A moratorium on marriage metaphors

From the Book of Revelation to the letters of St Paul (and even a little bit in the gospels), there are plenty of marriage metaphors, designed presumably to help us understand a relationship which might be difficult to grasp otherwise. But as a married person, I would like to say that they are almost all completely unhelpful. The metaphor does not work either as a pattern of marriage or as an illumination of some other relationship.

On the other hand, the Song of Songs is a most beautiful paean to physical love, but interpreting it in mystical terms makes me slightly queasy. Marriages are tricky things; no one outside a marriage can have any real idea of how it works, and no two are the same. But marriage as the floaty metaphor we find particularly in the New Testament and later writings by the Church Fathers often does not have the effect I imagine the writers were hoping for.

I think this is because the institution of marriage has changed enormously over the last four thousand or so years (picking a vague date in biblical terms), which is not really surprising, but does mean that the metaphor no longer works as it possibly did in the past. The biblical view of marriage is very different from what we would understand by the word nowadays, and certainly not what we might aspire to.

Old Testament marriages are easier to find than New Testament ones, but they are hardly good examples. Even when they appear to be love matches, they can be polygamous or involve extras in what we now envisage as an exclusive partnership (Abraham and Sarah… and Hagar; Jacob and Leah and Rachel … and Bilhah; Judah and Shua...and Tamar, his daughter-in-law; and we’re still only partway through Genesis). Wives bring property but also are property, with no agency of their own, just a requirement to be beautiful, rich, obedient and fertile.

We are already a long way away from the original plan where God made woman because it was not good for a man to be alone. After the Fall it took the man a long time to discover again that she could be the helper and co-heir that God intended her to be. At least the Catholic marriage vows have never included the requirement to obey.

The New Testament has married people in it, obviously, but we rarely have any information about what their marriages are like (Zechariah and Elizabeth are the best example I can think of, but the field is tiny), and for years both Peter the Apostle and indeed Jesus’ mother were said to have been widowed at an early stage on no evidence whatsoever. We know more about the family life of Martha, Mary and Lazarus than we do about anyone else, and of course there’s no marriage there. Jesus almost never mentions marriage, unless it’s specifically relevant to his interlocutor, like the woman at the well.

It is easy for us to miss quite how revolutionary Jesus’ attitude towards women was. He genuinely talks to them exactly as he does to men, he notices them (the widow with the mite, the Syro-Phoenician woman) when everybody else just walks by, he even takes over one of their jobs (washing a guest’s feet, making breakfast) without making a big deal of it. He regards them as people rather than slaves or props. He creates a level space around himself where men and women meet as equals (Mary among the listening disciples at his feet in Bethany, the woman at the well); but the Church has been trying to back-pedal on this ever since.

What does it mean when the scriptural authors use marriage as a metaphor? Usually it’s in the context of a bride bedecked for her wedding being presented to an older, richer, more powerful husband. The emphasis is on her youth, beauty and virginity (in varying order), and it’s all, quite literally, about the presentation. This seems to me to have very little to do with marriage as we know it or even aspire to it now. My idea of marriage, based on my parents, my in-laws, my own experience, and my wishes for my children, is of a partnership of equals, of co-workers – not a trophy wife awarded as a reward for valour, or a prize for success and perseverance.

The view of marriage in the Psalms describes a woman who may have power in the home, but does not leave it, and works in secret: “your wife like a fruitful vine in the heart [“recesses” in US translations – so we’re thinking alcove or cupboard?] of your home” (Psalm 127/8). Woman’s role is significant but extremely limited, far more than it is for the Ideal Wife described in the Book of Proverbs (31), where the person being celebrated is a mature wife (not a blushing bride), who works hard in all the family enterprises as at least an equal partner. She is seriously impressive, but she is not part of the usual marriage metaphor.

To return to the Song of Songs: it is a dialogue poem, which is strikingly unusual; both parties have equal voices, and the references to sisters and brothers as well as bride and groom are there to show balance and equal rank. The speakers even share some of the same lines, and both bride and groom are adorned to be beautiful for each other. But it doesn’t work as a metaphor for God and the Chosen People, because they are not on the same level.

The marriages offered to us as metaphors in Scripture always seem to be between one person (or Person) and an abstraction, or concept (the Church, the People of God, the redeemed, even, very confusingly, Our Lady). They are not between two people, which also weakens the metaphor. It reduces marriage to the wedding procession, but any married person will tell you that a marriage is infinitely more than a wedding. It is a contract – even a covenant – which has to be lived through to make it meaningful, and for the vast majority of the time the bride will not be wearing her finery. It’s appropriate to use the metaphor to illustrate something beautiful that has taken a lot of work; but the bride is much more than the monetary worth of her jewels.

Every couple has to work out their own way of being married, but the aspiration should surely be for equality of esteem, parity of value “giving way”, as St Paul says, “to each other” (Ephesians 5:21).  However, the rest of this chapter shows how the whole marriage metaphor goes off the rails. In the first sentence I quoted, Paul is addressing the assembly of the people, including slaves and women along with everyone else, and the message is for all; he immediately goes on to discuss how as the Church is subject to Christ, so the wife is subject to her husband, and the husband should love his wife as Christ loves the Church which he has had to purify, cleanse and redeem and then present to himself – and at this point I feel the whole metaphor falls over under its own weight. This is cultural baggage, not the ideal offered in Genesis, where Eve is an equal partner.

The marriage metaphor doesn’t work theologically whether your experience of marriage has been positive or negative. If positive, you will be struck by how the relationships described cannot approximate marriage because they are so unequal (Christ and the Church, God and the soul, God and Mary as Queen of Heaven, whoever is meant to be getting married at the Lamb’s wedding banquet). If negative, the whole idea of a performative unequal wedding will probably upset you, and is not helpful.

The best sort of marriage relationship in Christian terms and in these modern days is surely one based on deep friendship (that’s in the Song of Songs too). Christ can’t be “friends” with the Church, the Church is not an equal partner in God’s plan, it’s a human construct with many flaws, and as we know semper reformanda, though we’re not terribly good at doing it. How can nuns be “brides of Christ”, when he is God, the second Person of the Trinity; or a priest be wedded to his congregation, as remarked in a recent Tablet report?

A wedding has to have some balance between the two signatories of the contract, otherwise the relationship shades into something far darker. Complementarity does not work unless authority is shared. Surely the idea of nuns being the brides of Christ was an attempt to give them protection from men who might otherwise try to carry them off as booty, rather than an approximation of their relationship with the Lord. I do wonder whether the reason why Jesus says there will be no marriage or giving in marriage in heaven (Matthew 22 and Luke 20) is because the relationship as conceived in first-century Judaea and elsewhere was so far from being according to God’s plan in the kingdom of heaven.

Greek and Roman myths have an interesting, slightly different angle on this. Though the gods in these mythologies come down, interact with human men, and seduce human women all the time, there is an awareness of the dangers of unequal partnership. When Zeus visits Semele in all his glory, she is consumed, literally burnt up by his resplendence; when Psyche tries to see Cupid in the flesh, she loses him forever. But the Greeks are sometimes better at portraying long and happy marriages than the Hebrew scriptures: Deucalion and Pyrrha, for example, where Pyrrha is allowed much more agency after the flood than Mrs Noah, and my favourite of all, Baucis and Philemon, a true and rare portrait of a happy marriage. 

The problem arises because the people choosing and using the image, usually male theologians, from a long way back in history, but also nowadays, do not seem to have much awareness of the lived reality of marriage. This is not surprising, but we should now, surely, be able to incorporate the views of women and married people into the Church’s understanding.

Alternatively, we could stop using marriage as an image and find something which works better. Our relationship with God is not a relationship of equals, and we thank him for that, because he is much better at arranging things than we are; but a relationship between two human beings will be best and most productive when it is. That’s marriage; our relationship with God, the Church’s relationship with Christ and similar concepts are rather different. We need a new metaphor.

Kate Keefe composes musical settings for the Mass and writes about the psalms. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.