In Psalm 128, the Psalmist declares that for the man who fears the Lord, his “wife will be like a fruitful vine” within his house. With the following verse offering a picture of his children like olive shoots around his table, it makes sense to interpret the fruitfulness of the wife as her offspring: the blessing of the Lord on a woman is the blessing of children.
This idea is echoed in the pattern of barren women miraculously blessed with children that marks the history of Israel as well as the narrative of Jesus’ birth. The barren womb signals a lack not simply of offspring to carry on the family line, but also a lack of God’s favour. The reversal of barrenness becomes a vindication: God has in fact turned his face towards the expectant mother.
The identification of fruitfulness with children and God’s blessing continues today. Particularly in conservative Christian circles, in which the family is argued to be under attack, threatened by shifting cultural mores and norms, men and women are exhorted to familial fruitfulness: get married and bear children, solidifying their family unit against secular culture’s onslaught.
In this picture, singleness and childlessness continue to bear the meaning they held in the world of the Old Testament: signs of brokenness and a lack of God’s favour.
Yet this picture does not ask what difference, if any, the coming of Christ makes. Instead, it becomes what my seminary professor Erika Moore described as a “synagogue summary”–an interpretation of the text that fails to read the text through the coming of Christ. There is no indication, in this picture, that Christ has come and transformed the center of the community of God–no longer Israel, with its families and tribes.
In the kingdom of God that Christ has inaugurated, the family does not evaporate. Honor is still due to parents; care and love are still due to children. But these qualities are not necessary because the family unit is the key institution in God’s kingdom; instead, it is because these qualities mark those who have been made fruitful by the Spirit.
Too often, it seems to me, the “tradition” invoked by contemporary defenders of family values is one of the recent past. It is not the dominant tradition of the church, which has for centuries supported and encouraged men and women to forsake marriage and the building of a family for the sake of devotion to Christ. While at one point marriage was denigrated as a necessary evil, the Reformers insisted that marriage an honorable vocation. Yet Protestants, one could argue, have made the opposite error, elevating the nuclear family above all other relationships in a way that obscures Christ’s reorientation of our relational priorities.
We rightly praise those who have lived out this reorientation. Mary “Ma” Slessor, George Mueller, Mother Teresa, Pandita Ramabai: their lives do not fit a reading of Psalm 128 that idolises the establishment of the nuclear family and a single pattern of blessing and fruitfulness. This is because Christ redefines fruitfulness–not by the number of children a wife bears, but by the proliferation of the Spirit’s work in the lives of those who have been united to Christ.
In a christological reading of Psalm 128, Christ becomes the ‘blessed man,’ and his wife is, of course, the Church. In this reading, the woman’s fruitfulness is the fruitfulness of the Church.
Even more, some have identified Christ not only with the blessed man, but also with the fruitful wife. Medieval devotion often meditated on the Church as being birthed through Christ’s side wound, and medieval art often depicted this interpretation. As Grace Hamman writes, “He is the mother of the church, his wounds the womb through which we are born again. As our lover, he is profoundly fruitful.”
It is his primary fruitfulness that enables those who have been united to him to be fruitful as well. The Spirit does this work of fructifying Christ, and fructifying his Church: filling him and us with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.