This month, a few dear friends will be celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversaries. Within less than a year, my wife and I, along with two other couples we know, will be joining this august group of celebrants. Attending a recent ceremony was a couple who had just celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. What an honour to be able to call these celebrants my friends.
Interestingly, they are not only my friends, we all share a common faith in Christ. I am confident that my celebrating friends will concur that our years of fruitful marriage is related to our faith. You see, our faith is more than a devotional experience. It is because of our faith, we participate in a community that challenges us to pursue excellence in every aspect of our lives. As a community we celebrate and console each other at appropriate times.
Our community of faith is universally known as the church. Membership in this group is monitored by the founder – Jesus Christ. As an institution, the church has been maligned and discarded by many. However, it continues to produce some of the more committed and distinguished people in society. Unlike other institutions, the church caters to the young and the elderly. It provides opportunities for intellectual stimulation and facilitates camaraderie among its members and their circles of influence.
When the apostle Paul was teaching the Ephesians about the church, he used marriage to illustrate his point. He presented Jesus as the Head of the Church. Jesus paid for the church with His life. Furthermore, Jesus loves the Church and desires to fashion her to become “a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless…” (Ephesians 5:27). Earlier in the paragraph, Paul argued that the Church should be viewed as the “body of Jesus Christ…”. The imagery Paul used suggests, intimacy, beauty and nobility.
Paul contends, just as Jesus loves and cares for His Church, “… in the same way, husbands ought to love their wives, as their own bodies”. In essence, our leadership as husbands ought to produce intimate, beautiful and noble marriages. This is so different from leadership that produces control, deception and thuggery. I believe we need to re-examine who influences our understanding of leadership in our homes.
My friends and I, all members of the “Jubilee Club”, will be among the first to admit that our marriages are not perfect. We made errors along the way. However, we learned from those errors and moved-on. We were aware that our marriages were designed to illustrate the mystical relationship between Jesus Christ and the Church.
As Paul compared and contrasted the relationship between marriage and the Church, he admitted, “… this is a profound mystery…”. It is indeed a mystery to witness a man and a woman, from different cultures, influences and persuasions, pledge and honour their pledges for more than fifty years. To do this in a culture where such commitments are rare, that is a mystery.
To be honest, my friends and I believe Jesus guided our romantic choices and we further believe that He enabled us along the way. Furthermore, we also believe that fifty years is really about 18,262 days. We lived and continue to live one day at a time. Members of the Jubilee Club simply add the days and exclaim Hallelujah!
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