YGT: Marriage, In all Seriousness

I’m currently taking a class on marriage and family at Duke Divinity School.  One of our first readings for the course was Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics.  The things he says about marriage are truly powerful.  Read below (caution - helps to read slowly):  

The essence of marriage is more comprehensive than what we must understand by the term love in the sense of the special love of husband and wife.  It consists essentially in the life-partnership established and subsisting between these two… Marriage therefore is the proof of love.  In marriage as a life-partnership it is a matter of repeating in all seriousness the Yes of love.  But “in all seriousness” means in a life which is the whole life of man, in toil and care, in joy and pain, in sickness and health, in youth and age, in wrestling with the many questions, small and great, inner and outer, individual and social… “In all seriousness” means experiencing all this in the succession of unforeseeably many days of twenty-four hours and unforeseeably many years of fifty two weeks, with the intimacy of an everyday and everynight companionship which discloses everything on both sides, in which each very soon gets to know the other with terrifying exactitude, and in which the greatest thing can become astonishingly small and the smallest astonishingly great.  “In all seriousness” means to have become a collective, a We, a pair, and to live as such, not merely outwardly, but inwardly… This seriousness of love is what we mean by marriage as a life-partnership.  And when love stands the test of this seriousness, it means that marriage is a partnership which is fulfilled not merely according to the claims of duty, but gladly, joyfully and willingly, in repetition of the Yes of love...

Wow.  Like Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:23 below), there’s something about marriage that is mystical, sacrificial, and moving.  Marriage is a great teacher.  It shows us how God must love us and how we must become a "We" if we are to embody Christ's nature.

Committed,

j.a.g.

Lord, thank You for giving us the blessing of partnership.  As You declared, "it is not good for man to be alone".  We turn to marriage for a glimpse of Your nature. Even as we struggle with new definitions of marriage today, help us never to elevate earthly marriage above singleness.  Instead, let us each be married to You.  We long for Your presence.  In Christ's name, Amen.

*I honor my wife, Ashley, for being my life-partner and confidant.  She is by far the greatest thought I've ever had.  Through it all, “in all seriousness”, I love you.

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Ephesians 5:23

For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body.

Genesis 2:18

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”