No Ordinary Marriage by Tim Savage

Author:Tim Savage [Timothy B. Savage]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3036-4
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE MIRACLE OF ONE FLESH

We seldom seek to plumb the riches of this term, often regarding it as a self-evident metaphor. In marriage, two lives converge. They become one flesh. It’s as simple as that! Yet the expression “one flesh” cannot be so easily negotiated. If nothing else, it suggests a perplexing mathematical equation in which one plus one equals one. How can that be? Many struggling romantics would pay dearly for an answer. We shall discover that embedded in these two words is a miracle of unspeakable beauty. To mine its riches, we must solve the riddle: What does it mean to be “one flesh”?

In the Bible, the word flesh is used to describe what a person is at the core of his or her being. Hence when two people become one flesh, they unite at the deepest level. They become, as it were, ontologically one. Such a dramatic union represents far more than the sum of shared interests or the bond of sexual intimacy. It is a fusion of souls, an organic commingling of two individual lives.

What does it look like in practice? Helpful clues have been deposited in three biblical passages where the term one flesh appears. In Genesis 2 we read: “A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (v. 24). The next verse helps to unravel the meaning of one flesh: “The man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (v. 25). The two partners, it seems, were unaware of their individual nakedness. Perhaps it was because they were so focused on each other that they were unconscious of their autonomous selves. How can there be shame where there is no self-consciousness? Instead, they were lost in the unblushing joy of attentiveness to the needs of the other.

This suggests a dramatic insight: when two selfless lines of focus intersect, somewhere between the husband and the wife, a brand new entity begins to emerge in which two people actually become one person, the glowing result of the self-giving compassion of both parties. Does this sound mysterious? It should! According to Paul, the drama of one flesh is a profound mystery (Eph. 5:32).

But it is a mystery to which further insights may be added. In a second biblical passage where the term one flesh appears, we read the following from the lips of Jesus: “‘A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh” (Matt. 19:5–6). The second sentence points to a dynamic reorganization within marriage. Husbands and wives are no longer two apart but one together. Like the fusion of a sperm and an egg, they become a new organism. The fusion does not dissolve their original personalities but redirects those personalities toward each other in such a way that the best traits of each spill out into the other.

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