Adam and Eve and Anniversaries
After the Fall, what do we married people have?
Anniversaries are special. They mark yearly remembrances of significant life events, events that mark seminal, formal moments that shape us. Despite our modern embrace of reforging word meanings (perhaps I should just say deforming), we can’t altogether escape from older notions of anniversaries as truly important occurrences in time. For instance, I think we all instinctively recognize that anniversaries of coronations and marriages vastly outweigh, say, a monthiversary of a flexitarian diet. Sure, good for those who are learning to stick to something that’s improving their health. But that’s not remotely in the same league as Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee or Grandpa and Grandma’s seventy-fifth anniversary.
I’m thinking of marital anniversaries in particular because Jon and I celebrated ours this past week. I’m also thinking of them because I just reread the beginning of Genesis. I don’t actually remember what Biblical readings our ceremony had (note to self: look this up), but the last section of Genesis 2 is a popular Old Testament text included in many Christian weddings. Here God promises to make a partner fit for the single Adam, and He does. And Adam speaks words that testify to the visceral, deliberately created connection between him and his wife:
This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.
I love the beautiful imagery of God literally building Eve fit just for Adam, just as He had already made Adam fit just for Eve. It was a perfect Eden and a perfect marriage. From the start, our first parents literally shared a match made by heaven.
And then it all went wrong. Physically divided, spiritually broken, Adam and Eve’s marriage went from a God-ordained good, a full and true good, to one saturated and wrecked by the knowledge of evil.
It occurred to me this last week that Jon and I have a kind of inversion of what Adam and Eve experienced. Our marriage in 2004 happened in a full-throatedly sinful world. We individuals living in the early twenty-first century could never pretend to have had some kind of paradisical start, though modern romance would like the world to think this is the case. We have inherited our first parents’ woe, and thus our marriage has always existed in a sinful mire. Despite our relative youth in the created order, we are elders to Adam and Eve in that we are descendants of generation after generation after generation of married (and yes, probably some unmarried) sinners. Though it’s not popular to point this out around or at weddings, it is accurate. I also think it’s valuable for any young people looking toward matrimony to consider. No matter how much passion and ardor a couple might possess, the two will inevitably face the consequences of sin—within themselves, against each other, and in their marriage as a whole. All men are Adam and all women are Eve after the Fall.
Please understand: this does not mean that marriage itself as a God-ordained institution is wrong. It means that we are sinners are, and that’s why marriages are hard, even the best of them. They are full of sin and of sinners.
Adam and Eve had to live this reality after the Fall for the rest of their lives. In many ways, I think they had the hardest marriage—one that had been literally perfect that they both, either actively or passively, ruined. It would have been easy for them to despair of what they had lost, to despise themselves and each other for what they had destroyed.
But they didn’t, as far as we know. So we are like them in this way. We started out flawed and will continue that way, but not forever. Like them, we look forward in hope. Eve means “the mother of all the living.” There’s a Lutheran Study Bible note on how Eve’s very name points to the promise of God in Genesis 3:15, that a Savior will come from their line, from One of their children. Adam and Eve weren’t going to fix their mortality. Neither do we. But they placed their trust in the coming of Christ, as we do.
We also don’t try to strive for an unattainable perfect union in this life. But we grow together in hope for Christ’s return. Like Adam and Eve mucking together outside of Eden, Christ is building us, too. He is pulling our disparate personalities together, prodding his introvertedness toward more one that is more outgoing, calming my extroverted excitement to more introverted quiet. He is making us more patient toward each other and others. He is giving us love and mercy that we absolutely do not have within our brittle, selfish hearts.
Being married over time means coming to terms with the inevitable holes in our relationship—the different interests which can be selfish but sometimes not, the miscommunication that can be pridefully purposeful but sometimes not, the vacancies in some silences between us. Sin makes us clueless and ignorant of things that, in a perfect world, would be completely clear. We will always be inhibited by our inherited blindness. But we also know Who can make us see, and Who can help us to see, really see, each other.
I appreciate some things I’ve heard and read recently that have emphasized the Hebrew roots of the word typically translated as helper. A better word would be adjutant, which emphasizes the martial relationship of Eve’s role as wife to Adam’s as husband.1 Yes, I mean martial, not marital, though I think the words have a natural connection, and not in an ironic way. A man and a woman like Jon and I, are bound together in Christ, and we act at our best in unity, with a very specific, united focus. We live in the church militant, and our family is part of that. We know that the prince of this world is constantly working against us. But we have our own little brigade, a special, small unit in this war between God’s good and Satan’s evil. When we remember this, that with each other we are knit together in Christ for His purposes and common causes, it is much easier to see our roles as working in tandem, one vital to the other, moving together in time toward what He has planned for us.
Adam and Eve lost Eden, and so did we. And yet God gave us Christ and eternity. In our marriage, we live and struggle as we wait for the fulfillment of Christ’s second coming and the end of days. Meant to be eternal, we mortals bound together look with hope, to our temporal future, yes, but even more to our heavenly one. And God continues to bless our time, turning us back toward Himself. Anthony Esolen writes about this beautiful, ongoing learning:
I think it is an earnest of our immortality that we can stand to the side of time’s river, and let things long past continue to dwell in us; and not just as remnants, either. Who knows, but that some experience I have long forgotten will someday return and be a powerful and central part of my future days? Prodigal sons don’t always come to their senses so soon. Sometimes the healing famine doesn’t strike until people are quite old, and then they may say, hobbling on a cane, and partly foggy in the head, “I shall arise now, and go, and go — to where I was young, my Father’s house.
In our marriage, we pray to not be prodigals, though we can drift into it all too easily. And how do we keep from forgetting? How do we remember what we have been given, and how to live with the eternal gifts Christ has bestowed? How in the world do we keep repenting to God and to each other and receiving the forgiveness we so desperately need?
We hobble back to our Father’s house and to His table, to eat of Christ’s good gifts. This is not a destructive tasting, like Adam and Eve by that cursed tree, tearing them and the rest of us apart. This is a reconstructive one, one that God sets before us and feeds us, moving us back again together towards Him. We pray He continues to keep building us and feeding us together all the days of our married life. We pray He carries us on through life’s mundane toil, its incredible joys and crosses. And we give Him thanks for the anniversaries He has granted us.
I can’t remember which podcast episode I heard this in, but it’s in the Marriage Enrichment series with Rev. David Petersen on Issues, Etc. You can listen to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 in the links embedded here. And you really should listen to the whole thing if you haven’t already.