“I do.”
Those two words provoke a universal image – a man and a woman, together, surrounded by their closest friends and family, pledging to love honor one another, through good times and bad, in sickness and in health, for as long as they both shall live.
What follows next is the culmination of the litany of sacrificial obligations central to marriage, and represents one of the biggest leaps of faith many of us will experience in our lifetime.
“I do.”
This assent flows out of an acknowledgement that love is something that has to be freely given and freely accepted, to in fact be love. Without the act of selfless gift from one, coupled with the heartfelt acceptance and reciprocation of the other, you don’t have love. You have coercion. We all recognize that love can’t be forced, and that forcing someone to love is not love at all.
So it is with God.
God revealed himself as one God in three persons - father, son and spirit. Called the trinity, it is a mystery we will never fully grasp, but can contemplate as a model in our own lives, for it is the very essence of what love is and who God is. Love by its nature requires more than one person, and at it’s very heart, God/love is relational.
It was out of that trinitarian (one God in three person) relationship of perfect love that God created us. He had no objective need for humanity, but chose to form and send us as an act of love. We were also created in his image and likeness, and infused with his spirit so that we would love one another as he had loved us.
We were created in love, by love, for love.
As an agnostic, I was often mentally bound up in the objection that a good and loving God wouldn’t allow, or even potentially be the cause for such evil in the world. How could this loving creator, let alone love itself, allow for the injustice we see and experience? Couldn’t he just make us be good, and rid the world of suffering?
Actually, yes, he could have. But it would have come at a steep price. Without free will, God would be forcing his love on us, so it wouldn’t be love at all. We would be nothing more than marionettes dancing at the whim of an omniscient puppetmaster, coerced into action.
Again, by its very nature, love has to be freely given and freely received. Being that God is love itself, he had to give his beloved creation free will to accept or reject this freely given gift of love.
As a result, we can freely choose to do good or to not do good, the result being evil. Evil is present within us and in the world because we freely turn away from the true, the good and the beautiful by our actions. God doesn’t cause evil, but allows evil as a natural consequence of love and free will.
God has been called, “The Hound of Heaven”, relentlessly pursuing us, no matter what we have done, that we might eventually quit running from truth and accept his free gift of love. Most other religions center on the pursuit of God - in the Jewish/Christian tradition, it is God who pursues us. Desiring a relationship of love with each of us, God is still very much the bridegroom offering his hand to us as his bride.
Take a moment and picture that – God as a bridegroom, separated by nothing more than a gauzy veil, being so close to you that your lips nearly touch. Now picture this divine bridegroom slowly lifting the veil to breathe his love, his spirit into you. That’s how intimate he is, and how relational he wants to be with you, his beloved creation.
Marriage imagery is prevalent throughout the Bible, between God and/or Jesus as the bridegroom, and those who consent to receive that love as the bride, collectively, the Church. There is an intimate, loving, marital bond and promise between God and his people.
And the good news is that this love is not just for a chosen few - God (love) is for all. We know that God revealed himself to creation slowly, over thousands of years, through a series of ever-expanding covenants, of promises to his adoptive family, that bound him as to those that accepted in free will his loving offer.
This unveiling over time climaxed with God entering the world in the person of his son, Jesus Christ - taking on human form to model true love, forever linking the human to the divine.
All he asks in return, as the bridegroom to his bride, is that you accept his free gift of love. It is up to you, and your free will, to accept, saying,
“I do.”
Photo Credit - Tim Medrano