I started reading The Odyssey last week. This is yet another book I’m sure I was assigned and am even more sure I ignored. Like Roy Hobbs said to Harriet (sports star serial-killer) Bird, “The only Homer I know has four bases.” While the poem hasn’t “knocked the cover off the ball” for me yet, I’ve still got a couple thousand more lines to swing at.

The part of the story that provoked this post finds our hero, Odysseus, stranded on the island of the Phaiakians trying to get back to his wife, Penelope. He meets Nausikaa, a young girl out doing laundry, who seemed to him to be someone who could help him get home. Odysseus addressed her with the following flattery.

May the gods give you everything that your heart longs for; may they grant you a husband and a house and sweet agreement in all things, for nothing is better than this, more steadfast than when two people, a man and his wife, keep a harmonious household; a thing that brings must distress to the people who hate them and pleasure to their well-wishers, and for them the best reputation.

Here in Washington state, on a much less epic level, imagine a man outside of Safeway who needs gas money to get home. He observes a young woman with well-ordered hair coming out of the store with her friends and figures that she might be able to help him. If he flattered her about her marriageability, not only is it possible that she’d be frightened, she might be outraged. “How dare you assume that a woman would even want to be married!” or, “What gives you the right to say that marriage is between a man and a woman?”

Homer wasn’t a worshipper of the true God. The gods of his culture were nominally moral, and inconsistent at that. The stories told for entertainment included all sorts of the worst sexual immorality. And yet, these winged words from Odysseus reveal a worldview that still had some original, Genesis 1 and 2 image-bearing residue.

I’m discouraged that civilization in Homer’s day had a more civilized appreciation of marriage than ours. But the biggest whammer is that the first spouses to blame are within the church, not outside of it. If Christian husbands and wives actually enjoyed each other, if they demonstrated the glad dance of sacrificial love and submission, then maybe more people would desire marriage rather than deride it. Perhaps married life would once again seem natural.

I’m not arguing that Homer’s message makes it around all four bases. I’m arguing that Christians need to repent and take their marital image-bearing more joyfully for sake of our society and the next generation. May God grant such sweet agreement.