Marriage Might Be For The Rich But Jesus Is For Everyone

I happened upon this article/interview this morning and found it interesting, depressing, and probably true, although I’m not knowledgable enough to know for sure. Marriage, concludes the author of this book (which I haven’t read), has risen up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and is now teetering unstably at the top. It’s an exciting time for marriage, but it is also precarious, as the whole institution could easily tilt over and tumble away.

Marriages, he says, are fewer, but better, and are bearing more weight than ever before. Long ago you needed a spouse to help you survive and bring along the next generation. But now you need a spouse to help you grow, to help you flourish and become more of who you are. Although the author points out, you don’t really need marriage for that, you can do it on your own. Marriage is therefore increasingly for the rich who can manage their stress, their lives, and their own expectations appropriately. More and more, marriage, and happiness in marriage, is escaping the grasp of the less financially well off.

My head is firmly planted in Holy Week already, even though the festivities, cough, don’t kick off until tomorrow, so I couldn’t help but think about Jesus while I was reading the piece, and hearing his jangling and terrible words–how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God, harder than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Marriage may now be for the rich, for the those without economic stress, who can choose to have a child at the convenient and suitable moment, but who is Jesus for? On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, after you’ve worked your way laboriously all the way to the tippy top, there you are, you don’t really need marriage, but you certainly don’t need Jesus. It’s the modern equivalent of ascending to the hill of the Lord and being delighted to discover yourself upon your arrival.

Except that every morning I also flip past at least fifty mental health articles. How to become CEO of your own mind. Ten easy steps to get rid of anxiety. Seven reasons to be happy about who you are. Nine ways to make your partner into someone you don’t hate. Three ways to quiet the inner storm of isolation and sadness.

What I love best about the Passion Narrative (at least this morning) is that of all the people swirling around Jesus, he himself is the rich one and the mentally healthy one. He is the only one who has everything he needs. When he walks through the valley of the shadow of death, he can do it and come out on the other side because the entire cosmos obeys him. But he looks very poor. There he is–naked, bleeding, victimized, defrauded, beaten, destitute. Everything he has has been taken away. And everybody around him mocking him, striking him, taking his clothes, defrauding him of justice, they are all rich. But they are also horribly poor. They are the very ones for whom he is laying down his life.

The gospel doesn’t ever seem to get traction in the west any more probably for reasons too deep and too numerous for me to get a hold of. One of them, though, has to be for the same reason the prosperity gospel is burgeoning the world over. We want to go up the hierarchy of needs, we want to get to the top where happiness surely is. Once we get up there, teetering on that single glorious point, all the struggle and strife will melt away. We know this must be true. But while we are going up, Jesus, at that single cataclysmic moment in time, went steadfastly down, giving up one level after another until he was at the very bottom, dead in a grave.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, of course. For no matter where they are and how much they have, they know their true estate. They know they are poor. They know that happiness lies everywhere and nowhere. That the great need nestled, eating away at the core of the heart is only satisfied by a God everlasting enough to satisfy it. Blessed is the one who, whether at the top or the bottom, rushes desperately toward the grave on Sunday morning, anxious and worried, but sure of the one who had nothing, and yet processes everything.