Marriage Under the Microscope

An old celebrity was once asked if they believe in marriage. They responded that marriage was an institution, and who wants to be married to an institution?
Marriage has always been an accepted part of the cultural landscape. Many years ago there was the tune, “love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage”.
Today we live in a world of change. Some change is evolutionary, but there are times when we live through revolutionary change. In my view, we are living at such a time, when we are reconfiguring long held notions of sexuality and marriage.
The book of Genesis is a book of origins, how we are to understand the beginnings of things. It tells us that humans were made ‘in the image’ of their Creator. There was something unique, exceptional, remarkable about them. It tells us they were made ‘for community’, for others, and that there was something special about the unity in diversity between a man and a woman. This is what we understand as marriage, “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:24).
In this fascinating verse there are many lines of thought. We see that marriage is not purely an individualistic arrangement – there is a choice made to leave the current family structure to form a new one. Interestingly, it is the man who makes this move. Marriage is hereby depicted as a relationship that is social in nature, that impacts the life of the society, and is recognised by it.
The man unites, or cleaves, with his wife, and they become one flesh. Whilst this clearly refers to sexual union, there is a broader implication. There is a union of spirits, a new family unity. As one writer puts it, to become one flesh is “to refer to a union which will embrace the various realms of human expression and form a new cell in the social, economic, juridicial, political, cultural, etc, community” (Henri Blocher).
The man/woman relationship is a mystery. The two become one, though they are yet two. There is both a transcendence and an ordinariness in the sexual union. There is a reflection of the love and intimacy of the Creator who has fashioned the human beings in such a way, to live in harmony with others and with the One who formed them. And there is an exclusivity in the relationship that is foundational to it because of the enormity of the new one flesh encounter.
Of course, human experience of sexuality has often been one of brokenness and distortion. The openness and liberty of the first couple – their nakedness and lack of shame, Gen 2:25, quickly becomes a thing of the past. But the ideal of the first marriage is reinforced by Jesus in Mark 10:8, as the guide to how we think about marriage.
Contemporary debates about marriage often depend on personal opinion and experience, shaped by the latest trends in thinking. I hope that Christians, at least, will ponder the origins of marriage in Genesis, and its outworking throughout the Bible, and hang fast to its central themes, and the mystery of this relationship upon which all stable societies depend.