A Juliet For Romeo

After finding so little feminine imagrey in Scripture, I closed my books and picked up photography as a hobby, thinking that the idea had hit its last dead end. But I couldn’t put the study out of my mind. So I would think about it, and go with different ideas until they dead-ended too. But one night, I was thinking aloud with Miranda; it was four am in the morning, and suddenly I realized that God had built into the whole narrative story, a female prototype. The thought just came to me—as though out of thin air: it’s the church.

Look again at this well known passage in Ephesians: “For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything” (Ephesians 5: 23-24). Though the verse doesn’t come out and say it, the whole premise of this section is that because Christ acted, so husbands should act. Just as the Church responded, so wives should respond. For thousands of years people had been getting married and it was very unclear as to why. The reason, humans instinctively covenant with one another, is a mystery only revealed since Christ walked on earth. The mystery of marriage is that it shows us how Christ and the Church are in relationship with one another. (Ephesians 5:32) But the concept of the Church being the feminine example isn’t just in this section, it’s everywhere.

The feminine model of first, the chosen Israelite people, and then the Church, is the main character in the riveting story of how God has come to save His bride. This study has completely transformed my life, the way I see God, and my relationship with Him. These ideas have changed the message I live to the world through my femininity, because a powerfully redeemed woman represents the Church who God rendered heaven and earth to be in communion with. This message is the purpose, the heart, and the passion behind this study of femininity: we become more feminine women in order to grace the gospel, and to manifest the glory of the beautiful cross.

If you are reading this, and you do not consider yourself to be a Christian, it might be obnoxious to you that I bring everything back around to what may seem to you as unnecessary religious thought and jargon. The reason that Christians are always talking about ‘the cross’, and ‘the gospel’, is that this good new, the knowledge that we are not marked by our own abilities or works any longer, but that God Himself, in flesh, was so moved with compassion (and passion!) that He fully satisfied His justice so that He could be true to His nature, and still be with the Bride that He loved is...life altering. It is so life altering that when you ‘get it’, we call that conversion. It’s like a newlywed obnoxious bringing everything back around to their love story. And is this one a love story! It is the love story every love story is patterned after. It is dark in some places, God even seemed to give up on His bride who continually committed adultery against Him, and even wrote her a certificate of divorce. But the story isn’t finished.

It is in this story, that men learn what true masculinity is, and women learn what it means to be beautiful and alive as women. But the bigger point is, that we all learn who God is. And that’s the point. If you are a Christian, God has enabled you through His forgiveness to have an identity and a purpose that is bigger than yourself, and I would add, a feminine identity and a feminine purpose if you are a woman.