the relationship between friendship, obedience, sacrifice, and love. But the occasion of the day invites us to try to understand how friendship, obedience, sacrifice, and love are important for marriage. This seems to present no great difficulty, as we naturally associate these aspects of our lives with marriage—indeed we tend to think marriage is the paradigm instance of love—they go together like a horse and carriage. It is therefore tempting simply to take the texts for this ceremony as an excuse to wax eloquent about the relation of love and marriage, friendship and marriage, etc.
Yet to follow such a strategy avoids the force of this text from John, for as so often in John, Jesus does not just tell us to be loving—he commands us to be loving. Nor does Jesus say that he is ready to be our friend without reservations; rather we are his friends if we do what he commands. For, as he reminds us, we did not choose him, we did not claim him as our friend, but he chose us that we might bear fruit. Thus, Jesus does not make some general recommendation that it would be a nice thing if we were to be loving in a manner consistent with being his friend. Therefore, the question cannot be, what is the relationship between marriage and love, but between marriage and the kind of love and friendship that Jesus commands.
Rather than taking on that question directly, I would ask us to reflect a little on our assumption that there is a natural relationship between love and marriage, friendship and marriage, sacrifice and marriage. For in spite of our strong assumption that love is connected with marriage, indeed that it is the very essence of marriage, it is unclear what we mean by this. For example, we soon learn that the feelings, emotions, and choices that we call love in the first blush of our relationship often have little in common with what we find marriage necessarily must become. The sheer joy we feel at being recognized by another often gets lost in the tedium of our lives; or worse, we find such recognition can only be sustained at the exorbitant price of the loss of self. We will do almost anything to command the gaze of the other, even if it means leading the life they choose for us, rather than the life we would choose for ourselves.
For genuine love requires the recognition of the other as other—i.e., as a being not under our power. Instead, we often assume that that love is greater the more each shares in a common purpose that diminishes our otherness. Such a notion of love gives the basis for the most perverse forms of love as the self avenges its loss by hating as well as loving the other. Thus, as we become the object of such perverse love (a love, to be sure, that is often celebrated as the highest ideal because it asks great sacrifices from us) we are recognized as somebody who has our name and our looks—but who is denied recognition as the other.