For the most part this series on different ways Christians have understood the atonement, i.e., Christ’s saving work, will be focusing on the heaviest hitters, those images that have been the most influential or important in history. Today I’d like to do something a bit different, and think through a perspective that has never been among the most common, yet offers, I think, a profound vision of our salvation: This is a perspective that views Christ as our bridegroom and the Cross as our marriage bed. For many Christians this idea may be brand new, or even shocking, strange and esoteric. And yet, once we start to look for it, we actually see its stamp all over the Scriptures.
As with all of these ideas from the earliest days of Christianity, we have to remember that the first Christians were not trying to come up with comprehensive belief systems, but were using the symbols and stories of their ancient Jewish traditions as lenses through which they might view and find words to describe what they had experienced in Jesus. For this reason, we have to start with the way the metaphor of God as Israel’s husband is used in what Christians call the Old Testament.
As Christians, the first image that comes to mind when talking about God is generally ‘Father’. But, while this idea certainly existed in the Hebrew Bible, the far more common metaphor to describe God’s relationship to Israel was not parental, but nuptial: God as Israel’s husband. Of course, the meaning of marriage has evolved a lot over the centuries, so we need to shift our mindset a bit to understand what exactly this metaphor would have meant. To our ideas of love, intimacy, fidelity, home, and family, we need to add ideas of protection, alliance-brokering, provision, and removal of shame. If this sounds patriarchal, well, it was: For God to be Israel’s husband meant that God was taking responsibility for Israel’s safety, well-being, and reputation; for Israel to be God’s wife meant that Israel was promising fidelity, honour, respect, and service. It was a partnership, but one in which God was certainly the senior and more powerful partner.
But, of course, as the Biblical narrative goes, Israel was not a faithful wife. The metaphor of Israel going astray and cuckolding her husband and not bearing him the children (i.e., good works) expected, is one of the most common motifs in the Prophets. Her are just a few examples:
- “How the faithful city has become a harlot! She that was full of justice and righteousness. Righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers!” (Isaiah 1.21)
- “Sing, O barren one who did not bear. Break forth unto singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in travail. … Your maker is your husband; the Lord of hosts is his name, and the holy one of Israel is your redeemer. The God of the whole earth he is called, for the Lord has called you like a wife, forsaken and grieved in spirit like a wife of youth, when she is cast off, says your God.” (Isaiah 54.1, 5-6)
- “Thus says the Lord: I remember your devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown. … Yea, long ago you broke your yoke and burst your bonds, and you said, ‘I will not serve.’ Yea, upon every high hill and under every green tree you bowed down as a harlot.” (Jeremiah 2.1, 20)
- And the example of Hosea, who was called to make his life an object lesson of Israel’s infidelity by marrying a woman who repeatedly cheated on him (Hosea 1).
Another important Old Testament text, albeit a more positive one, for the nuptial motif is the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon). This is a lengthy piece of erotic poetry that includes such lines as:
- “O, that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth! For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is oil poured out; therefore the maidens love you. Draw me after you, let us make haste.” (Song of Songs 1.2)
- “Upon my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loves, for I am sick with love. O, that his left hand were under my head, and that his right hand embraced me!” (3.1)
- “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.” (7.10)
While the poem was likely originally sung at weddings, it has had a very long history, in both Judaism and Christianity, of being understood as an extended metaphor for the mystical union between God and the faithful. In fact, many of the most important biblical scholars and mystics of the patristic and medieval periods wrote commentaries on it in this vein, including Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Simeon the New Theologian, and Bernard of Clairvaux.
While the Old Testament use of this motif is well-known, what is more surprising to many Christians is just how common it is in the New Testament, from the first moments of Jesus’ public ministry. In Mark 2.19-20, just after he calls his first disciples, Jesus is asked why they don’t keep the fasts as John the Baptist’s disciples and the Pharisees do; he responds: “The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.” In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ first miracle occurs at a wedding. And, John the Baptist, when asked about his own identity, identifies himself as the best man at a wedding, casting Jesus as the bridegroom:
I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him. And he who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears him rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now full. He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3.28-30)
In a fascinating detail of John’s Gospel, this story that frames Jesus as a bridegroom is directly followed by the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). How is this relevant? Well, in Genesis, two of the patriarchs, Isaac and Jacob, meet their wives at a well. And in Exodus, Moses does too. In other words, John’s Gospel calls Jesus a bridegroom and then immediately puts him in a situation that was the classic ‘meet cute’ of the Bible. But who is the prospective bride? A woman of poor reputation from a group ‘good Jews’ of the time despised as half-breeds and heretics. More on this to come!
Wedding imagery is also found in Jesus’ teaching, in such parables of the Wedding Banquet (Matthew 22) and the Unprepared Bridesmaids (Matthew 25). We’ll see a bit later how these parables were woven into the theological tapestry of this motif, but for now the point is that in these parables, Jesus likens the Kingdom of God to a wedding.
This motif is less common in the Epistles, but not absent. For example, Paul claims that in his role as apostle, he “betrothed” the Corinthians to Christ, “to present [them] as a pure bride to her one husband” (2 Corinthians 11.2). And, of course, Ephesians’ household code controversially says that “the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the Church” (Ephesians 5.23).
Finally, there is what is undoubtedly the most famous nuptial image in the New Testament, the Marriage of the Lamb scene from Revelation 19:
Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory,for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready;to her it has been granted to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure”—for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb”! (Revelation 19.6-9).
What is interesting in all this is how the New Testament both builds on and twists what its writers had inherited from Jewish tradition. The biggest twist is that, whereas the Old Testament texts always talked about God and Israel as husband and wife, all but one of the New Testament texts talk about Jesus and the Church as groom and bride. The focus is on the event of the wedding rather than on the married state. I can’t help but use a cinematic analogy here: it’s like the New Testament metaphor reboots the God-Israel story by retelling its origin story. Another interesting fact about the New Testament appropriation of the nuptial motif is that while there is definitely the continuity here that we saw with recapitulation, instead of recapitulating humanity’s role as we saw in the Adam and Israel imagery, or recapitulating the act of salvation as we saw with the Passover imagery, here Jesus recapitulates God’s role in the salvation drama.
All of this imagery is kind of mixed up and inconsistent — sometimes Jesus’ audience is cast as the bride, sometimes as bridesmaids, and sometimes as guests to the party; the only consistent element is Jesus’ role as the Bridegroom. But the early Church used this variety creatively. This is particularly demonstrated in the Eastern Orthodox services for Holy Week, which likely date back to the early Byzantine period (so, late Antiquity or early Middle Ages in Western timelines). These ancient hymns riff on the two parables from Matthew’s Gospel. The Parable of the Unprepared Bridesmaids is one of Jesus’ most apocalyptic texts; it warns its hearers to be ready, for the bridegroom is coming and you don’t want to find yourself shut out of the ceremony. From this parable, Eastern liturgy gets hymns like the following:
- “Let us cast aside slothfulness and go to meet Christ, the immortal Bridegroom, with brightly shining lamps and with hymns, crying: O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord!”
- “Let us prepare our souls like shining lamps, and when the Bridegroom comes let us enter with him into the eternal marriage feast before the door is shut.”
- “Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight! And blessed is the servant whom he shall find watching. But unworthy is the one whom he shall find heedless. Beware, therefore, O my soul, lest you be weighed down with sleep, Lest you be given up to death and be shut out of the Kingdom. But rise up, saying “Holy! Holy! Holy, are you O our God!”
These hymns rightly pick up on the parable’s apocalyptic themes. And, because they are sung in Holy Week, they lead those who sing them to associate the Cross of Jesus with this apocalyptic wedding.
The hymns take up the Parable of the Wedding Banquet less literally. In this parable, a king is throwing a wedding feast but all of the ‘right’ invitees decline the invitation. So, he invites the ‘wrong’ guests, who happily accept. The parable ends with a strange detail about one guest who is not wearing the right clothes and is cast out of the party. In an unexpected move, the ancient hymns focus on this last detail. Moreover, they shift the scene from the banquet to the bridal chamber: We are no longer guests to the wedding, but the bride being summoned to bed to consummate the marriage! Here are just a few hymns of this style:
- “Into the splendor of thy saints, how shall I enter? For I am unworthy, and if I dare to come into the bridal chamber, my clothing will accuse me, since it is not a wedding garment, and I shall be cast out by the angels, bound hand and foot. Cleanse, O Lord, the filth from my soul and save me in thy love for mankind.”
- “O Bridegroom, surpassing all in beauty, thou hast called us to the spiritual feast of the bridal chamber. Strip from us the disfigurement of sin through participation in your sufferings. Clothe me in the glorious robe of thy beauty, and in thy compassion make me feast with joy at thy kingdom.”
- “Your bridal chamber I see adorned, O my Saviour! But I have no wedding garment that I may enter. O Giver of Light, enlighten the clothing of my soul and save me. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!”
These hymns agree that the wedding garment in the story represents a good and fruitful life. In this way they parallel the them of readiness from the hymns about the Parable of the Bridesmaids. But what can be lost on us, coming from a very different cultural context, is that at the grand kind of wedding talked about in the story, the host would provide the guests with the clothes to wear. The clothing therefore acted as the invitation or ticket to the event. This is why the hymns ask the Bridegroom to give us the clothing. So, this isn’t talking about a kind of ‘works righteousness’, but about opening up and ‘putting on’ the gift of salvation offered by God. In the ancient Church, this was symbolized by the gift of a white robe to those being baptized (see Revelation 19 above).
Finally, this verse from the major Easter hymn of the Eastern Church, directly equates the cross and tomb with the marriage bed: “O Passover, save us from sorrow; for today Christ has shown forth from the tomb as from a bridal chamber and filled the women with joy by saying: ‘Announce the good news to My Apostles.’ ” This is actually a pretty shocking image. If there are three things English speakers are traditionally squeamish about it’s religion, death, and sex, and this links the three directly! Christ’s death is understood to consummate God’s union with humanity in the same way sexual intercourse was understood to consummate a marriage. Some theologians have even linked this with Jesus’ last words as recorded by Matthew: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” How? Because this line, taken from Psalm 22, uses a rare word, found elsewhere only in Genesis 2.24, which talks about a man “forsaking” his family to join to his wife. As much of a reach as this link may be, it’s a fascinating idea, suggesting that the Father ‘forsakes’ Jesus so that he might ‘marry’ humanity on the cross.
All this said, this motif of Christ the Bridegroom is less cut-and-dry than some of the others. It’s a bit all over the place. And yet, through a kind of pastiche or bricolage of the different ways nuptial imagery is used in the Scriptures, the Christian tradition has come up with a very robust, and I think beautiful, way of understanding the cross and salvation.
Let’s look at the summary table to see how it answers the big questions:
| What does it say about God? | God is a faithful husband |
|---|---|
| What does it say about humanity? | Humanity was created to be God’s faithful bride and wife |
| How does it define sin? | Sin is faithlessness, adultery, and separation from one’s heavenly ‘spouse’ |
| How does it define the problem? | Humanity is separated from God |
| What does it say about Christ? | Christ is the bridegroom who unites fully with his bride, humanity |
| What does it say about the cross? | The cross is the marriage-bed where Christ consummates his relationship with the Church |
| What does it say about the resurrection? | The resurrection is Christ’s emergence from the bridal chamber, no longer as the Bridegroom but the Husband |
| How does Jesus remedy the problem? | Through the mystical union between Christ and the faithful, union between humanity and God is restored. |
| What is the result of this for us? | We have been united to God in Christ and live again faithfully in relationship with God. |
As we see here, this motif — perhaps surprisingly — has pretty good answers to the big questions. It also better captures the apocalyptic aspect of Christ’s death and resurrection, which is so important in the New Testament, than the others we’ve looked at so far. But it does have its drawbacks. For example, it is profoundly mystical, with its sexual language and talk of divine union. This isn’t a weakness in the theory, but may make it less accessible for those among us who aren’t mystically minded. And, more importantly, what it has to say about the resurrection, while not weak, is not quite as dramatic as the New Testament witness suggests it should be. It suggests Jesus’ resurrection is a natural outcome of his death, an idea I don’t think anyone would find entirely satisfying. An unsatisfying perspective on Jesus’ resurrection has been a common critique of all the atonement motifs we’ve looked at so far. Next time, we’ll look at a motif known as Christus Victor, or, ‘Christ our Champion’, which was by far the most important atonement ‘theory’ in ancient Christianity, in which the resurrection takes its rightful centre stage.
Matthew Root 
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