Water and blood

Adam's deep-sleep and the building of the Bride

For the Theology of the Sexes course, Alastair Roberts assigned us to read some chapters from James Jordan’s Trees and Thorns together with the first chapters of Genesis. (It so happened that I’d just read Trees & Thorns a few months before taking the course, but I do not count myself amongst those who complain about re-reading James Jordan.)

Amongst the many wonderful insights in that book, Jordan notes that the word used for Adam’s “deep sleep” is not the ordinary word for sleep, the kind we all do each night. It refers to a state more like death. Jordan says that this deep-sleep is “the place where covenants are made; it is de-creation preceding either total death or resurrection” (James Jordan, Trees & Thorns, 110). At least in some symbolic sense, Adam dies. Then, having placed Adam into death, God builds a bride for Adam from his side. Adam wakes again to see this woman, and delights over her with singing. Even prior to the Fall, we see this pattern established: Adam deep-sleeps, his bride is built from his side for him, and he wakes again to see her.

The promise of the seed of the woman crushing the head of the serpent is often called the protoeuangelion, the first gospel. But as Dr Roberts noted in one discussion, before that great promise, we are given this statement about the one-flesh union between a man and his wife, which concerns Christ’s marriage to the church, according to St Paul.

Around the same time that I was having all this fun in Theology of the Sexes, I was also reading Augustine's The City of God for Christian History. This passage caught my attention:

Now in creating woman at the outset of the human race, by taking a rib from the side of the sleeping man, the Creator must have intended, by this act, a prophecy of Christ and his Church. The sleep of that man clearly stood for the death of Christ; and Christ's side, as he hung lifeless on the cross, was pierced by a lance. And from the wound there flowed blood and water, which we recognise as the sacraments by which the Church is built up. This, in fact, is the precise word used in Scripture of woman's creation; it says not that God 'formed', or 'fashioned' a woman but that he built it (the rib) up into a woman'. Hence the Apostle also speaks of the 'building up' of the Body of Christ, which is the Church. The woman, then, is the creation of God, just as is the man; but her creation out of man emphasises the idea of the unity between them; and in the manner of that creation there is, as I have said, a foreshadowing of Christ and his Church. [Augustine, The City of God, XXII.xvii]

This goes some way towards explaining why John makes such a big deal, both in his gospel and again in his first epistle, that he witnessed a spear go into Christ’s side and that both blood and water flowed out from him: at that moment, John witnessed the Second Eve coming from the side of the sleeping Second Adam–who soon would awake to rejoice over her with a song. In Revelation, John sees in a vision the Second Adam making war against the ancient serpent to deliver the Second Eve. She is the New Jerusalem, the wife of the Lamb, the mother of us all.

We are members of his body

The gospel is foretold in miniature even before the Fall. This should give us a fuller vision of the goodness of Christ’s work than the one we might otherwise tend towards. We tend to see the marriage of Christ and the church as gospel because it responds to the problems caused by the Fall. This is quite true: for us men and for our salvation, Christ came down from heaven and was made man.

But there is more going on. As Paul says, the man was not made for the woman, but the woman for the man. In an important sense, the Church was built for Christ, in order that the Word-made-flesh might be complete. As James Jordan says in another place,

God has no inadequacy in Himself. The Father and the Son are always mystically joined by the Spirit. But by becoming man, the Son placed Himself in a position of inadequacy. He now needs completion. He needs a woman to be a complete Man. If He has no bride, He remains forever incomplete. Thus once He became a Man, Christ had to find a bride, and this meant that He had to die for her sins. [Jordan, 95]

Even in those first moments of human history, God had already established the shape of the salvation that was to be revealed in the last days.