Marriage: What I think it's all about, Part II

Mirrors fascinate me. I could spend hours looking in them, and not because of the image staring back at me(!), but rather because of their ability to reflect things so clearly. Things may be slightly distorted, and the image flipped, but overall, what is seen by gazing at a looking glass allows for a image to be retained in one's mind.

Marriage is all about love. A love that is not self-serving, but continually seeking out ways to offer itself in word and deed, and so by giving of itself, receiving all the more. This is a choice made everyday, in every circumstance and situation that is presented in the course of life lived with another. And it's far from easy. Believe me, I know.

I know, not because I'm married, I know because of what marriage is a mirror image of; Christ, and His love for the Church. Please note that this is Church with a capital C, not a lowercase. Capital C Church is for all those who believe in Christ and who have accepted him, it's not divided into denominations or sects, or any other splitting ourselves apart over the small stuff.

Christ loves the Church, and the Church in return should love Christ. And it's here I'm left with several interesting questions, the first of which is what exactly is meant by loving Christ?

I can get loving a person, another human being... I can do this through word and deed and present them directly to them. A wife loves her husband by showing him respect, and a husband loves his wife by continuing to pursue her heart. But what does it look like to love Christ? He's not even "really" here anymore. He left another in his place... so how do I show love to him?

There's this scene of Jesus talking to his disciples, it's a personal dinner discussion between him and the 12 of them. He's breaking the news to them that he's not going to be around forever, he's going to have to leave them. It's in this in this discussion that Christ spells out what it would look like to really love him. So he tells them, if you truly love me, you'll show it by doing what I've told you.

Huh, so... to love Christ, is to obey all the rules and regulations that are in the Bible, right? Err. That's what I used to think, and is where I got lost in legalism for years. It's not about being able to say that you don't do such and such, or that you do this and that. It's about being able to say at the end of the day that you loved on someone else. It's about being able to know that instead of picking yourself in such and such situation, you picked someone else. To love Christ is to love someone else.

That's the beauty of it, marriage between man and woman and that which happens metaphorically between Christ and the Church is shown by denying yourself to benefit the other. They are mirror images of each other, and serve to be a reminder of what love looks like.