Matrimony

Note: This is only a sketchy outline needing to be fleshed out. I certainly do not represent this as anything at all complete. It is simply an aid to be used in exploring more deeply the subjects and ideas put forth. Hopefully it will provide the user with a contextual framework from in which to develop further the ideas I have set forth here for discussion.

• SCRIPTURAL SOURCES:
  
  Genesis 2:18-28
  
  
  
  
  • Marriage is not for procreation alone; it is for procreation as well as for the mutual bonding of the partners in love.
    
    
  • Man and woman are equal partners. Eve being made from Adam's rib means both are made of the same stuff. Furthermore, being someone's "rib" denotes equality and partnership as well as intimacy.
    
    
  • Man and woman are both images (icons) of God; both reveal the nature of God.
    
    
  • The creativity of sexual difference and of our reproductive power is "very good", as distinguished from God's creations during the other five days after which God declared them to be only "good".
    
  
  
  Exodus, Chapters 19-35
  
  
  
  • God's love is expressed for us in that we are "chosen". Being chosen is the same thing as being loved.
    
  
  
  The Book of Hosea
  
  
  
  • presents a profound image of God's love for us; God marries Himself to our humanity even though we go whoring after other gods. He remains faithful even after our infidelities!
    
  
  
  The Song of Songs
  
  
  
  
  • A vivid love song in which God woos us and we woo Him as lovers, as bride and groom.
    
    Theological Note: Christ depicts Himself as the Bridegroom of Israel. Thus he depicts Himself as God, the One who loves Israel, His bride. See Mark 2:18-21; Revelations 19:7 and 21:9.
    
  
  
  Proverbs 5:15-20
  
  
  
  • Fidelity = Covenant and Covenant = Fidelity. Divorce is an evil, a tearing apart, a separating that is the opposite of the original order of Creation found in the union between Adam and Eve. (cf. TWENTY-SEVENTH OF THE YEAR (Lec.# 141) B-Cycle 6 October 1991).
    
  
  
  Matthew 19:1-9; 22:1-14
  
  
  
  • Christ restores marriage to the full dignity originally intended by God in Genesis, at the dawn of creation. Furthermore He restores it to the dignity of the Covenant marriage between Yahweh and His people, Israel. Divorce and the breaking of the Covenant went hand-in-hand in the history of Israel.
    
  
  
  Ephesians 5:21-13
  
  
  
  • This is the great controversial passage when it comes to the alleged subordination of the role of women to that of men. But NOTE that the burden of the passage commands husbands to be servants of their wives! Husbands are servants of wives because Christ, the Suffering Servant, loves His Bride in such a fashion. (Note the washing of the feet at the Last Supper, the "Wedding Feast of the Lamb"). In the Church we do not "lord it over each other" as the pagans are wont to do.
    
  
  
  
• COVENANT OF SINAI
  
  
  
  1. Liberating/commitment, freeing/embrace, death/life event. Such is the paradoxical "stuff" of marriage.
     
     
  2. God's Covenant freed Israel to BE. Love should give us the freedom to be all that we can be, to become greater than we were, to become more of what our self was created by God to be and has the capacity and destiny to be. Energies shift from "the pursuit" of courtship to the growth found in marriage.
     
     
  3. An Old Testament theme was that Israel was "the virgin Daughter of Jerusalem," and therefore totally open to the implantation of God's seed within her. Hence, the seed that is God's Word becomes flesh through the Virgin Mary in her being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. In that moment the Christ is conceived in her womb. (Note also the imagery of the Spirit "brooding over the waters" in Genesis and the baptism of Christ in the Jordan). Note also the active Presence of the Spirit in the Church's "birth" at Pentecost!
     
     
  4. Note too the symbolism of the Easter candle and the baptismal font presented during the Easter Vigil's baptismal liturgy! God impregnates His Bride, our Holy Mother Church, so she is fecund, giving Him children in His New Creation.
     
  
  
  
• CANA AND THE LAST SUPPER - GOSPEL MARRIAGE BANQUETS
  
  
  
  
  1. On their wedding night, when they went to the bride's chamber and prepared for bed, the groom would get down on his knees and wash his bride's feet. The symbolism was not lost on the apostles when, on the night before He died during the Lord's Supper, Jesus got down on His knees and washed their feet. IT WAS A SHOCK!! He was doing something terribly intimate, even nuptial! Thereupon Jesus stood up, looked them in the eye and declared: "I no longer call you slaves, instead I call you friends." With that he said what grooms say: This is my body, take it. This is my life's blood, mingle it with yours. Thus the Lord's Supper is called "The Wedding Feast of the Lamb."
     
     
  2. Cana opens (in John's Gospel) the miracles of Christ and lets loose in our world God`s power to change things. The peak is reached in the Lord's Supper, the last of the "Signs" (Great Miracles) of John's Gospel. Christ's "hour" comes and the nuptials between divinity and humanity are consummated.
     
     
  3. Love means "transforming power" in biblical imagery. Things change when love enters our lives; things change tremendously when Divine Love enters. What was thought to be sterile and what was thought to be impossible becomes now possible!
     
     
  4. "This is the chalice of my blood" means: "This is the transmission of Divine Power to overcome sin." We no longer need to be steam-rolled by sin - Christ is victim no longer; we no longer need lay down and die in front of the onslaught of hate, prejudice, jealously, infidelity, anger, oppression, militarism, racism, sexism, materialism, consumerism, and all of those other noonday devils that beset us. We need be victims no longer. Read now Psalm 91!
     
     
  5. This is the New and everlasting Covenant. Hence, once again, no divorce! I will be your God, you will be my people. Even though you turn your back on me, even though you spit on me, crown me with thorns (see Hosea again!) even though you crucify me and let my life and love slowly ooze out of me into the ground, I WILL LOVE YOU!! I will come back out of the grave to love you because nothing can make me not love you. You cannot kill my love.
     
     [It is upon this that all Christian marriage is built.]
     
     Theological Note: Even though we cannot kill Love we can let our relationship with Love die within our self. Hence the opposite of love is not hatred, it is indifference. In His teaching, Jesus continually reminded us that the opposite of faith is not doubt, it is fear. The opposite of love is not anger, it is indifference. There is no greater insult we can offer God than to know that He is offering us His love and His life - and then yawn in His face!
     
  
  
  
• MARRIAGE AND PRIESTHOOD (1 Corinthians 13:1-13)
  
  
  
  
  1. The husband causes the wife's grace, and the wife causes the husband's grace. Both challenge and summon each other to journey from the "already" into the "not yet". To live up to this passage in St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians seems, in the eyes of the worldly, to be impossible. "With men it is impossible, but with God, all things are possible", Scripture tells us. Only a love that is divine can withstand the tensions of two people living in bonded intimacy of the kind Christ calls us to. Marriage isn't supposed to make them happy, it is supposed to present them with work that will save them. Happiness is a by-product, not the reason for their union. Of course we want married couples to be happy, but God didn't put them on earth to make others happy. He put them on earth to accomplish His purposes.
     
     Like a priest, each is called by God (vocation) to trans-substantiate the substance of human struggles for intimacy. They thereby transform the sufferings found in that struggle. This becomes a Sacrament of God's action and movement. This becomes a Sacrament of His call to intimacy between us.
     
     
  2. "Every Christian, especially the Christian priest, must be a witness. To be a witness consists in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist." [Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris].
     
     
  3. Christian marriage doesn't make any sense at all unless God exists. Celibacy doesn't make any sense at all unless God exists. Celibacy and marriage are flip sides of the same basic and radical position that we take before Life, Death, Love and Reality. Both demand a radical dependence upon God.
     
     
  4. There is an intrinsic bonding between love and life. That's why love creates life. Also, there's a deep, intimate, covenant-union, a permanent and ordained pair-bonding between a man and a woman (as distinguished from a boy and a girl) that is intended by the Creator of Life to be the milieu, the ground, in which and upon which babies should be born and thereupon enter into life. Such a pair ARE THE CHURCH, the "domestic Church" for the child which they and God have co-created.
     
     
     
     
     1. The Sacrament of Matrimony is, therefore, a Sacrament of the Church. The couple ARE the Church for their baby.
        
        
     2. Just as the Persons within the Holy Trinity authenticate, actuate, and discover who they are in their inter-personal relationships, so also do we (made in the image and likeness of God) discover, authenticate, actuate and cause our selves to be, to exist, in such a milieu.
        
        
     3. Marriage is indissoluble because its sacral and sacred significance is grounded in the indissoluble marriage between Love and Life. It is not conceivable that the Church could ever love any other than her Lord Christ, the Lord of Life.