Knowing from comparison. . .

There are those who would suggest that any knowledge of anything must proceed from the thing itself.  In this idea, comparison is a false source of knowledge about something or at least an incomplete one.  Odd, because knowing by comparison is exactly how Scripture treats knowing.  We know ourselves in comparison to God, for example.  The knowledge of self and the knowledge of God arises from a comparison.  Remember when Job addressed his questions to God?  He did not get the answer he expected.  Instead, God compared Job to Himself as if to say to Job there are limits of what you can know or what can be revealed to you because you are not God and I AM.  Culture as well as much of Christianity has rejected this and presumed that the most authentic knowledge of self proceeds from within.  We know ourselves by knowing God.  That is not a fruit of the fall into sin but a dynamic present from the first moments of creation.  The rejection of God or knowing self by knowing God leaves one left with a question of where to begin and how to know yourself.  It is this that has left us with the pursuit of of self that is exclusively internal and not in relation to or in comparison to another.  Even Christians sometimes talk as if God were a little added extra instead of the means by which we know who we are, why we are, what we are to do.

This is also an important idea in knowing not only self but what it means to be male and female.  Even in ordinary speech we refer to our spouses as the opposite sex,  That is not a joke.  Maleness and femaleness arise from our relation or in comparison to each other.  Of course, our modern ideas have rejected this and thus has arisen as normal the perfectly odd idea that being a woman is a choice or a conclusion to be arrived at -- just like being a man.  It bears not upon DNA or chromosomes or reproductive organs but upon a feeling formed by the self without any real input or question from outside the person.  Though some fear that such a relational or comparative identity will result in division, conflict, confusion, or inequality, it is the exact opposite of this.  The relationship identity or comparison begs for clarity and unity and a certain equality born not of decision or reason but of basic need.  Male and female are not complete without the other.  The Scriptures do not say that man may, if he wants, leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife but for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall be one flesh which no one can divide.

Of course, this is messy but it is whole lot less messy than where we are now.  When we have arrived at a point where we cannot describe or define what it means to be a man or a woman, we have created a situation of extreme poverty and want that will certainly prevent us from knowing who we are as well as knowing others.  It is the fruit of a radical individualism in which only the self matters and only myself.  Marriage becomes not simply optional but no longer essential or necessary.  Man and woman are joined as one not simply for the sake of the other but for their own sake.  This is how they know who they are, their purpose upon this earth, and the future ordained for them.  Marriage is not an impediment to this realization but in one profound sense its facilitator.  Though we live in an age in which life has devolved into a reality based upon feelings that cannot be challenged or denied, we were ordered for marriage and for family and to cast off these constraints is to keep us from knowing our place, purpose, or completion.  

Nowhere is this more true than in the manifold ways that Scripture uses marriage to describe the relationship of the people of God to God Himself, the people formed in Christ by baptism with the Christ who is their bridegroom to them, the bride.  This is not simply an image but the shape of reality.  Christ has not come to transcend this but to fulfill it so that it might be ours and we might belong to Him forevermore.