An additional piece of reading in advance of the Yearly Meeting sessions on Committed Relationships:

The idea of marriage, including the closeness and wholehearted commitment which marriage  entailed,  meant that in the Bible it was used as a metaphor for the relation between God and his people Israel (in the Old Testament)  and between Christ and his people the Church (in the New). So if you were looking for a way to describe a relation to God which involved  promise made and accepted, commitment (covenant), care, patience, love, failure and forgiveness/reconciliation – you might choose the analogy of marriage. It’s a sacred, mysterious thing, says Paul.  Human marriage points to something deeper – to a kind of love between Christ and his people.

Here is the 8th century BC prophet Hosea speaking. He had once had a wife who was adulterous and now he speaks on God’s behalf about the religion of his day. His message is that God, the injured ‘husband’, is constantly trying to woo back a straying partner (the people) which goes around committing idolatry with gods (baalim) to which she hasn’t covenanted in ‘marriage.; So the Biblical picture of the God- humanity relationship is sometimes of a tender, longsuffering husband, ever reaching out to reclaim and reconcile a straying wife who forgets her marriage vows. God says-

“But now I shall woo her, lead her into the desert and speak encouraging words to her. I shall give her her vineyards again . . . there she will respond as in her youthful days, as when she came up from Egypt [i.e. the Exodus]. On that day she will call me ‘my husband’ and not ‘my Baal’ . . . you [says God to the prophet] bestow your love on a woman loved by another man, an adulteress, just as I the Lord love the Israelites, although they resort to other gods and love the raisin cakes which are offered to idols’. (Hosea 2:14-17 and 3:1)

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