Whose Wedding It Is

At the last wedding I stood up for, I missed the bride entirely. The doors opened, the room turned, and I was watching the groom — hands clasped, crying in the way men cry when they are trying not to, looking at her as though she were the most radiant person alive. I have been thinking about his face ever since.

Paul has a wedding like that in view when he writes to husbands at Ephesus. He is giving ordinary household counsel — how a man should treat his wife — and then: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). He keeps going until he says he has not finally been talking about marriage: “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). The word translated mystery, mystērion, is not a riddle to crack but something long hidden, now brought into the light. Marriage was patterned on this from the beginning — Paul quotes Genesis 2:24 a verse earlier — whether or not anyone in the room knows it.

So go back to the doorway and look at the bride, because that is where Paul looks. She is radiant. Where did that come from?

In Ezekiel, God finds his people as an abandoned newborn left in an open field to die, and he bathes her, clothes her and adorns her, until he can say of her beauty, “it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you” (Ezekiel 16:14) — and the chapter does not end there, for she takes the splendor to other lovers. Paul has the same picture in front of him: Christ gave himself up for her, “that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle” (Ephesians 5:26–27) — the true washing every rite in Israel pointed toward. She can be presented without spot because the Bridegroom bore what she deserved; the word washes her because the blood was shed. A bridegroom at an altar pledges his life. This one paid it.

And the wedding is not behind us but ahead. Jesus worked his first sign at a wedding at Cana, keeping the best wine until the end (John 2) — a foretaste of the feast still coming, when the Bride is at last “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2) and the marriage supper of the Lamb begins (Revelation 19:7).

So we can stop straining at the mirror, trying to make ourselves presentable enough to be loved — he does not overlook the spots; he is washing them out. And that sends us back to the husband Paul began with. We find this passage hard, and it is worth saying so; but the weight falls on the husband: the one with the power is the one told to die. Loved into security by this Bridegroom, he no longer needs his wife to make him somebody, and can spend himself on the actual woman in his kitchen, loving as he has been loved.

So we can stop straining at the mirror over our own spots and wrinkles, trying to make ourselves presentable enough to be loved. The doors will open. The room will rise. And when we come down the aisle, the splendor we wear will be his, and the face at the front will be the face of the One who gave himself to have us there.