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The Sign of Marriage

Fr. Paul Ward

Homily

Nuptial Mass, Saturday, April 14, 2007

Sweetest Heart of Mary Parish, Detroit

            “A certain wise man, when enumerating which blessings are most important included, ‘a wife and a husband who live in harmony.’[1]  In another place he emphasized this: ‘A friend or a companion never meets one amiss, but a wife with her husband is better than both.’[2] From the beginning, God in his providence has planned this union of man and woman, and has spoken of the two as one: ‘male and female He created them’[3] and ‘there is neither male nor female, you are all one in Christ Jesus.’[4]”[5]

            On this great night, the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday – a pledge that God’s mercy shall surround your marriage every day until death – we have gathered to witness and celebrate the marriage of John Damiani and Muna Oram. This is the sacred hour, when they will exchange vows before God to one another, and give themselves up for one another, in imitation of Christ, who gave himself up for his Church, and of the Church who is impeccably faithful to her Lord. Therefore, let us leave for a moment the festivities and external celebrations, for those things are not what matters; what matters is the sacrament, celebrated before you and in your midst. So it is weighs upon us to reflect once again upon the spiritual reality of marriage, the invisible reality unseen by human eyes. And this we shall do by meditating on the scriptures.

            Let today’s message, then, be for John and Muna. But for all of us present, let it be a renewal of our assent to the Church’s teachings regarding marriage, an opportunity to repent if perhaps your marriage has been less than what God wants it to be, a renewal to renounce sin and live like followers of the Risen One, and a confident conversion to the Lord of Mercies.

            First of all, marriage is a mystery, and the world, full of sin and hatred for God, is completely incapable of understanding marriage. The Church has it right about marriage; the world has it wrong about marriage. How are we to understand this mystery? Very simply, for we shall do it through Christ, for he, and he alone, is God and the source of all graces.[6] So let us go step by step.

            In our first reading,[7] we read, “Happy the husband of a good wife.” And there is a meditation on the wife. This is easy to understand, for the bride of Christ is the Church. When the scripture says, “the beauty of a virtuous wife,” it is a proof that true beauty, everlasting beauty, is found in the virtues. She is chaste and thoughtful, she is prudent in speech and chaste in conduct. For this is how the Church is with Christ, and so should a bride be for her husband, which is a boon for the Christian family. Twice the bride is referred to as a “gift,” she is a “generous gift,” and the “choicest of blessings.” For in marriage, the spouses give of themselves, and this sort of self-giving is most perfectly manifest in the virtuous bride, for she lives in love, and “it is characteristic of love to think first of the beloved.”[8] Why is the good wife compared to the sun in the heavens made by God’s hands? What sun does to the world, so a good wife does in her home: governs it, gives it order, bestows warmth, dispels darkness, brings joy, causes understanding to prevail, brings out the beauty in other people and things.

            The mystery of marriage is greater still. I mean that it is a sign of something more perfect and greater, something eternal. I mean that marriage in this life can make man happy, but never completely satisfy his heart. As St. Augustine says, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” [9] Marriage, understand, is a means to an end, and it ends in this life. The end is to love God with all your soul, with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength; and second to this, to love your neighbor as yourself.[10]

If this is the purpose of marriage, and marriage indeed conveys the graces to grow in this love in the most marvelous way, then the worst enemy to your marriage will be sin. Many sins encroach upon marriage in our day, and you know them. America as a nation is rife with the enemies of marriage: divorce, divorce and remarriage, contraception, infidelity, impurity, abuse of the spouses, and so much more. You therefore may have to fight, from time to time, to keep the devil, the flesh and the world at bay, and be faithful to your marriage.

But more is to be said about the mystery of marriage. For in the beginning, God was the one who made man male and female. He was the one who created marriage, and the loving union of man and woman, blessing marriage with the qualities of indissolubility, unity and openness to fertility.[11] Do you remember when he did this? He did it on the sixth day.[12] The scriptures point out three aspects of the union of man and woman in the beginning, and they are fruitfulness, dominion and blessing.

Jesus came into the world, causing a sort of second Genesis, a new beginning. In the first beginning, there was darkness.[13] In the second beginning, there was the Word.[14] Yet it was this very same Word, the Son of God, through whom all things were created in that first beginning. So the first things are patterns, figures, models of things that were later to come, when Jesus, who is the Son of God, would reveal everything to us. The standard of marriage, therefore, is given in Adam and Eve as a pattern, a figure or a model, but the real thing is found in Jesus Christ. Therefore Jesus is the teacher of marriage and of all the sacraments, virtues and truths which save us. What does Jesus reveal to us about marriage? Ah, too much for one little homily.

But allow me to detain myself on today’s Gospel, the wedding at Cana of Galilee.[15] I hope no one skipped over the first words, “On the third day.” For watch what marvelous things happen in these first verses of the Gospel of St. John. The expression “third day” recalls to us the day the sun was made; and is not the wife like the sun in her home, as we have said? It also recalls the newness of life given us by the resurrection “on the third day.” Yet the expression does not tell us everything, for it was not the third day.

In chapter one of the Gospel of John, the first day was when the Jewish priests and Levites questioned John the Baptist in the desert, asking, “who are you.”

Then verse 29 we find the expression, “the next day.” The second day is, therefore, when John sees Jesus and exclaims for the first time, “Behold the lamb of God.”

Verse 35 repeats, “the next day,” and this day is when the first apostles become acquainted with Jesus. It is the third day.

Then verse 43 states, “the next day.” It is the fourth day, when Philip and Nathaniel meet the Lord. There is much meaning in all of this, but let us press on to the next days.

For now we come upon the first verse of the wedding of Cana, and lo, what do we behold: “On the third day.” If we add these three days to the fourth day, we come upon the striking realization: it is the seventh day. It is the sabbath of the Lord.

And so Jesus Christ reveals to the world that the rest of God is a wedding feast, indeed, the wedding of himself and his bride the Church. It is a sabbath recreated to imitate grace. It is a sabbath of the new covenant in the blood of Christ. For marriage is the covenant, wherein the couples say, this is my body, given up, yes, given up for you, albeit only analogously to the self-gift of Christ in the Eucharist.

Let your marriage, then, John and Muna, be lived not only as the union of man and woman intended by God at the beginning of time, but lived also spiritually, by helping each other attain sainthood. Let your marriage covenant be frequently nourished by the covenant of the Eucharist. Do not live as those of the world, who have no hope, and who strive to satisfy their hearts with passing goods. If you love each other, stand now before the altar of God, and promise to give yourselves away, as Christ did; promise to one another to strive after sainthood; promise to defend one another from the wiles of the evil one; and promise to give aid to the whole Catholic community and the whole world, so that more and more souls, through your example and word, may find their eternal salvation. Amen.