Marriage Vows

Jeremiah 31:31-34

For this whole season of Lent we have been talking about covenants. It’s a good biblical word, a theological word. But it is not a common, everyday word. We rarely use the word covenant in our daily life. We talk about contracts. We understand contracts much better than we understand covenants. You might say that the language of contract is a language we understand, while covenant language is a different kind of language.

The only exception that comes to mind is marriage. In the church, at least, marriage is spoken of as a covenant between two individuals in the presence of God. Where a contract might be easily nullified if one party breaks it, a covenant involves love and forgiveness. It is not as easy to break a covenant as it is to break a contract. It is not as easy to break a marriage as it is to break a simple contract.

Although we all know it is much easier to be divorced now than it used to be. We talked about this at the roundtable. We felt that it is so different now than it was when we were younger. There is less social stigma attached to it. It is easier for a woman than it was in the old days when she was, in a sense helpless and defenseless without a husband. And, just from a legal perspective, divorce is “no-fault” now, meaning you don’t have to establish that one party was somehow at fault. Usually you only need one of the parties to want a divorce to make it happen.

The laws of divorce differ from state to state, but there are a few states that stand apart in one particular way. They offer a distinct kind of marriage called covenant marriage, where the couple voluntarily put certain restrictions on their future rights to divorce, such as mandatory counseling, a waiting period, or establishment of certain facts. A couple who enters into a covenant marriage is, you might say, making a decision to go against the grain of the culture. They are asking the state to help them handle their marriage in the best way possible. I don’t know how well it works, but I have read that there are very few couples who avail themselves of this option.

Whatever else you might say, I think we can probably agree that marriage is complicated. It is often hard. When marriages last, it is not because it was easy. And when marriages end, they rarely end easily. And it is interesting that God so often compares God’s relationship with Israel to a marriage.

In the book of Jeremiah, it seems at first that there will be a divorce. And this is not a modern no-fault divorce. The word of the Lord comes to the young prophet Jeremiah, laying out the case against Israel – the faithless wife. As a faithless wife leaves her husband, so you have been faithless to me.

At first, the Lord urges the faithless wife to return. Return; I will not look on you with anger, I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt. God wants to reconcile.

But soon the tone changes. A few chapters later: How can I pardon you? asks the Lord. You have committed adultery.

And then: I am full of the wrath of the Lord, says Jeremiah, and I am weary of holding it in. For the Lord says, ‘I will stretch out my hand against the inhabitants of the land.’

It is looking more and more like God will, indeed, divorce Israel. And, I imagine it was feeling more and more like that to Israel. Jeremiah was prophesying during a very difficult time in the life of Israel. The kingdom had long ago been divided in two – a kind of divorce in itself – so there was the kingdom of Israel in the north and the kingdom of Judah in the south. Both kingdoms suffered the sieges of other kingdoms – Assyria, the superpower nation, came down from the north and annihilated the kingdom of Israel. Watching Israel go down, Judah desperately tried to avoid that same fate by entering into a relationship with the Assyrians to appease them. Then along comes Babylon from the east, to overpower Assyria and then come knocking on Judah’s door. Judah turns to Egypt in the south, hoping for some protection, but of course Egypt had designs of her own, which didn’t really involve the welfare of Judah. Things were not going well for Judah. Most certainly, Judah – the people of Israel – felt as if the Lord was finally abandoning them.

And Jeremiah wants them to know: it is because you have broken every covenant the Lord has made with you. You have been faithless. And now you will know what it is like to be a woman without a husband; defenseless, without the protection of the Lord.

Thinking about marriage, both literal and metaphorical, the film I watched this past week was The End of the Affair. It’s based on a novel by Graham Greene. It is about a marriage between Sarah and Henry that seems to be a marriage in name only. There is no real love between them, but it is merely habit, convenience. And Sarah falls in love with another man, Maurice. And so there is a sort of love triangle filled with jealousy and resentment and regret.

You realize that Sarah and Henry want to remain faithful to their marriage vows but they don’t seem to know how to work this legal arrangement into their hearts. Each of them wants to do well, to do right by the other, but they cannot seem to. Henry turns to his work, and Sarah turns to Maurice.

It is during the Second World War. And the bombs are falling all over London, it seems. One day while Sarah is with Maurice they are rocked by an explosion and Maurice is blown across the room and falls down a flight of stairs. Sarah goes to him as he lies on the floor covered in blood. She tries to revive him but he appears to be dead. She then does something unusual for her: she falls on her knees in prayer, begging God to bring him back. She promises that she will stop seeing him if God will let him live. Then she hears Maurice call her name and she knows God has heard her prayer – and her promise.

She stops seeing Maurice, never explaining why because he wouldn’t understand. A couple of years later Maurice learns the story of what had happened. He tries to see her again, but she is resistant. There is a scene where he is literally chasing her from one place to another. When he finally chases her into a church Sarah sits beside him in a pew and tries to explain everything to him.

“I have made two promises in my life – to marry Henry and to stop seeing you – and I am too weak to keep either of them,” Sarah tells Maurice. She speaks a sort of universal truth here. We make and break promises so often because our hearts are seeking something that we aren’t quite sure how to find. We make and break promises because we are afraid of losing something we might not have ever really had. We make and break promises because we never let them be written on our hearts.

And I wonder: does Sarah think that if she breaks this promise she made, God will abandon her?

I know that the people of Israel had to have felt that God abandoned them. The Northern Kingdom had been obliterated and now the Southern Kingdom was on the verge of destruction as well. The people were dying or being dragged away from their home. The temple was destroyed. The life they knew so well was being taken from them.

Everything they had been promised was being taken from them, or so it seemed.

Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will be different from the old covenant, for this time it will not be written on tablets of stone. It will be written on their hearts. And I will remember their sin no more.

So. Do we get this? It isn’t especially easy. I think we get this when we understand how completely forgiven we are. We get this when we know how fully and unconditionally God loves us. We get this when we realize that God wants to be intimately involved in every part of our lives. When we really and truly let God into our hearts, let God engrave his promises on our hearts. Then we get it. All thanks be to God.