| |
April 20, 2008
|
Transformation
|
Pastor Brian Shimer
|
|
“Behold – The Bride”
Genesis 2:18-24; Revelation 19:4-8; 21:1-4, 9-21 and 21:1-5
- We are in the theme of becoming transformed – being changed. Since Easter we have looked at some of the aspects of
how our souls can be renewed or transformed, last week at the reality of the presence of Jesus with us – another gift in being renewed in our lives is seeing Jesus there—and today at our identity as the bride of Christ.
- All of us have been to weddings –
most likely many of them. And you can testify that for most weddings there is something magical and special that happens when the bride enters the room and makes her way, usually on her father’s arm, towards the groom. While many members of my family are always most interested in the dress worn by the bride, for me in all my experience in weddings, better by far than the dress is the look on the groom’s face when he first sees his bride.
Often he has not seen the bride before that moment on that day, and certainly he has not seen her as dressed to the nines as she is at that moment. So, over his face comes this look of “she’s gorgeous” “my knees are buckling” “I am the luckiest man alive” “wow”. It is all there. Stunned amazement. I love that and it reminds me of Adam’s response in Genesis 2 when he first laid eyes on the woman brought to be his helper, his partner, his co-regent, co-tenant in that garden. His ultimate “knee buckling” response is seen in each groom.
I will long remember seeing it on Jeff Larson’s face when he awaited his best friend Natesa Punzel to come to him down that aisle. As she came and Jeff melted next to me, his best man leaned in and in a low whistle said, “Wow, Jeff, you have done well. She is beautiful!” And Jeff acknowledged this truth with a nod and his quirk of a smile, saying, “Yes, I have, and yes, she is.”
There is something about the bride that takes the groom’s breath away. Remember that thought.
- In the 1999 movie The Runaway Bride
the grooms do not get a chance to ponder the beauty of the bride long with that look of wonder for Maggie Carpenter, played by Julia Roberts, continues to panic and flee from the wedding about half way down the aisle. As the movie opens she has already fled three weddings – once dragging the ring bearer who had been holding her train and did not let go, once on a moped, and once on a horse. The cool thing about the story is how Maggie comes to grips with the need to learn not to run.
Her dash away from marriage, from covenant, is a theme not uncommon in Scripture. Therein we find God’s bride, Israel, fleeing from the covenant God invites her into. In scripture the bride has accepted the betrothal from God, she has entered into the relationship with God only to flee into sin. When Israel rejects God to serve other gods, to bow before idols, this turn is referred to frequently as committing adultery.
Again and again throughout the prophets Isaiah (54), Jeremiah (2), and Ezekiel (6,23), God calls back His wayward, disobedient wife, the people of Israel. In the book of Hosea God calls his prophet to live out this relationship by taking a prostitute as his wife, showing that although Israel had become as the prostitute, still God would pursue her, still God would woo her to Himself.
In the Runaway Bride the pursuer turns out to be Richard Gere, who plays the newspaper reporter Ike, who starts out believing Maggie Carpenter is a “man devourer” who purposefully leads men to the altar only to leave them in the lurch. But he grows to understand that it is a lost-ness within her which leads her to thus flee, and grows to love her. She eventually agrees to marry Ike but flees from that wedding too. Yet, unlike all the other grooms, Ike chases after her.
Maggie unlike Israel had never known a man who would truly know her and love her just for who she is. Unlike Eve in the garden, she had never been fully known by anyone and indeed did not even know herself.
Yet, this man Ike, knew her, knew her heart, knew she was lost, knew she needed to be found, and discover who she was, and still loved her knowing her. This shakes Maggie’s core. She had never known such love from any man.
In one conversation she is telling how each of the guys had proposed to her, and in that conversation he ends up telling her how a guy ought to propose saying, that a guy ought to say:
"Look..." (sits on the arm of the couch) "I guarantee that we'll have tough times. I guarantee that at some point one or both of us will want to get out of this thing. But I also guarantee that if I don't ask you to be mine, I'll regret it for the rest of my life. Because I know in my heart -- you're the only one for me"
It is a poignant moment—the honesty, the tenderness floors Maggie and indeed Ike as well.
- We understand something about the romance of relationships – we have experienced levels of such love and movies like Runaway Bride are popular in this culture because they epitomize the hope of a relationship that is real, honest, open, and filled with a real love between a man and a woman. So much in our lives falls short of the hoped for epitome. So much of our lives we flee from such intimacy, but Scripture and these movies continue to place before us something that God wants us to know and to see – that from Genesis to revelation, His intention has remained unchanged. That is His intention for us, the church, to be the bride of Christ as Israel foreshadowed this union throughout the old Testament.
Ancient scholars in the church saw this union of Christ and the church pictured in the book of Genesis chapter 24 where the patriarch Abraham sends his most trusted servant to go and seek a bride for his son, his only son Isaac by going to his own people up in the area of Haran. The ancient exegetes said as Abraham pictures God the Father and Isaac, God the Son, which is seen in the 22nd chapter where Abraham goes up onto the mountain with his son to offer him as a sacrifice, so the servant is the Holy Spirit sent away to seek a bride for the Son. Similarly they said, the Holy Spirit has birthed the church as the bride of Christ.
This idea of us being the bride, of Jesus coming for His bride, is something repeated throughout the New Testament – from the offer of the cup at the Last Supper being with the same words used by a young groom when proposing to his future wife, to Jesus’ multiple parables dealing with marriage, a feast, the groom coming to call the bride, to Paul’s reference that he had promised the Corinthian church as a pure bride to one husband, Christ, to the closing scenes in Scripture of the bride of Christ coming down from heaven.
<-- V.-->
- What is so challenging with the pictures given in Revelation is that they do not fit our thinking about how the “church” as a bride would look – how is this city seen by John the bride? Are we to end up becoming a “city” – isn’t that rather cold and impersonal? Kind of like the thought we would end up constantly bowing, tossing our crowns down and saying the same thing 24/7.
I think this is the challenge of interpreting literature from passages such as the book of revelation which is what is called apocalyptic literature – meaning that John saw a series of visions with no clarity as to the order of events in those visions, no “literal” representation in them (throughout the book John frequently describes things with the terms ‘it was like’ or the little word ‘as’ showing his visions were of real things put into metaphorical language for there was no other way to describe all he saw).
When interpreting this book it is so important to remember not to take the images given as “exact, literal” images – but as descriptions meant to accomplish one thing for the reader. John wrote the book to bring blessing, we read in the opening verses, to encourage and strengthen the one who read or heard it. It was not a book meant to give times or dates of the coming of Christ. It was not written as an end-times manual. It was written to encourage –
No matter what you are encountering on earth, there is much happening in the heavenly realms around you and there is one thing certain: God is in control and Jesus is real and personal and the final victor. Because of this, you, wherever you are, you can overcome.
The book ends with a great chorus of praise—you heard it in the 19th chapter that there will be a wedding of the Lamb with His bride and there will be a wedding supper in heaven. In the 21st chapter John is invited to come and see the bride and sees a Heavenly City of Jerusalem coming down from heaven, as a “bride dressed for her husband”. This is the “dwelling place of God with men” we are told. God will live with us. We will live with God. God will be our light, Jesus our lamp, and from this city will flow a river and the tree of life will grow on both sides of the river. All this we read – the life of God will flow from this place, a place of light, of joy, and most of all, a place of love.
Imagine if all this imagery is given in wedding terminology – think of all the intimacy, passion, and love that must be embodied in these descriptions. This will not be a cold place but a warm, full of joy, loving place.
And if we are to become this bride adorned for her husband, the Lamb, Jesus, the Lion of Judah, then also know that this groom will have more joyous light in his eye than we ever see in any groom.
- Speaking of grooms, the movie Runaway Bride ends with Maggie coming to grips with her own lostness, beginning to express the gifts that Ike first encouraged her to walk in, and returning to Ike to ask his forgiveness, give him her running shoes and ask if he could possibly still marry her.
He hesitates at first, stunned by the fact that she had come to grips with the reason she had run before and stunned to be holding her running shoes. So she pulls up a chair and says back to him the exact thing he had said to her earlier in the movie.
"Look... I guarantee that we'll have tough times. I guarantee that at some point one or both of us will want to get out of this thing. But I also guarantee that if I don't ask you to be mine, I'll regret it for the rest of my life. Because I know in my heart -- you're the only one for me"
Ike gets up from where he had been sitting on the balcony, turns on some music and comes back to her, holding out his hand, says: “Dance with me.” She does and they marry.
I guess it just reminds me of Jesus, the ultimate groom, who has already extended his hand to you and to me and invited us to dance with him in the fullness of the life of the trinity which the ancient greek scholars described as the “Dance of God”. And it reminds me that as every groom has that “knock me over” look in his eyes, so does Jesus as he looks at us and delights in us. And best of all it reminds me that all of life really does have a “happily ever after” ending. That no matter what happens, this life ends with a wedding.
|
|
|