The Promise Was Made in the Plural

The lounge at Thornbury smells of dinner an hour after dinner, and the chairs have been pushed into a shape that is trying to be a half circle and is not managing it.

Duncan is here every third Sunday for his aunt, who is ninety-one and who holds his hand the whole time and calls him by his father's name, which he has stopped correcting because she is happier this way.

A volunteer has brought a keyboard on a stand. Twelve residents. One asleep with his chin down and a hymn sheet on his knee. One singing a completely different hymn with great commitment. A woman by the radiator who does not sing but mouths every word, and a man at the end who joins in only on the last line of each verse, loudly, like a man arriving at a bus stop just as the bus does.

Before the last hymn the volunteer reads two sentences from a card and one of them is this: the church is the bride of Christ.

And Duncan, who has heard that phrase his whole life and never once asked anybody about it, looks round the room. Twelve armchairs. Somebody's tea going cold on a wheeled table. His aunt's hand in his.

This?

That is your question too.

You have nodded through that sentence at funerals and weddings and Sunday mornings, and it has never gone anywhere in you, and you have not asked because it seems like the sort of thing everybody else understood years ago. And underneath the not knowing sits something sharper: if there is a company that God is pleased with, you are fairly certain you are on the edge of the photograph, standing behind somebody taller.

The word is a plural and it has always been a plural

Let me take the sentence apart with you, because the confusion is not your fault. It is a translation problem that English has and Greek does not.

When Paul writes the line this image comes from, he is writing to a church. A whole congregation in a port city, arguing with each other, some of them wealthy, most of them not, several of them in trouble. And he says this to all of them at once:

For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I promised you as a pure bride to one husband, to Christ.2 Corinthians 11:2

Every single one of those words for "you" is plural. He is not telling one Corinthian about their private inner life. He is telling a body of people what has been done concerning all of them together. You are inside that plural, and you were inside it long before you knew the sentence had one. In English we lost the difference between one you and many you, and the whole picture got shrunk to the size of a person, and it has been causing quiet trouble ever since.

You are part of a company Christ has committed Himself to. That is what the written sentence actually says when you read who it was addressed to, and it is His Spirit who joined you to that body rather than any decision of a committee. The promise came to a people. You are in the people.

So let me rule out the other reading, once

It is not a romance.

Nowhere in Scripture is a person put in a private romantic relationship with Christ, and if that framing has ever made you uneasy, your instinct was sound and you should keep it. The bride language is covenant language about a company: chosen, bound to, provided for, brought home. It belongs in the same family of words as a nation being called God's own people, and it is about the same size.

That matters practically, and here is why. A romance is something you have to be attractive enough for. A covenant made with a people is not. You have a place in this that does not depend on being anybody's first choice. The word says Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her, corporately, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put you inside that body, and nobody in the room got in on their own appeal.

Look back at the lounge for a moment. A man asleep with his chin down. A woman who mouths the words. That is not a poor version of the bride and it is not the waiting room for the real one. Scripture has never once described this company as the impressive.

Nobody in that room is on the edge of the photograph

Now the part I most want to hand you, because I think it is the thing actually sitting on your chest.

You have spent a long time being the person nobody sends for. You know the feeling of a room where the arrangements are being made about somebody else, and the habit of standing slightly outside it so that being left out never quite lands as a surprise.

You were included by a promise, not by a selection. His word says He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, us, a plural, and the Spirit He gave is the deposit guaranteeing it, and none of that language admits a back row.

I am not going to hand you a list of things to be, either. Getting ready is His work and it is done to the whole company, and no article should ever make you personally responsible for the state of the church.