Marriage images Christ’s union with his Church

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Gn 2:7ab, 15, 18-24
Second Reading: Heb 2:9-11
Gospel Reading: Mk 10:2-16

Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis says that “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” Chapter 2 says that God created the man first, but then made the woman “as his partner.” The man clung to his wife, and the two became “one flesh.”

Therefore, said Pope St. John Paul II, a human images God not only as ruler of the world, “but also, and essentially,” as a “divine communion of persons.” God ordained the communion of man and woman “right from the beginning.”

Throughout salvation history, God expressed his love for his chosen people as conjugal love.

In the Old Testament, he reproached Israel: “I remember the devotion of your youth, how you loved me as a bride.” “But like a woman faithless to her lover, even so have you been faithless to me, O House of Israel.”

However, he continued to woo her: “I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart,” he said. “She shall respond there as in the days of her youth, when she came up from the land of Egypt. On that day she shall call me ‘my husband,’ and never again ‘my baal’” (“lord” or “master.”)

God comforted Israel and encouraged her: “He who has become your husband is your maker; his name is the Lord of Hosts; your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel, called God of all the earth … For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great tenderness I will take you back.”

He promised to be faithful to her: “I will espouse you to me forever … and you shall know the Lord.”

In the New Testament, Christ described God’s Kingdom as a wedding: “The reign of God may be likened to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his Son.” Asked why his disciples did not fast, he revealed himself as the bridegroom: “How can wedding guests mourn so long as the groom is with them?”

God’s love for us reached its “fullness” when the bridegroom Christ sacrificed himself on the cross for his bride the Church, said Pope St. John Paul II.

Finally, the Book of Revelation describes Heaven itself as the marriage of Christ and the Church.

In his encyclical Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”), Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI says that the Bible’s marital language is not just God’s attempt to describe his love in human terms.

God, “the absolute and ultimate source of all being,” the “universal principle of creation,” is “a lover with all the passion of a true love,” he says. God loves “with the love of a person”; his love “may certainly be called eros.”

The institution of marriage as ordained by God was officially recognized as one of the Church’s sacraments at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.

Now a sacrament is an observable sign that actually brings about the spiritual reality it signifies. In matrimony, that sign is the spouses’ free consent, consummated by the marriage act. The spiritual reality it signifies is Christ’s union with his Church. By the power of God, then, spouses’ consummated consent really does create between them the relation between Christ and the Church.

Accordingly, St. Paul used Christ’s love for the Church to teach us about matrimony, not the other way about. God’s love came first; human love images it.

A consummated marriage, then, is a sacramental sign of Christ’s indissoluble, faithful, and fruitful union with his Church. Consequently,

1) it cannot be dissolved by any power on earth. “What God has joined together, let no one separate,” Jesus said.

2) it demands total, lifelong fidelity.

3) it must be open to the birth of children, for Christ’s union with his Church leads to their re-birth as God’s children, so that, as St. Paul says, God may bring “many sons and daughters to glory.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English in both written and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 3, available on YouTube starting Oct. 3, is “Who is Jesus Christ?”