An Advent Sermon

Fr Paul Plumpton | December 2003

Ever since the prophet Hosea was ordered by the Lord to take a harlot to wife, as a prophetic sign of God's faithful love for faithless Israel, the marriage relationship and the marriage bond have featured large in scripture as the symbol and sign of the covenant relationship between God and his people. The relationship between the sign and the thing signified has been reciprocal: on the one hand the human and experienced reality of marriage has made the divine-human relationship powerfully real for God's people, and on the other hand the very fact that the earthly everyday reality of marriage could carry such a transcendent meaning beyond itself has enhanced the status and importance of marriage for those who see it in such terms.

We know that prophets after Hosea frequently employ the marriage imagery and in later Judaism the Bridegroom becomes a title for the human figure of the promised Messiah. This is right and fitting, for in the end, the incarnation of God as a male human being is demanded by the inherent dynamic of the marriage imagery. Because marriage is a physical bodily fact, if God is to be truly the Bridegroom then he must have a bodily relationship with those he comes to save and to unite with himself. Only so can he say, as the new Adam of his Bride the Church, that she is 'flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone'. Only so can he win, through sacrifice, the Church which is his Body and his Bride 'and the two shall become one body'. Only so can he say in the marriage-feast of the Eucharist, 'This is my body, which is 'for you', just as the earthly bridegroom says in the marriage service, 'with my body I thee worship'.

From the moment Jesus calls himself the Bridegroom, the marriage imagery runs through the Gospels and beyond, and not least in an Advent context. We need only think of the parable of the marriage feast of the king's son, which is an image of the messianic banquet of heaven, or of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, where the bridegroom's coming takes place at the unexpected hour of midnight.

We know that in this imagery the roles of bridegroom and bride are neither reversible nor interchangeable, and we do not look for their abolition but their fulfillment. But there are no new heresies, and second-century gnostics believed that the kingdom of God would come only when male and female were abolished; as for example in the heretical Gospel of the Egyptians, where Jesus tells the disciples that they will go into the kingdom 'when...you make the man with the woman a single one, in order that the man is not man and the woman is not woman'. Does it sound ominously familiar? So many of the things we oppose in the liberal agenda - women priests, the divorce culture, same-sex unions - are set to undermine and negate this fundamental marriage image which lies at the heart of the covenant relationship, of scripture, of revelation and of the incarnation itself.

But in this Advent season, when the marriage imagery adorns so many of our hymns, we do not look forward to the abolition of gender but to its glorious vindication and fulfillment in its distinctiveness and complementarity. 'And I saw the heavenly city, and the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, all dressed as a bride for her husband.' Happy are those who are called to the marriage feast of the Lamb. As we look forward to that midnight hour that will signify the end of this earthly day and the beginning of that Day of God which has no end, we say with eager longing, 'See, the Bridegroom is coming. Let us go out to meet him.' 'And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come.' Maranatha! Amen: come, Lord Jesus.