“Everyone marries a stranger.”
As I prepare to perform my first marriage in April, the words of my friend and fellow pastor, Tom Cannon, haunt me. He’s right, of course. I think most couples who’ve been married, even for a little bit, know this. You don’t really know who you’ve married until you’re married.
So how do you counsel two strangers who have made the decision to spend the rest of their lives together? How can two people decide to become one flesh in the first place?
If we can know so little about our spouses before we marry them, if our spouses can remain mysteries to us even years after our weddings, then how can we claim to know God? My spouse is at least another human. I’ve spent more time with her than anyone else. Yet if I don’t even know her as well as I think I should, how can I know the God of the universe? Of course, whatever I know about my spouse is by what she shows me. And what we know about God is what God shows us. This is revelation. But this revelation does not happen haphazardly (as is often the case with learning about our spouses). God does not give us bits of data that we can contemplate and place into neat categories. God’s revelation is a gift, something imparted to us.
Indeed, God’s revelation is Someone who comes to us. We cannot master this Someone who comes to us; we must be mastered by him.
This Someone is Jesus Christ. Holy Scripture attests to this revelation of God as the Word (John 1:1-14), specifically the Word that was made flesh, the incarnation of his Word. For Barth, the incarnation of God’s Word is the objective reality of God’s revelation. God is always the Subject of his own revelation – it is his revelation, by him and about him, not us. The Holy Spirit in us is the subjective reality of this revelation – God is at work in us to fulfill his revelation.
But Jesus as the objective realityof God’s revelation stands outside of us. As such, we are always talking about a mystery, what Barth calls “the prime mystery.” Jesus Christ cannot be pinned down by us. We are dominated by this Someone who is above us.
And yet, he is one of us. The Creator of this world is a member of this world. The Maker of human beings has become a human being. In Jesus Christ, God is both revelation to us and our reconciliation with him. God shows us who he is by becoming one of us, and in becoming one of us, he restores us to relationship with him.
Even in this relationship, we cannot say that we know him (like we might be bold enough to say about our spouses after a few years). The best we can do is acknowledge him; we confess him as very God and very man. The prime mystery of God’s revelation remains a mystery to us. But the miracle of Christmas is that he is no longer a stranger. He is our Bridegroom. Amen.
