The question that remains with me after all these years of debate about marriage has still not been resolved, even after this year’s General Synod.
I’ve read theological opinions about marriage. I’ve debated about marriage. I’ve gone on the radio to talk about marriage. I’ve spent my time wishin’, and hoping and praying that we would change our discipline on marriage.
And still I feel as though the big question remains unresolved. Unconsidered even.
The question is this…
Should, on the basis of the biblical evidence, heterosexuals be allowed to get married at all.
Should one man and one woman be allowed to stand before God in a holy place and pledge their troth to one another in the company of their friends.
Should the church pronounce a blessing upon such couples?
And I have to say that on the basis of reading the bible, it seems very far from certain that they should.
In these weeks as we go through the book of Genesis reading these glorious stories of humanity we find so much talk about marriage.
But, I fear, not all of it is good.
And today’s story is no exception.
Jacob offers to work 7 years labour for Laban in exchange for the younger daughter whom he clearly has eyes for.
Jacob whom we recently met pulling the wool over his brother Esau’s eyes then has a trick served on him by Laban who pulls the veil over the wrong daughter’s eyes and palms Jacob off with the elder daughter instead.
No bother, Jacob says, and here I think the story does tend towards the slightly unbelievable, I’ll take the pair and agrees to Rachel becoming his wife too in exchange for another seven years work.
Two wives for fourteen years hard labour.
All I’m saying is that I’ve been working for you as a congregation for 11 years and so far you’ve not even supplied me with one wife.
I must remember to put it on the Vestry agenda.
Those of you who have heard me preach on this text before will know that it is one of my fabourites. And Leah in particular is one of my favourite characters in the bible. Not because of her valour or her spirituality but because we know almost nothing about her except knowing something about her eyes.
Our translation describes her as having lovely eyes. Some compensation for not possessing the preferred delights of her sister maybe. But the translation is but that – a mere translation. The Hebrew word is soft.
Soft eyes. That’s what Leah has and you can translate it just as accurately by thinking of Leah having eyes that were made soft by weeping.
Perhaps her eyes were softened because she wasn’t the preferred one. Jacob clearly fancied her sister more than he fancied her.
That one word, capable of being translated two different ways – as meaning lovely or meaning tearful is a reminder that the bible as we hear it is an inherently ambiguous book. Don’t forget that the Hebrew texts we have come to us without all the vowels and the Greek texts we have come to us with no spaces, capital letters or definitive versions.
When we are asking what the bible tells us about marriage or anything else, the best we are going to get is a broad brush artwork.
Whilst we are on the topic of marriage, it is worth saying again that the Scottish Episcopal Church did something in relation to marriage which deserved worldwide headlines, not recently but in 2007. We didn’t get the headlines then but we did something that will resonate through the church forever because it recognises things about the very nature of God which we have come to behold and which are worth sharing with others.
In 2007 we agreed a marriage liturgy which presumed that the two people getting married were equals. There was no giving away of a bride by her father to a husband. There was no unequal set of promises. There was just a couple meeting as equals before the Lord and their friends.
We decided that heterosexual people could get married but we would treat them as equals for equals they are.
And funnily enough we ended up with a liturgy for doing so which is appropriate for our most recent decisions in this area too.
How very far we have come from the days of Laban and Jacob and Leah and Rachel.
The arrangements we heard in scripture this morning were clear. It was a same-sex agreement – the father dealing with the husband and doing deals in which the goods exchanged are his own daughters – women who are presumed to have no say in the matter.
But don’t get too caught up in the idea that this is all about wicked men trading in women. The women get caught up in the patriarchal presumptions of the piece too, going on to vie with one another to produce children for Jacob the paterfamilias, even offering their own handmaid-slaves to bear him babies when they couldn’t do so. They are implicated in some very questionable behaviour to our eyes too.
Our new wedding service was one of the first to presume that two people getting married are fundamentally equal.
That should have got us the headlines much more than anything we have done recently as a church. It was a much more profound change and break from tradition.
In it we were saying that some of the ways of thinking about relationships between people have changed fundamentally from the ways people thought in biblical times.
Does it matter?
You bet it matters.
Our recent decisions wouldn’t have been made without our decisions some years ago.
And it matters because there is this notion that marriage teaches us about the nature of God, about the way God loves the church and the way things are amongst human beings.
Patriarchy is not dead. It rears its ugly head in new ways all the time. In the church at the moment it is being taught as a virtue by those who are seizing on the word Complementarity to describe the relationship between men and women in marriage. (As though a same-sex couple is incapable of offering complimentary gifts to one another).
Our new way of understanding marriage teaches us about God. Teaches us that God is interested in equality in equity and in right relationships between people on earth.
If we think of it informing what we know about the relationship between Christ and the church, it teaches that Christ is beguiled by humanity and the church is entranced by the love of God in Jesus.
Christ and the church are holy lovers, not an unequal relationship where one party dominates and subjugates the other.
For in all these things we are more than mere conquerors through the one who loves us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor patriarchy, nor discrimination, nor angels, nor archbishops, nor church arguments present or church arguments to come, nor powers of unfairness, nor heights, nor depths, nor twitter, nor Complementarity nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
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