Valentine’s Day seems like a secular invention belonging to a world of easy swiping on Tinder.
Or perhaps a way of businesses wanting to upsell you. I did notice a lovely looking deal at one supermarket for three special courses. Chocolates and flower sales spike on around February 14, and that’s all good.
But what’s been forgotten in all this is that St Valentine’s Day is actually a named after a third century priest who was focussed on God’s love. What’s more, the Bible teaches a radically different approach to love than the low-commitment intimacy popularised in modern culture. In fact, it points to marriage as being a metaphor for our relationship with God.
That might sound a bit weird, but I’ll come to that a little later.
Anyway, Valentine, who spent his time ministering to persecuted Christians, was arrested not for organising a bad date but for engaging in evangelism. He refused to give up his faith and was executed by the Roman emperor Claudius II on, possibly, 14 February 269 AD.
As the Bible Society puts it:
It might seem morbid to think about death on a day like Valentine’s Day, but as Jesus said, “The greatest love you can have for your friends is to give your life for them. And you are my friends” (John 15.13–14, GNB).
By reflecting on Valentine’s death we catch a glimpse of an extraordinary love, the greatest love that it’s possible to have on earth.
It’s a love that in itself is a witness (which is what the word ‘martyr’ means) to the matchless love for each one of us that Jesus Christ has…
Some say that St Valentine upset the emperor by secretly conducting marriages of soldiers that had been banned (in order to encourage their enthusiasm for the armed forces). But this seems to just be a nice story.
In an article in National Geographic, Ronan O’Connell writes that 14 February “began as a religious feast marking the execution of a St Valentine”. He adds:
The first mention of Valentine’s Day as a celebration of passion was made more than a thousand years later by British author Geoffrey Chaucer, according to Henry Kelly, a professor in history and theology at UCLA. The author of Chaucer and the Cult of St Valentine, Kelly says Chaucer’s writing instigated the tradition of lovers marking this annual feast. He says many colorful stories now linked to St Valentine were “fictitious.”
The Jewish and Christian significance of marriage
Marriage is a metaphor in both Judaism and Christianity. According to the late Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi:
A wedding ceremony is more than a formality and a piece of paper. The prophets saw marriage as the single most compelling metaphor for the relationship between God and us — because it involves commitment, a mutual pledge of openness and trust, a promise that neither will walk away in difficult times. From that covenant of loyalty and love, new life comes into the world.
The idea also appears in a book by John Piper, This Momentary Marriage. He says:
…marriage, in its deepest meaning, is a copy of Christ and the church. If you want to understand God’s meaning for marriage, you have to grasp that we are dealing with a copy of an original, a metaphor of a greater reality, a parable, and a greater truth. The original, the reality, the truth refer to God’s marriage to his people, or now in the New Testament we see it as Christ’s marriage to the church. And the copy, the metaphor, the parable refer to human marriage between a husband and a wife. In one of the best books on marriage I have read, Geoffrey Bromiley says, “As God made man in His own image, so He made earthly marriage in the image of His own eternal marriage with His people.” I think that is exactly right. And it is one of the most profound things you can say about human life.
Piper talks about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and anti-Nazi dissident who was hanged during the Second World War. At the time, he was engaged. As the Anglican New Testament scholar Scot McKnight explains:
In talking about Bonhoeffer, who was hanged before he could marry, Piper says he “skipped the shadow on the way to the Reality”. After quoting Mark 12:25, [Piper says] “The shadow of covenant-keeping between husband and wife gives way to the reality of covenant-keeping between Christ and his glorified Church. Nothing is lost. The music of every pleasure is transposed into an infinitely higher key”.
What are the implications? “High romance and passionate sexual intimacy and precious children may come. But hold them loosely — as though you were not holding them”. Romance, sex, and childbearing are temporary gifts of God. They are not part of the next life. And they are not guaranteed even for this life. They are one possible path along the narrow way to Paradise.”