the foundational reality of Christ’s sacrifice. Because our sins are forgiven through Christ, we are given the privilege of enacting small replicas of this glorious good news every time we gather like this. Every Christian wedding is therefore a testimony to what the end of history for believers will actually be like. And so every Christian testimony is a wedding invitation.
Jon, the center of this gospel that I have been talking about is the Lord’s willing surrender of Himself to the will of His Father, for the sake of His bride. Christ gave Himself away, gave His body to be broken, gave His blood to be shed, because His bride was more important to Him than avoiding the cup that His Father had filled for Him to drink. He did this, in one sense, so that none of His followers would have to experience it themselves. He also did it, in another sense, so that all His followers, once we were forgiven, would be liberated from the curse of the law so that we would be able to imitate Him. And of course, if we imitate Him, then we will experience what He experienced. It will not be a cursed experience, however, but rather filled with blessing. Every husband is called to imitate Him precisely in this. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it. This is a world filled with dangers and threats, and you are committing yourself today to place yourself between your wife and every last one of them. You are to be the shield. The promised blessing is that you will have a life of joy and gladness with Jamie, a life well worth shielding.
Jamie, your role in the imitation of this glorious gospel of Christ is that of responding to Jon’s invitation. Jon’s task is to imitate the bloody edge of the gospel, and your task is to imitate the glory that always comes from that. This is godspel, a good story, a death and resurrection story. Jon enacts the death; you are the resurrection. He enacts the sacrifice, you keep it from being a pointless sacrifice. He lays down his life in humility, and you are to be what such humility receives whenever it is exalted and lifted up. A godly wife, Scripture says, is the crown of her husband. The woman is the glory of the man. You are to be willing to be the life that Jon is being drawn into. Now of course you both surrender to Christ, you both walk with Him, you both die and rise. But in your peculiar roles as husband and wife, he is to play the role of Christ and you the role of the Church. He is like the Lord facing the cross, and you are the joy that is set before him.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.