The Matrimonial Mystery of the Biblical Narrative
(This essay was originally submitted as an assignment for a course in biblical theology at the University of Notre Dame.)
The opinion of the early Church Fathers is that the Old and New Testaments, despite being composed by many human authors over the course of many centuries, together reveal one coherent narrative—one oikonomia—that charts God’s dealings with His chosen people throughout the past, present, and future of salvation history. In this essay, I will draw on the text of sacred Scripture to argue that the hermeneutical key to the biblical narrative is marriage. In essence: God is saying to humankind, to Israel, to the Church, and to each one of us: “I want to marry you,” and Scripture tells the story of our frailty, His fidelity, and the final fulfillment to be found in “a new heaven and a new earth,” when in the fullness of time God will have summed up all things in Christ, both in heaven and on earth (Revelation 21:1, cf. Ephesians 1:10). The following ten passages trace this biblical narrative.
Genesis 1: Male and Female Are Together the Image of God “God created man in his own image…male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’” (v. 27-28). It is notable here that the first chapter of Genesis describes man and woman together as the image of God—intimating that one or the other, by themselves, would somehow be lacking. And while the human author of Genesis 1 may not have had the Blessed Trinity in mind, we of course know that this union and call to fruition are part of the imago Dei precisely because God is Himself a community of Persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—whose eternal exchange of love is both the source and the end of every good thing.
Genesis 2: It Is Not Good for Man to Be Alone “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him’…Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman’…Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (v. 18, 23-24). Here, as Jesus himself says (cf. Matthew 19:5), we see a poetic account of the institution of marriage, a natural and primordial bond that Christ the Lord would eventually raise to the dignity of a sacrament among those who are baptized into His body the Church (cf. CCC 1605, 1660; Acts 9:1, 4-5).
Genesis 3: The Fall and its Consequences for Man and Woman Unfortunately (or fortunately—O felix culpa!—as the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil says), this prelapsarian state of marital bliss did not last for long, and the sin of our first parents brought on consequences for both man and woman. For woman: greater pain in childbearing, disordered desire for her husband, and disordered subjugation under him (v. 16). For man: the curse of difficulty and toil in farming the land (v. 17-19). And for both: shame before one another (v. 7) and before God (v. 10), as well as the ultimate punishment for sin, namely death (v. 3-4, 19, 22-24).
Hosea 1-3: Israel’s Infidelity to God as Prostitution Throughout the many centuries which then elapsed from the dawn of human history through God’s covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, and all the way into the rise and fall of the kingdom of Israel, God’s chosen people often wavered in their faithfulness—in their willingness to “keep up their end of the bargain” with God. The life of the prophet Hosea, who hailed from the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8th century BC, serves as an analogical account or microcosm of Israel’s own idolatry and infidelity. “The Lord said to Hosea, ‘Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry, for the land commits great harlotry by forsaking the Lord’…I will punish her for the feast days of the Ba’als when she…went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the Lord” (1:2; 3:13).
Isaiah 62: Your Land Shall Be Espoused, Your Builder Shall Marry You And yet, in one of Isaiah’s most beautiful and consoling prophecies, God’s own faithfulness is extolled and the ultimate triumph of His love for Israel proclaimed: “You shall no more be termed ‘Forsaken’, and your land shall no more be termed ‘Desolate’; but you shall be called ‘My delight is in her’, and your land ‘Married’; for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married…And as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (v. 4-5). The ultimate gift that God, the divine Bridegroom, could give to His Bride, the Church, is of course the gift of Himself—and this is exactly what He would do “when the fullness of time had come” in the person of Jesus Christ, true God and true man (cf. Galatians 4:4).
John 2: The Wedding Feast at Cana The opening of the Gospel according to John is rife with references to Genesis 1, and so it is no accident that the wedding feast at Cana occurs on the seventh day of the narrative; it is as though St. John intends to point out that the very God who made man and woman in harmony on the sixth day of creation has now entered into that creation and taken up His work again. At the prompting of the Blessed Virgin, Jesus effects His first miracle, one which not only preserves (one can only imagine the couple’s embarrassment if Jesus would have allowed the wine to fail!) but celebrates the harmony between a newly-married husband and wife. “This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (v. 11).
Matthew 22: The Parable of the Wedding Feast, No Marriage in Heaven At a later point in his public ministry, Jesus would equate the Kingdom of Heaven to a wedding feast, noting that God offers the opportunity of salvation to “both the bad and the good” (v. 10), but that obedience to God’s will is a necessary part of meriting this gift of salvation (v. 11-13), and it is for this reason that “many are called, but few are chosen” (v. 14). And on “the same day” (v. 23), he would also remind the Sadducees that “in the resurrection [to eternal life, people] neither marry nor are given in marriage,” because marriage is a sign pointing toward the eschatological fulfillment of the love between Christ and the Church (see the section on Ephesians 5 below). Of course, signs are no longer needed once one has arrived at the destination. Marriage is no longer needed when the plenitude of self-sacrificial love that it points toward is realized for those whom God calls to His heavenly banquet.
Matthew 25: The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins Our Lord enjoins us to be vigilant, though, admonishing that we “watch, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour” when the Bridegroom will come (v. 13). This is in reference to the customary Jewish wedding practice, in which a man and woman were betrothed but not yet living together until the husband had built a house (or “prepared a place,” cf. John 14:3) for his wife. When the house was prepared, the bridegroom would travel during the middle of the night to the home of his bride, arriving at an unknown hour, and with a procession of their companions he would take her to himself. “The Kingdom of Heaven shall be compared to ten maidens who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom…and [only] those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast” (v. 1, 10; cf. Psalm 45:14).
Ephesians 5: Marriage as a Sign of the Love Between Christ and the Church The genesis of this essay came from my reflections on the end of the fifth chapter of Ephesians, where after discussing the conduct of husbands and wives toward one another, St. Paul quotes Genesis 2:24 (just like Jesus did!) in reference to marriage, and then makes the rather sudden and profound statement that marriage “is a great mystery [a great sacrament, an enormous sign, a magnum sacramentum], and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church” (v. 32). Here again we see God’s love for humankind, Christ’s love for the New Israel which is the Church, analogized to the love between husband and wife: she is subject to her husband, but no longer in the disordered way of Genesis 3, instead “as the Church is subject to Christ” (v. 24); and he loves her no longer selfishly, “but as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (v. 25). Therefore, St. Paul says, “Let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband…because we are [all] members of his body…the Church” (v. 33, 30, 29).
Revelation 21: The New Jerusalem as a Bride Adorned for Her Husband The eschatological fulfillment of the matrimonial covenant will come at the end of time, when husbands and wives will no longer be married to each other, but instead each will enjoy the profound relationship of intimacy and love with the persons of the Blessed Trinity of which their sacramental marriage was only a foretaste. For “the form of this world is passing away” (I Corinthians 7:31), but once “the first heaven and the first earth [have] passed away” (v. 1), there will be “[a] holy city, [a] new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (v. 2, cf. Isaiah 61:10), and at long last “the dwelling of God [will be] with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them…[with] the Bride, the wife of the Lamb” (v. 3, 9).