wedding clothes
“I guess it’s about that time,” Kevin says, glancing at the clock and then at me, meaning time for us to set aside our books and our lazy attitudes, time to get dressed in our wedding clothes. I think of the dress I bought, hanging upstairs on a hanger in the closet, the silver brocade scrolling across the bodice, the layers of sleek navy crepe falling in diagonal waves down the skirt. I think it’s beautiful, fitting for the occasion certainly, but in some ways too elegant for the truth of me. And yet, in the back of my mind glimmers the reminder of Love, the promise that God’s glory will one day be revealed even in me.
I untangle the knot I’ve made of myself, unfolding my legs, carefully replacing my bookmark, and wander upstairs, wondering if I can transform myself. I cannot; that’s the truth. For now, it will just be me, but me as God has recreated me, adorned in a lavish dress.
The whole idea draws my mind back to words Jesus prayed, words I lingered over this morning, my thumb carefully sliding over. I wanted to memorize God’s heart.
“Father, the hour has come,” He prayed. It’s about that time. “Glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began (John 17:1,5).”
As He anticipated the cross, Christ longed to return to what He had before the world began. In four words, He claimed His eternal divinity. I try and fail to imagine the true essence of Jesus, uncloaked by the limitations, the vulnerability, the mortality of human flesh. In scripture, God has given us clues, as much as we can handle. At the event we call the transfiguration, “his face shone like the sun and his clothes were as white as the light (Matthew 17:2).” To John, exiled on the Isle of Patmos, Christ appeared, “like a son of man, dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters (Revelation 1:13-15).” It’s enough evidence to reveal that in actual essence, Christ looks more intimidating and stunningly powerful than we can imagine.
This morning, sitting on the porch holding a steaming cup of coffee in my hands and feeling every bit like the barest essence of myself–rumpled, vulnerable, sleepy-soft, I looked up the word translated glorify because I wanted to understand what Jesus longed for in those last hours before the cross. In ancient Greek, doksázō means, “to ascribe weight by recognizing real substance (value).” The lexicon elaborates with the thought that, “glorifying God means valuing Him for who He really is.” In the Greek, dóksa, the word for glory, like its corresponding word in the Hebrew Old Testament, kabo, meaning heavy, conveys the ancient economic idea that weightier things–thick, precious, plentiful things set on scales–have more intrinsic value. The weight of the eternal Presence of Christ, by virtue of His value and vast, incomprehensible (to us) substance, has crushing proportions. Halfway up the stairs, I think of the superincumbent weight of the sea.
Paul says that, while in our mortal bodies, we long to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, with immortality, “because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked (2 Corinthians 5:2,3).” This morning, I felt it, the nakedness Paul describes. I feel it now, my feet pressing into the floor. Elsewhere, in a letter to the Galatian church, Paul wrote that all who have been baptized into Christ have “clothed yourselves with Christ (Galatians 3:27). I long to be clothed, am literally preparing to put on my wedding clothes. Christ enigmatically used this exact action–dressing up for a wedding–to describe the absolutely critical preparation of a soul for eternity (Matthew 22).
I lift the dress from its hanger. It feels weighty in my hands, all that brocade, those layers of crepe. Heavy. Glory. Glory. Glory, I think, letting that heaviness sink over my shoulders. Not my glory. His. Scripture says that the weight of glory achieved in us will be so great that our heaviest, longest held burdens will feel “light and momentary” by comparison. The idea in scripture is not that we will have suddenly become valuable, but that God will one day ascribe to us the kind of weighty presence that expresses what has always been our true, intrinsic worth to Him. Naked since Eden, we will at last be clothed.
Meanwhile, Christ, having been clothed with our vulnerability for our sake, longed to be unbound. Before He would be clothed again with His glory, He would allow himself to be stripped naked, completely and fully taking our nakedness Himself, and He would allow Himself to be hung, exposed, on a cross, so that we could at last be dressed. Facing this, He hoped in what He had before, for us as well as for Himself: the full acknowledged weight of His identity as God and King. Glory, glory, glory.
I cannot imagine, I’m thinking, wordlessly turning so Kevin, who instinctively responds, can zip my dress and secure the eyehole hook at the neck. I prayed for a husband who would point me to Christ, and Kevin, by grace, God gave to me. Even this tiny moment turns me toward divine intimacy. It’s not as though scripture points to a singular holy enrobing, but instead it suggests that all of this life may be imagined as the process of getting dressed, like a bride does so carefully, so elaborately, for hours, as though with His every touch, Christ helps us into our identity. As Paul describes it, we are “being transformed into his image with ever increasing glory (2 Corinthians 3:18).”
Now dressed, I finally turn around to face my husband, sighing a little. “Okay, I guess I’m ready then.” I lift the skirt with my hands so I can walk. Heavy.
Kevin smiles, warm, all love, and says lightly, as though it’s a breath, “Beautiful.”
