Married to Christ

“My beloved is mine, and I am his.” – Song of Solomon 2:16

“Late it was that I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new, late I loved you!” – St. Augustine

Before we got married, Dave was a self-declared “bachelor till the rapture.” He (and I) were happily single: I because I was too absorbed in my studies, he because he recognized the greater freedom he had as a single to follow Jesus, which at the time meant traveling on missions trips, exploring different careers, caring for his parents, and helping plant a church. But all that changed when we met, and because of the constraints of medical training, we had to consider each other in making major life decisions far earlier than perhaps we naturally would have. Dave transferred medical schools so we could live in the same city; I gave up a fellowship so we could spend more time together.

The fact is, people who are married have to give consideration to their spouse all the time: they simply don’t have the control over their time, money, and decisions that single people do. The Bible says that marriage is an analogy of our relationship with Christ, our bridegroom (John 3:29)—yet, spiritually speaking, many of us live as if we were single rather than married. Pastor Iain Duguid puts it this way: “If you are married to Christ, is that relationship the center of your thinking? Do you find yourself dreaming about him, lost in amazement at how wonderful Christ is, how incredible it is that he should love you, and longing for more of his presence? Do you constantly wear out your friends and relations with your endless chatter about how wonderful your Beloved is? If you are anything like me, the answer most of the time is ‘No.’ I have to admit to living most of the time as a functional single, spiritually speaking. Every now and then I bump into Christ, as it were, and am reminded that we are married… Much of the time I am so absorbed with my own earthly desires and projects that I admit to my shame that he never even crosses my mind.”

Do we remember we are married to Christ, or do we function like spiritual singles? Do we make all of our decisions with him in mind? More than that, do we dream about and long for him the way the bride does in Song of Solomon? St. Augustine writes: “You called, you cried out, you shattered my deafness: you flashed, you shone, you scattered my blindness: you breathed perfume, and I drew in my breath and I pant for you: I tasted and I am hungry and thirsty: you touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

Being Careful With Our Loves

“Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God.” – Joshua 23:11

“My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.” – Augustine, Confessions

In this chapter, Joshua speaks his last words to the leaders of Israel: he looks back and he looks forward, much as we do this time of year. Not one word has failed of all the good promises God made to us, he says of the past. And do you want to know the single most important factor in determining whether your future will be good or bad? How careful you are to love God.

This verse has six different words in the Hebrew: m’od shamar shamar nephesh ahab Yehovah Elohim. Shamar means to keep watch or guard, and is repeated twice for emphasis. What do we guard? Our nephesh, our souls, our whole selves, a word which doesn’t explicitly make it into the ESV translation. Ahab is a comprehensive word for love, though it literally means “to desire, breathe after,” getting at a sense of longing, delight, and affection. Yehovah elohim are personal and universal names for God. 

But the word that strikes me most is m’od. It is an intensifier which means “exceedingly, diligently” and comes from a root word that refers to a wooden poker, the kind used to rake embers and stir a fire. What an interesting word picture: that there is, within my soul, the embers of love. The need to desire after something. As James K. A. Smith writes, “To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.” And that desire is powerful, like a conflagration that grows easily out of control, that drives and consumes us: because we are what we love; we become what we worship. We are defined not by what we know, but by what we desire. It is what we desire that drives how we live.

The person who realizes this, who realizes the importance and power of his or her desires, is the one who holds the fire poker, the one who tends the embers. Because love is not, as popular culture likes to think, something we are seized by, or fall into, or stumble upon. It is a choice, but I think this picture goes beyond choice: it introduces a sense of diligence and habit. The point of the fire poker is to adjust the wood so that the flow of oxygen, availability of fuel, and proximity of nearby embers either make the fire grow or force it to die out. It takes constant attention and some amount of practice. The same is true of our desires: they grow, or die out, depending on the kind of attention and practice we give them. Love as it is lived out in our lives is, in this sense, not so much a conscious choice as a baseline orientation. And we reorient our desires not by acquiring information, but through practices that inform the habits of how and what we love, through rituals, routines, rhythms, done over and over again.

Learning to love God takes practice. It takes understanding the pyrotechnics of the soul, the workings of desire. It takes choosing to suffocate unhealthy appetites or idolatries in our lives by ruthlessly cutting off whatever habits tend to feed them. It takes repetitive, daily exposure to God in his Word. It takes various spiritual practices that nurse our loves, and there are many very good ones, many worth exploring until we find a good rule of life for the season we are in. This new year, this new decade, what are the loves that are being lived out in your life? What habits do you have in place to train your dispositions, to form, teach and affect your desires?

ABC's Of The Word

“And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature.” – Luke 8:14

One of my most memorable rotations in medical school was working on the surgical trauma team in the emergency room of Massachusetts General Hospital (or “Man’s Greatest Hospital,” as we liked to call it). As a third-year medical student and the lowest on the totem pole, my job was to carry around a right-handed glove and a packet of lubricant and basically stay out of the way until the team did a log-roll, at which time I would check for rectal tone. I loved it, though: the pace, the variety and intensity of the cases we handled. No matter what came in the door, the first thing we checked was always the same: the ABC’s, or airway, breathing, and circulation, in that order. Is the airway blocked? Are there spontaneous respirations? A regular rate and rhythm? The most basic thing to life is oxygen getting to tissue cells: hypoxia can lead to irreversible damage in neurological cells within minutes.

The word of God, Jesus says, is not information we download of a Sunday morning. It isn’t an injection we take during a few devotional moments. It is life that grows, and to grow, it needs continual air and circulation. It is capable of being choked, its purpose in us aborted. The Greek word for “mature” is the same used of pregnant women. What suffocates the life of the word within us? Jesus identifies three things: cares, riches, and pleasures.

The word for “care” here, merimna, comes from a root meaning “to separate into parts” or “to cut into pieces”: this is an anxious kind of care, that comes from feeling drawn in different directions. Seems like this describes the baseline temperature of life here, where we’re expected to be simultaneously excellent in all areas of life. I love bullet journaling, but the fact that I need one to keep track of all the threads in my life says something, surely. The word for “riches,” ploutos, comes from a root meaning “filled,” referring to not merely possessions, but an abundance of them. The word for “pleasures,” hedone, means not merely pleasure but the insatiable desire for it; not merely concupiscence, but any lust that drives us to quarrels and distorts our prayers (James 4:1, 3).

These are thorns. Weeds are not plants that are bad in and of themselves: they are simply growing in the wrong place or to the wrong degree. They have become, as Augustine put it, disordered loves. But weeds do tend to be plants that proliferate easily and propagate effortlessly when unchecked. I love the mint in our plant beds, but I keep it in a pot within the earth because otherwise it would take over the entire space. And so, cares, riches and pleasures are not bad things, but they tend to take over easily. They can strangle all the life out of the word planted in us.

How do we weed out the garden of our souls? There is a lot to be said for learning to curb our appetites, our possessions, our anxious cares, and many times, I’ve regretted not doing that earlier or more habitually in my life. But ultimately, I think we have to love the plant that is growing. We have to care about its life and desire its fruit so much that we are always checking its ABC’s. Reordering loves is a matter of being pierced with love for Jesus, who wore a crown of thorns so that we could cast all our merimna on him (1 Peter 5:7). As Augustine wrote: “The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.”

Bridegroom Of Blood

“At a lodging place on the way the Lord met him and sought to put him to death. Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it and said, ‘Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!’ So he let him alone. It was then that she said, ‘A bridegroom of blood,’ because of the circumcision.” – Exodus 4:24-26

Was anyone else completely puzzled by these three verses inserted near the end of Exodus 4? The chapter seems to make more sense without them: God commissions Moses to leave Midian, Aaron meets him to help. But in between—God tries to kill Moses? What is going on?

“This episode,” writes Jeffrey Tigay, “… is extraordinarily puzzling because the motive for God’s attack is unclear, the pronouns are equivocal, and Zipporah’s remarks are enigmatic.” Indeed. Take the pronouns: it’s unclear who is being referred to in the first sentence (most think Moses, others suggest Pharaoh’s firstborn from the preceding verse), which son is referred to in the second sentence (Moses had more than one son by that point, including Gershom, his firstborn), or even whose feet it is (in Hebrew Moses is not identified; it simply says “his”). No one agrees on what Zipporah’s strange comment means; some feel it expresses her disgust or revulsion, others that is a ceremonial utterance related to Midianite rites (I find the KJV translation humorous: “a bloody husband thou art”). No one agrees on what the deadly attack was; some feel it was a theophany of some kind, or an angel, others an incapacitating illness. While most feel God’s intent here was to enforce the law of circumcision that Moses had neglected in his own family prior to his stepping out in leadership, others read it in allegory, as a spiritual landmark along the journey from desert to pagan city. 

The temptation with obscure sections of Biblical text is to either skim over them entirely, or get so caught up in them we lose the big picture. But, granted that we have a good foundation in the vast majority of clearer passages, the more confusing ones can invite us to dig deeper, to have greater humility and patience in our approach to the Word. 

St. Augustine writes about Biblical interpretation in On Christian Doctrine: “Some of the expressions are so obscure as to shroud the meaning in the thickest darkness. And I do not doubt that all this was divinely arranged for the purpose of subduing pride by toil, and of preventing a feeling of satiety in the intellect, which generally holds in small esteem what is discovered without difficulty… Accordingly the Holy Spirit has, with admirable wisdom and care for our welfare, so arranged the Holy Scriptures as by the plainer passages to satisfy our hunger, and by the more obscure to stimulate our appetite.”

Well, these verses do stimulate my intellectual appetite: because they were included here for a reason, whether or not I can make one out. One thing I find fascinating: the word for “touched” here, Hebrew naga, is next used in Exodus 12:22: “Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch [naga] the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin.” Just before Moses enters Egypt, blood touches flint to thwart divine wrath. As Moses exits Egypt, blood touches hyssop and lintel, again to escape death. The blood touching flint came from a son; the blood touching hyssop came from a lamb, but points to a Son. The exodus is framed with the touch of blood and the threat of death to say: your deliverance from slavery only happens this way. One day it will come from the true Bridegroom of blood. Is that not who Jesus is to us? I think of the first time John sees Jesus in heaven: “a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain” (Revelation 4:6). In other words, bloody. And all the creatures and elders sang, “and by your blood you ransomed people for God.” Our Bridegroom of blood.