Love is for Life: Pastoral Letter of the Irish Bishops
PART I God's Plan For Love


(8.) MARRIAGE RESTORED IN CHRIST

41. The Old Testament's promise of a new and everlasting covenant and of a restoration of humanity to the glory and perfection of its first beginning is fulfilled in Christ. As St Paul says: "However many of the promises God made, the Yes to them all is in Christ" (2 Corinthians I :20).

42. Our Lord himself, in his teaching about marriage, appeals explicitly to the situation as it was "in the beginning", before the Fall. Christ restores marriage to that glorious condition from which it had miserably fallen through human "hardness of heart". We read in St Matthew's Gospel:

Some pharisees approached him, and to test him they said, "Is it against the Law for a man to divorce his wife on any pretext whatever?" He answered, "Have you not read that the Creator from the beginning made them male and female and that he said: This is why a man must leave father and mother, and cling to his wife, and the two become one body? They are no longer two, therefore, but one body. So then, what God has united, man must not divide".

They said to him, "Then why did Moses command that a writ of dismissal should be given in cases of divorce?". "It was because you were so unteachable", he said, "that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not like this from the beginning" (Matthew 19:3-9)

43. This restoration of the original order which God laid down for marriage "in the beginning", is a constant element in the whole Christian tradition. Christ restores all things, bringing about a "new creation" . We enter into that new creation by baptism. Indeed, baptism makes us members of the very body of Christ, which is the Church. It makes us sharers in Christ's very nature as Son of the Father; and Christ is, in his own person, the New Creation. He is "the first-born of all creation" (Colossians 1: 15), the one who "makes the whole of creation new" (Apocalypse 21 :5). As St Paul says:

For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here. It is all God's work. (2 Corinthians 5:17-18)

44. It is by baptism that we begin to live "in Christ" and in the Church, and therefore within the New Creation. The Church is the beginning of the making new of the whole creation. The sacrament of matrimony is part of the restoration of all things in Christ. The marriages of baptised persons were referred to by St Paul as marriages "in the Lord" (cf. I Corinthians 7:39). Christian marriage was seen as marriage restored to its original condition, before the first sin. What the prophets promised about marriage is, for Christians, no longer a promise for a far-away future. In Christ, the promise is fulfilled. The Prophets presented the covenant in terms of marriage, and thus related marriage to the covenant, God being the Bridegroom, Israel the Bride. In the New Testament Christ is shown to be Himself the Bridegroom of whom the Prophets spoke. His Bride is the Church and all humanity, called to membership of his Church. Marriage is the sacrament which signifies Christ's love for mankind. The sacrament of matrimony reflects Christ's love to the world through the love of husband and wife.

45. The sacrament of marriage in the New Testament era has its prototype in the covenant-marriage between Christ and the Church. Christian marriages share in the reality of that covenant-marriage between Christ and his Church. It is St Paul who develops this doctrine most fully and most beautifully. In his Letter to the Ephesians, he writes:

Husbands should love their wives just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her sake to make her holy. He made her clean by washing her in water with a form of words, so that when he took her to himself she would be glorious, with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless. In the same way, husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies; for a man to love his wife is for him to love himself. A man never hates his own body, but he feeds it and looks after it; and that is the way Christ treats the Church, because it is his body‹ and we are its living parts. For this reason, a man must leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one body (Genesis 2:24). This mystery has many implications; but I am saying it applies to Christ and the Church. (Ephesians 5:25-32).

46. Christian marriage is called by St Paul a "great mystery"; and we remember that the word "mystery" is the earliest name for a sacrament. The sacrament of matrimony signifies the love of Christ for His Church, that is, the love whereby the Church exists, the love which the Church is. Matrimony contains within itself the love of Christ for the Church; indeed it contains within itself in miniature the Church itself. One of the early names for the Church was "the love". The Church exists to witness to Christ's love for humanity and to communicate Christ's love to men and women. The special vocation of married people, in virtue of their sacrament of matrimony, is to reveal to others the love which the Church is and to share with others the love which Christ gives them for one another. Marriage, the Vatican Council says, is "a community of love". Married love says to others: "this is how Christ loves his friends". In a special way, matrimony enables a couple and their family to be the Church. Early Christians called the home "the domestic Church", "the Church in the home".

47. Matrimony is a sacrament; Christ is at work in it, as in all the sacraments, operating the great works of his redemption through signs which both signify and effect his redeeming work. These signs point to the paschal mystery of Christ's Death and Resurrection, and each sacrament makes that paschal mystery present and powerful at a particular point in our lives. In the sacrament of marriage, the sign is the love between husband and wife, solemnly pledged and plighted in the exchange of marriage vows . The partners are themselves the ministers of the sacrament of matrimony. Their vowed love is the efficacious sign whereby they become ministers of Christ's grace for one another. The greatest gift they ever give to one another is the gift of Christ's grace. Husband and wife are only human beings, whose pledge is no stronger than their own weak humanity. Yet, through the sign of their love, Christ is there; and "power goes out" from him (cf. Mark 5:30) to the couple, as it went out to those he touched during his earthly life . Christ is ever present with them as they struggle, day by day, to stay faithful, to surmount crises together, to overcome temptations, to resist discouragements, to forgive one another as God has forgiven us, to love one another as Christ himself loved the Church. Christ loved supremely on the Cross. As Blessed Angela of Foligno said: "It was not in fun that Christ loved us". Christian marriage is marriage under the sign of the Cross. That means readiness for suffering; but it also means promise of the Resurrection. It means assurance of the ultimate triumph of love.

48. Married people have a special experience of the Cross in their lives. They experience its pain; for married people can and do inflict misunderstanding, hurt and wrong upon each other. They also experience the power and victory of the Cross; for they learn that love can grow through pain and suffering, and that married love can be deeper and more mature after forgiveness and reconciliation than it would have been if the forgiveness had never been necessary. It is because Christ's own death-conquering love dwells in their human love that a bridegroom and bride can have the courage to say to each other:
I take you as my wife (husband)
and I give myself to you as your husband (wife)
to love each other truly
for better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health
till death do us part.

49. It is through the power of Christ's love, dwelling in theirs, that married people can have for each other that love of which St Paul so beautifully speaks:
Love is always patient and kind;
it is never jealous, love is never boastful or conceited;
it is never rude or selfish;
it does not take offence, and is not resentful.
Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins
but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse,
to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.
Love does not come to an end...
In short, there are three things that last:
faith, hope and love;
and the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7,13)

50. It is significant that in this passage St Paul, who is writing in Greek, uses a term for "love" which is different from the term used for human love by the Greeks of his time. The Old Testament had only one verb and noun for both human love and divine or religious love. But the New Testament writers found that the Greek word for love had become so debased and corrupted in the contemporary culture of their time that they could no longer use it as a term for Christian love. To name God's love for men and men's love for God and the love which Christ calls us to have for one another, the New Testament writers used the Greek word "agape", or love-charity . The question has been asked whether the term "love" is not once more becoming so debased in our own day that it almost needs some explanation or addition when we use it to name Christian love. So often nowadays, in popular song and speech, the word "love"means only physical sexual love‹or even sexual lust. This is why Pope John Paul can say that the Church's moral teaching about sex is a programme for "putting love into love". It is a call to make human love between man and woman, and specifically to make sexual love, an expression of love-charity. It is indeed none other than the New Commandment given us by Christ:
Love one another;
just as I have loved you,
you also must love one another. (John 13:34)

51. The fundamental vocation of Christian married partners is to love one another as Christ has loved them. In the words of Lacordaire, they must each aim to be the other's "particular Christ". Their love, sealed by the sign of the Cross, looks to Christ on the Cross . Not only do they find here the model of the love they are called to have for one another; they are also made capable, by the crucified Christ himself, of having that love for each other, and of persevering in it through all difficulties and renewing it in spite of all failures. Their vocation is at the same time a wider one. Christ's love reaches out to all, and so the love of husband and wife reaches out to their children and beyond their children to their children's children and to the community. They become channels of Christ's love. The special vocation of married people is to show how the world can be made new by Christ's new commandment: "love one another as I have loved you" (John 15: 12).

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Net publishing courtesy of the Newman Center at Caltech

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