This is a translation of the homily for the twentieth Sunday of Trinity (year II) in Uskedal Church and Holmedal Church in Kvinnherad, Norway, Sunday 6th October, 2024. The readings are as follows: Genesis 2:18-25; Ephesians 5:31-33; and Mark 10,2-9. When quoting Scripture, I will use the Revised Standard Version of Scripture (RSV), unless otherwise noted.
Collect of the day (translated by yours truly):1
Let us Pray: Eternal God, source of love, you have created us to live in communion with you and with one another. We pray: Build our homes in peace and bless all marriages, families, and communities. Fill us with your love so that we may serve you in joy, through your Son Jesus Christ, our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one true God, world without end. Amen.
The readings this Sunday are all about marriage but the underlying theme that lies beneath them, and this Sunday, is the love of God that grounds everything. As the Collect starts: “Eternal God, source of love, you have created us to live in communion with you and with one another.” Then, the Collect continues praying that God will “bless all marriages, families, and communities.” And this is important. For as humans, we are not created for isolation. We are created for love, for community, for communion. Therefore, today I want to dwell on this, and how this finds its fulfilment in our relationship with Christ and how this is expressed especially in the Eucharist, where we share in Him in a very concrete way in something we can sense.
In the Gospel reading, Christ points to the act of creation where God created man and woman. But as I have said, He did not create humans to be alone but for communion. For marriage, says Christ, “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Mark 10:7-8). Here, He cites the first text we have read, from the Genesis account of creation. This shows us that God has ordained this from the beginning. Marriage is not just social order, it is a order of creation. But in the second text, St. Paul shows that this does not just refer to the natural relationship between husband and wife, but between Christ and His Church. Christ is the bridegroom, the Church is the bride.
This was an important theme in the Middle Ages and in the period after the Reformation. Martin Luther was concerned with the mystical tradition and its focus on this theme, that we should be one with Christ as the bride is one with the bridegroom. We are to be one body, as it says in Genesis and as Christ reiterates in the Gospel. This is a central theme in Scripture. We, as the Church, is the body of Christ. We are all members of the same body. As we will sing in our communion hymn, we belong together. If we are in different countries, on different continents, we are all bound together. Yes, we “share our mutual woes, our mutual burdens bear, and often for each other flows the sympathizing tear.”2 As St. Paul puts it, in 1 Corinthians 12:26: “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” We er all members of the same body, the Church, which is the bride of Christ.
This is an image that runs through the entire Bible, starting with the marriage between the man and the woman, Adam and Eve, and ending with the heavenly wedding or heavenly marriage, the marriage of the Lamb, in the Revelation of John.3 Our ultimate goal is full union with God, through Christ. It starts with creation, it ends with salvation and the new creation where God makes all things new.
In church history, one has often referred to the Song of Songs in the Old Testament. An important figure here is the French Benedictine theologian St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who lived mainly in the 12th century.4 He says that when we read about the man and the woman in the Song of Songs, this is an image of the true communion between God and man. He says that true desire finds its fulfillment in this and the image he uses is that the soul makes itself attractive to God, as a bride can adorn herself for her husband. The way St. Bernard uses this image is that he is saying that God gives humans grace so that we can live life in order to become attractive to God. We must be pious, kind, good, loving. The soul does not do this by her own power, but by grace and by the help of the Holy Spirit. This is how we can go through the four stages of love, where we get closer and closer to God. First we have self-love, where we only look to ourselves. Then we come to the love we have for God because he comes to our aid - that we pray to God in need and sorrow and thank him in joy. Here we realise more and more that God is to be trusted, something which leads us to the third stage, where we love God for his own sake and not just to achieve something. But this is also expressed in love for our neighbour, because we recognise that God has created all human beings and loves them as much as He loves us. The fourth stage is the continuation of the third but in heaven. There we live fully and completely in this love, without the interference of sin. There we only experience love and live fully in it.
Of course, we cannot fully comprehend this, and therefore have to use images. But the interesting thing here is that it is actually our communities, our marriages, that are the images. What we get through a marriage is just an image, a shadow, of the real, true marriage between Christ and the Church. This true marriage is the origin or archetype, while our marriages are images or shadows of this. And as shadows, they are not perfect. Sometimes things go wrong and we often do not live up to the ideal. When I officiate a wedding I usually say that you should ask for forgiveness when something goes wrong, not if something goes wrong, but when. For things will go wrong. But then we should look to Christ as our great example. Our earthly structures are the shadows; Christ is the original, the archetype. And when we look to Him, we do not see a tyrant who rules everything with an iron fist. No, we see someone who gives Himself completely, yes, who sacrifices Himself, for his bride. Yes, He loved us so much that He was willing to die for us, even death on the cross. He gave everything. And that should be the ideal.
Luther read St. Bernard, but he interprets this mystical tradition in light of his own position on justification through faith alone. Where St. Bernard says that the human soul must be made attractive to God, even if through the grace of God, to become the bride, Luther says that Christ does everything and that the bride in this instance becomes attractive by having Christ as her bridegroom. As the bride of Christ, we get everything from the bridegroom. Luther says that like the married couple shares everything, we share everything with Christ. But the difference is that we do not bring anything to Christ but our sins. Christ, on the other hand, gives us everything. We become one body with Him or one flesh with Him. But He is the active one. Where St. Bernard focuses on desire, Luther focuses on Christ giving the promise and fulfilling it. But we also see something else here. Luther says that as sinners, we are in a way unattractive to God but Christ is also in a way unattractive to us, as sinners, because He takes our sins and our weakness upon Himself. We do not see His glory but we see Him as crucified. As it says in Isaiah 53:2-3:
For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
But through faith, which can only be given as a gift, as it is the work of God, we can see past this, into what is true and good, as it reveals Christ’s true nature. Then we can see what Christ has done for us, as we see in Isaiah 53:4-5:
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.
In Him, we find healing. He is the bridegroom who gives Himself completely to and for the bride. He is the one who gives Himself to us, we do not give ourselves to Him. He gives, we receive. For Luther, this is all about the promise and therefore it is not married life that is the most important image in the Bible, but the marriage celebration itself, the wedding, the place where the promise is given. But the difference is that where we have two sets of vows in ordinary weddings, where both parties are active, we are passive in our relationship with Christ. When we become one with Him, we do not give Him a promise, we receive His and He even gives us the condition by which we can receive it, faith. We do not need to give anything. The promise, the gospel, is that Jesus will love and honour us and be faithful to us for better, for worse, not just until death do us part but forevermore. And all this because His self-sacrificial love has made it possible. And therefore, for Luther, the most important image, then, is the wedding, the marriage celebration, not married life. Let us read Revelation 19:6-9:
Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty thunderpeals, crying. “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure”—for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.
And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are true words of God.”
We can partake of this celebration in the Eucharist, where we receive Christ concretely in something we can sense, in ordinary bread and wine. The Eucharist is our participation in the heavenly liturgy. It is not our accomplishment; it is a gift from Christ which we can receive in faith. All our celebrations on earth participate in the single heavenly celebration, the marriage supper of the Lamb. The Eucharist is not for the perfect but for all who have been baptised in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Jesus calls everyone, children and adults, to be disciples and to have fellowship, and especially table fellowship, with Him. The Eucharist is the Church’s central mark of communion and it is linked to baptism, where we become on with Christ. As British theologian D. Stephen Long says:
In baptism we receive faith, through which we recognize our place in God’s economy. This recognition is sealed, strengthened, and renewed in the celebration of the Eucharist. The blessed meal is our participation in the life of God, and all of our life is to have its intelligibility from the centrality of that meal. Such a meal makes us holy and cultivates in us the practice of koinonia, which is both our communion around the table and our communion with God.5
But this community is not something we have created, it is something given to us, from the great bridegroom, the true bridegroom, who loved and loves His Church so much that He gave Himself to here completely and continues to do so, again and again, in His gifts in the word and the sacraments. So receive Christ, for in Him you find love, salvation, and eternal life.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux had many good points but I agree with Luther when emphasising that the soul neither need to nor is able to make herself attractive to God in order to participate in Him. No, we have nothing to give except our sins. Rather, the soul becomes attractive to God by participating in Him. When we become one with God, through baptism, we are made attractive through grace. We receive love, salvation, and eternal life and thus we become attractive. Christ gives, we receive.
The celebration of Mass is the marriage celebration and the celebration of the Eucharist is the meal. Here, we find the feast that saves, the eternal feast that continues forevermore. But as long as we are here, we only seem to receive as taste. And we must seek God, seek Christ, where He is, as we are reminded in Isaiah 55:6: “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.”
My appeal today is therefore: Pray to Christ, receive Him in the word of God, and partake of Him in the Eucharist. For He comes to you through channels you can understand, through your senses. Receive the sacrament when you can, for there Christ is concretely. There you get a tase of what is waiting for us in the marriage supper of the Lamb. There we receive forgiveness, life, and blessing.
We must always remind each other of this. If we have faith in Christ, we will be with Him in eternity. But since we still have not gotten to the end, we must comfort each other, encourage each other, and always remind each other of the gospel, of the love that has been given to us in Christ, only in Christ, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans 8:38-39:
For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, who was, is, and will remain, one true God, world without end. Amen.
The liturgies of the Church of Norway can be found online, with some translations. The Collects, however, have not been translated or they have been but not published.
“Blest Be the Tie That Binds” by John Fawcett (1782), verse 3.
For some thoughts, in Norwegian, on this mystical tradition, see Benjamin Bjørnsen Anda, “Det hellige bryllup: Om erotikk og brudemystikk i Børre Knudsens salmer” (For oss, 14.01.2022) and Stein Solberg, “Brudemystikk – klamt føleri eller bibelsk teologi?” (Bibelsk Tro 3, 2012).
My presentation of Bernard and the comparison to Martin Luther is based on Jack Kilcrease, “The Bridal-Mystical Motif in Bernard of Clairvaux and Martin Luther” (The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 65:2, 2014), 263-279.
D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy (London: Routledge, 2000), 234.