‘Til Death Makes Us One
Jen and I are a little over a week away from celebrating thirteen years of marriage, and if the season wasn’t incentive enough to reflect on a year together with God, our anniversary being a week before Christmas really drives it home. Thirteen years of marriage is kind of insane for me to fathom, especially considering our first date was in 2003.
None of our time together these decades (!) has made us experts, but it has given us the heavy gift of some helpful perspective. So lately, as we’ve prayed with and for our married friends, celebrating new unions and interceding for struggling ones, I’ve found myself thinking about the words of our wedding ceremonies and marital counseling in the church.
For the last few years I’ve started to omit the words “‘Til death do us part” from the wedding ceremonies I officiate. The phrase is so well known and widely used that it feels almost unavoidable in our celebrations of new union, but I think when we sit with it for a bit, it’s impossible to miss how it can rob Christian marriage of its sanctifying glory and eschatological hope.
Ask any happy, faithful couple decades into life together, and they’ll tell you the honest truth. Love and death are not strangers. In fact, relationships grow on how willing we are to protect the former by facing the latter. It’s for this reason that marriage is filled with a million little deaths. Each is necessary for new life to emerge. Married couples experience the death of expectations. Of selfishness. Of separateness.
I’m often surprised by how much Ephesians 5 still pops up in wedding ceremonies. Not because it isn’t helpful or hopeful, but because it is so deeply countercultural. Death is at the heart of the new life of marriage. Women are called to submit (a modern epithet, if there ever was one), which is its own kind of death, and men, specifically, are called to love as Christ loved the Church. This kind of love is sacrificial and aimed toward resurrection.
It is the small deaths that prepare us for the final one, the daily cross carrying that guides us to new life in Christ. In committing to one another in the often painful work of sanctification a married couple has the opportunity to testify in a unique way to the hope of the Kingdom, their holy partnership a foretaste of coming joy that will transcend even the best marriage at the height of its happiness. I like how Alexander Schmemann puts it in For the Life of the World:
In a Christian marriage, in fact, three are married; and the united loyalty of the two toward the third, who is God, keeps the two in an active unity with each other as well as with God. It is the presence of God which is the death of marriage as something only ‘natural.’ It is the cross of Christ that brings the self-sufficiency of nature to its end. But ‘by the cross joy (and not ‘happiness!’) entered the whole world. Its presence is thus the real joy of marriage. It is the joyful certitude that the marriage vow, in the perspective of the eternal Kingdom, is not taken ‘until death parts,’ but until death unites us completely.
Marriage predates the Church, as many customs do. Every culture has some ceremony or practice to commemorate a loving partnership. But what separates Christian marriage must be this: an acceptance of death - daily, final - as the passage to resurrection life. At the start of the journey, we have to help Christian couples grasp the significance of the Cross, not merely as a helpful tool for practical marital solutions, but as the very framework everything they do together will hang upon or fall apart from. If we can do that, the joy of eternal unity in the Spirit will fill homes with resilient laughter and peace that defies understanding.
I wish I had better grasped this centrality of the cross in Christian marriage in the early days, but I’m grateful now to still be able to cling to it in my weakness and failures, and to learn again and again that the mercies of the Lord are new and near to us, year after year after year. If I could go back to 2009 (!), that’s what I’d tell my younger self, and that’s what I’ll tell people now. Look at the cross and see the eternal love of God. His mercies are new every morning. That means a marriage can be too.
- Caleb Saenz
