Christian Living

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Girls have it easy. Now, before you ladies get the old lynch mob together and hunt me down, let me explain. In traditional/old-fashioned society, the girl’s job is basically to wait for some guy to come along and realize how amazing and beautiful she is and then sweep her off her feet and take her away and do all sorts of other romantic things I don’t understand. Sure, she could give signs and leave clues to try and lure the ones she actually liked, but even if she did miraculously run across a guy able to pick up on those kinds of things, her role was still basically passive. I understand that’s not always how it works now, but I think the basic paradigm still holds, especially in Christian circles.

Boys, on the other hand, have to take stock of all the girls around them, try and figure out some method to help them sort through them and figure out which ones are really worth their time (i.e. the ones they might have a chance with), and then go about the guerrilla reconnaissance work of getting to know her and learning about her without tipping their hand about how they really feel so she won’t get freaked out and run away to a convent and never talk to him again. I realize that might sound a little too dramatic, but that’s what it feels like.

And I haven’t even gotten to the hard part. Whenever the Bible employs the marriage metaphor, Christ is the groom and the Church is the bride. That is, Christ is the one who seeks us out, knows all about us, makes all the plans, and presents us with the invitation. All we do accept his offer. He pays for everything, gets us all ready for the big day, and then goes back and raves about us to his family, telling them how beautiful and perfect we are, things that aren’t true but will be eventually. We don’t initiate any of this. That’s the job of Christ, the groom, the man.

So when you look at human marriage as a metaphor for Christ’s dealings with the Church (as Paul does in Ephesians 5), the woman’s role remains pretty much the same: Accept and respond to the initiation and action of the groom. There’s just that one set of rules, that single script to follow.

But it’s different for men. In the spiritual picture, we’re the passive, immature bride, responding to the leading of the one we know is infinitely stronger and wiser than we are. In the human realm, though, we’re asked to switch roles. We’re expected to be the initiator, the active one. That is, the script has been rewritten with us in the Jesus role. (More than can handle, to understate it grossly.) We get to know the exhilaration of asking and offering, but we also experience the bewildering disappointment of rejection, the agonizing confusion, the second-guessing. And that’s the really hard part.

I don’t know how Jesus does it, where he finds the strength to ask again and again.

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