p/c Beatriz Pérez Moya via unsplash
Over at Logos I wrote a piece last year about the theme of Division-Multiplication in Scripture. You can read it here, if you’d like. As we approach an All Saints wedding this weekend my thoughts are drawn to the creation of Eve and to the way that marriage is itself a picture of this pattern of Division-Multiplication.
The first three days of creation are all prototypical Division-Multiplication events:
God takes undifferentiated chaos and divides the Day from the Night. Abundant life results from the division, Day-and-Night Morning-and-Evening, Light-and-Dark are more than the parts of Chaos, its something more, there is more potential, more life, more flourishing. God sees it is good.
God separates the waters above from the waters below. This is more than a distinguishment of species. The separation creates a new and more glorious union. Now there is a firmament, now there is depths, now there is —and this is key for us and other animals— space in between the deep places and the high places. More potential, more life. It is good also.
God separates the dry land from the waters and creates land. Land-and-sea is not just a synonym for swamp. There are now new and more and different things which were not prior. God divides and in doing so multiplies. Glory to glory. It is good.
Following this pattern God takes the body of the Man, Adam, and applies the same procedure: he lays him into the ground from which he was taken, puts him into a death-like state, and divides him, separating him. But what results is not just two halved-Adams. No. It is something new, something more: Adam-and-Eve. This is very good. Their state is blessed, which means fruitful and having the potential for life.
But, notice, what God creates is not merely two private selves (another Adam, in that case, would have sufficed just as well as an Eve). He creates two different things which are then ordered towards a more glorious whole. The goal is not a mere re-union of two halves. No. That’s the vacuous flaccidity of Gnosticism. It is rather a new kind of union that results in even more life, more division, more diffusion of the divine gift of being. “They shall become one flesh” is not a call to mutual absorption or to homogeneity. It is the call to complementary exaltation. The life they share together, as one, is the life of each laid-down for the other.
Our bride and groom on Saturday will be, like waters above and the waters below or the loaves and fishes of Jesus’ feeding of the 5000, lifted-up blessed and then broken. Their lives will become fully One Flesh, even as they prepare in a new way, like the one loaf of the bread at Holy Communion, to be broken and given away, and, in the giving-away, multiplied.
Their new and glorious unity will lead them to even deeper participation in the mysteries of division and multiplication. As work, and taxes, and years, and memories, and church-life, and the possibility of children, and the life of the Gospel will call them together and singly to continues the work of division, the promise is that when God divides he multiplies, and when he multiplies he also gathers us into a greater and more glorious unity —Deo gratias!