The Bride of Christ: a holy people

The image of God’s people as a bride – specifically God’s bride – appears in a number of places in Holy Scripture. This study is informed particularly by two scripture readings:

Jeremiah 2: 1-7

¹ The word of the LORD came to me: ² "Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem:
       " 'I remember the devotion of your youth,
       how as a bride you loved me
       and followed me through the desert,
       through a land not sown.

³ Israel was holy to the LORD,
       the first-fruits of his harvest;
       all who devoured her were held guilty,
       and disaster overtook them,' "
       declares the LORD.

 ⁴ Hear the word of the LORD, O house of Jacob,
               all you clans of the house of Israel.

 ⁵ This is what the LORD says:
       "What fault did your fathers find in me,
       that they strayed so far from me?
       They followed worthless idols
       and became worthless themselves.

⁶ They did not ask, 'Where is the LORD,
       who brought us up out of Egypt
       and led us through the barren wilderness,
       through a land of deserts and rifts,
       a land of drought and darkness,
       a land where no one travels and no one lives?'

 ⁷ I brought you into a fertile land
                 to eat its fruit and rich produce.
            But you came and defiled my land
               and made my inheritance detestable.

Revelation 21: 1-4 

¹Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. ²I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. ³And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ⁴He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."

In Jeremiah’s prophecy, God remembers how he had a loving and devoted relationship with Israel, which is likened to the relationship between a bride and her husband. This is an image which is not only about love, but also about commitment – the lifelong promise to remain together and to support one another which is unique to a marriage relationship over any other; and to a degree it is about ownership. In the culture in which Jeremiah was writing, the bride was the property of the groom, and he therefore carried not only certain authority over her but also responsibility for her care and protection. This relationship did not remove a bride’s ability to act and think for herself – her choice to love and serve her husband was her own and she could choose not to do so.  And this is precisely what we see in Jeremiah’s prophecy. Israel was the bride, the beloved of God. Indeed, some writers compare the passionate love poem we find in Song of Solomon to this relationship between God and Israel. Whether this was the poet’s intention or not, the quality of devotion is the same. God loves Israel, and as bride Israel loved God just as much. But her attention has wandered. She has busied herself with other things, been distracted by the interests of other friends. She no longer shows that level of devotion and commitment that is expected from a wife. The marriage is damaged.

It would be easy to give up hope. The relationship between humankind and God is changed and that special closeness is lost for ever. We humans don’t stay focussed, we don’t stick with God when times are tough and other options are easier. However good our relationship with God might be, the joy of having a relationship with the quality of married love and commitment has been lost to us. But then, almost as the scriptural story comes to an end we are presented with a stunning image of the future. Revelation climaxes with the image of a great celebration at which ‘the Holy City, the new Jerusalem’ is recognised as the bride. Now the wedding is happening and ‘the Spirit and the bride say, "Come!"’ (Revelation 22:17). The new Jerusalem is not merely those people who are part of Israel, but a much bigger group of people who have entered into relationship with the Lamb – that is, the Christ – and who together have a relationship which once again can be likened to the devotion and commitment of a marriage.  

In the Living Brook Benefice the parishes are studying a course which I wrote, and which I call ‘Church: Right Here, Right Now!’ (Some parishes in the Oxford Diocese experienced the same course under the name ‘the Nature of the Church’). In the first session of the course we look at the church as the Bride of Christ. This is an ancient image, and one which is easily tangled with sexual imagery. Perhaps this is why we hear so little preaching on the subject. Then again, for men in the church there is some challenge in associating oneself with the image of a bride! As with all the images which we will look at in the course, they are meant to help with discussion, to help us take to heart aspects of our calling to love, but if the image becomes an obstacle to relating to God then it may need to be quietly set aside.

The bride is the lover of the groom. She is in the closest relationship there can be between two people. In this image the groom is the Lamb of God (Revelation 21: 9), whom we identify as Jesus Christ. Some people will find it difficult to identify with an image of the Church which in human terms has such a strong sexual aspect.  But the marriage relationship is more than merely a sexual arrangement. It is primarily a relationship of strong commitment, of growing understanding and knowledge between two people, of obedience, service and care, all motivated by love. This devoted relationship is the image which help us to understand the nature of the church as holy.

We proclaim Jesus as holy in every Eucharist as we say or sing the Sanctus during the Eucharistic prayer, and we often enjoy singing of his holiness. We refer to certain outstanding historic Christians as holy in calling them ‘saint’, a word rooted in the Latin sancte, which means holy.  It is significant that the groom in our marriage image is described as the Lamb, the one who was sacrificed for us. We associate holiness with sacrifice, with the Cross. The Lamb, the one real sacrifice for us all to end all other sacrifices, is truly holy. The Rt. Revd Rowan Williams writes[1] that in John 17:19 Jesus says:

 'for their sake, I am making myself holy, so that they may be made holy in truth'. And that gives us, I would say, a very important clue as to what Christian holiness is about; here is Jesus, the night before his crucifixion, saying 'I am making myself Holy'. He is going forward to his crucifixion, where by the shedding of his blood, he makes peace between Heaven and earth.

As bride and groom come together in a shared life, that act of peace made by Jesus unites heaven and earth in a relationship which becomes holy.

The question that follows for us is: how then does our being a holy lover of Jesus affect the way that we live out our life as a church community now? We can see the picture of how it will be in the future in the book of Revelation – the new heaven, the new earth, the wedding banquet of the Lamb and his bride to which we invite all people to come and never be thirsty. But how do we live this out in England today?

We already have a settled way of being church. There is great value in much of this. The eucharistic gathering of the family looks forward to the wedding feast and backwards to the moment when the world first saw what holiness really is – when Jesus went to the cross and allowed his body to be broken, his blood to be shed, in order to restore a peaceful and loving relationship between God and his people for all time. He didn’t have to die to achieve that goal. He could have preached and healed and called, and that would have attracted enough people to change the world. But in dying for us he came alongside the suffering in a more real way than he ever could in living. Some Christians speak of the message of incarnation and the message of the passion and resurrection of Christ as though they are somehow separated.  But they are facets of the same stunning story – that Emmanuel, God with us, brought heaven and earth back together; and that he didn’t stop at that – as if that was not enough – he went to the darkest, most difficult and humiliating place to which a man could go and stayed there to the bitter end. Our loving husband Jesus has shown us how to be holy in a world of suffering and pain.

As he did this he instituted the Eucharist, saying ‘whenever you gather and share bread and wine, remember me’. And so it is right and proper that we place the celebration of the Eucharist at the centre of our life as a church. But his action was far more than a ritual involving bread and wine. He gathered people around him and went with them into the hard places of the world he loved; ultimately he went to be God’s presence with us in death and then showed us what God’s eternal life looks like.  This too informs our calling to be church. It is not enough to gather on a Sunday for a ritual service. We need to be the holy lovers of Christ, making peace between heaven and earth as he does.

So in this study we need to consider how we relate to the world around us as holy lovers. How do we relate to each other in such a way that we continue to encourage each other in holiness and learn together how to bring that holiness into the world?

 ⁹But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. ¹⁰Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 1 Peter 2:9-10

As a bride is chosen and called by her groom, in a relationship of mutual love, so each of us – and we all together – are chosen and called by God to be his people. We can choose to respond to this call positively and if we do so we live in relationship with God, and it is a relationship we need to nurture just as a marriage must be nurtured.

We must give the best of ourselves to God. The best of our time, the best of our thought. That can’t be restricted to a slot or two on a Sunday.  It is a full-time calling and may well involve joining with other Christians on other days of the week for worship, fellowship, service and mission, as well as praying and studying on your own or with family members on a daily basis.

And as a marriage relationship can’t be done on our behalf by somebody else, neither can a relationship with God.  The clergy are not there to do our holiness, our loving or our relating for us. It is easy to become mentally and spiritually dependent on the clergy to ‘do church’ for us, but they are merely fellow servants – and servants who are as fallible and needy as all the rest of the church. They will not be standing in for us when we die and come face to face with our Saviour. If at that stage we find that we don’t have a great relationship with God because we’ve done nothing about nurturing it, the clergy won’t be there to help. They will not be any use to us when we are asked whether we acted as holy lovers to the rest of the church and the world. However much we each may have supported our clergy in their endeavours, we cannot use their work as an excuse to take no interest in living out our calling ourselves. When we meet Jesus he will want to know what you did, not what your vicar did.

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[1]  Friday 28 October 2005 Archbishop's Address to the 3rd Global South to South Encounter Ain al Sukhna, Egypt to be found at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1464 (retrieved by the author 21^st December 2009)