Sunday -- Second Week of Ordinary Time C

Today’s readings invite us to reflect on the Sacrament of Marriage. In the first reading the Prophet Isaiah describes the ruined city of Jerusalem as an abandoned wife. When God her husband comes back:

No more shall people call you “Forsaken,”
or your land “Desolate,”
but you shall be called “My Delight,”
and your land “Espoused.”
For the Lord delights in you
and makes your land his spouse.
As a young man marries a virgin,
your Builder shall marry you;
and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride
so shall your God rejoice in you. 

Today’s gospel also invites us to reflect on marriage. Jesus blesses a wedding with his first miracle, a sign of extraordinary blessing for the married couple.

It would take hours – and hours well-spent – to recall all the Bible passages about marriage. If we don’t understand Jesus as the bridegroom of his church, we know nothing about the Church or Jesus. But, having reflected on those passages, what can we say about marriage as we know it today? What should we expect from the sacrament of marriage?

First we look for vindication of the sacrament. Just as there are few people willing to be celibate priests today, there are few people willing to enter the life-long, faithful, fruitful covenant of marriage. Many people suffer a chronic inability to make commitments or sacrifice. Many people believe they are homosexual and have no desire for marriage --although they covet its respectability. Many people suffer from narcissism. They think only of themselves and cannot actually experience the mystery of another human being.

If weddings seem to be expensive exercises in futility today, one day soon God will vindicate the sacrament, restoring its original beauty. As Saint Paul says,

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us….

In the light of the many scriptural images about marriage, what can we expect of the sacrament?

1.   First, that a man and woman will find great happiness in their love. “You shall be called my delight,” God says to Jerusalem. When Jesus turned six jars of water into 180 gallons of choice wine, people were very happy. They laughed at the steward and the bridegroom who could not explain where all that fine wine came from. There is cause for rejoicing here.

2.   God forgives the sins of every married man and woman as they forgive one another.
Matrimony is a sacrament of penance. It exposes our sins and helps us to find forgiveness.
A man’s love for his wife is God’s love for that woman. If she has any doubt about her worth in God’s eyes, she will discover it in the eyes of her husband.

3.   God restores our integrity through the sacrament of marriage. A man who is honest with his wife becomes honest with himself, with God, with his children, his family, his work, and his church. There is no room for duplicity in marriage. 

4.   Because marriage is a union of opposites – as they say, men are from Mars and women are from Venus – marriage resolves the differences between the sexes. The war is over. Psychologists spent the last century discovering the many different ways that men and women see, hear, taste, touch, smell, feel, dream, think and reason. They’re different.
Married couples discover their opposition is actually complimentarity. They need each other and neither is whole without the other.

5.   The sacrament of marriage restores our charm, our fascination, our desirability. God finds us endlessly fascinating. He cannot take his eyes off us. A man who loves his wife keeps his eyes on her. He doesn’t look at other women. Everything he dreams of is right there in bed with him. And she knows it!
Likewise, he knows how irresistible he is in the eyes of God because his wife still hungers for his embrace. It doesn’t matter how many years they are married, they are still nubile in each other’s eyes.

6.   God restores our fertility through the sacrament of marriage. God never gives a blessing simply for your own pleasure. Marriage is a serious responsibility which must bear fruit for others.
To put it simply, married people have children, and every child has the right to a father and mother who are married to one another in the eyes of God and the eyes of the world -- love one another.

7.   God restores our virginity through the chaste life of a married couple. Virginity is not never having sex; virginity is a grace which God gives to those whom he favors.
In the Church we honor the Virgin Mary as the new Holy City, the New Jerusalem. When the magi arrived in Jerusalem they found the Holiness of God had migrated to a quiet house in Bethlehem. When they entered that house they saw the child with Mary his mother. She is the Virgin Spouse of God; and men and women who honor the sacrament of marriage – as husbands, wives, or as chaste individuals – enjoy the gift of virginity.

With his changing water to wine, Jesus changed the ancient institution of marriage with all its complexities into the Sacrament of Marriage. And he invited everyone to drink deeply of the intoxicating pleasures of integrity, wholeness, honesty, kindness, tenderness, compassion, chastity and fertility. Like the disciples at Pentecost, we are drunk with the Holy Spirit.

It is easy to be cynical about marriage. Any coward can do that. Courage teaches us to expect God’s vindication of the Holy City. And just as God never gives up on his people, the Church will never stop believing in the holiness of marriage.