A Twilight Musing

Some married couples choose, for one reason or another, to renew their marriage vows.  It may be that they have had dissention in their relationship and want to reaffirm the promises they made to each other in the first bloom of their love.  Or maybe they want merely to say to the world, “Join us in celebrating the holiness of marriage vows and the richness of life that can be demonstrated by people being faithful to each other over a long period of time.”

The similarity between marriage and our personal and corporate covenant relationship with Christ is commonplace in Scripture.  Perhaps the most focused instance of this comparison is in Eph. 5:22-33, where Paul speaks of Christ as a husband to his bride, the Church, and the bond between husband and wife as an embodiment of the mystery of union between Christ and His church.  The husband is to cherish and protect his wife as he would his own body, and the wife is to honor and serve her husband as she would Christ Himself.

Based on this analogy, when we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we would do well to see what we are doing as a renewal of our vow at baptism to submit to the Lordship of Christ, and a reaffirmation of trust in God’s promise in Christ to love and protect us, even to the giving up of His own life.  In partaking of the bread and the wine, our life in Christ is renewed, and we rejoice like a bride whose husband has given his life for her but has been resurrected to continue living with her.  We can, to alter an old saying, have our Lord, and consume Him too.

Those who renew their marriage vows usually do so only once in their lifetimes, but we have the opportunity frequently to reaffirm our union with Jesus.  Our earthly marriage to another mortal, however rich it may be, will end someday, while marriage with Christ will last forever (Rev. 19:6-9; 21:2-4, 9).  If we are married people partaking of the Communion, our physical union with our spouses is sanctified by our reaffirmed union with Christ; if we are single, we can find the ultimate intimacy in perceiving Christ as our lover.

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.