6th Sunday of Ordinary Time (World Marriage Sunday)

With Valentine’s Day on the calendar for this week, the United States Catholic Church recognizes it as National Marriage Week (Feb 7-14) and today specifically, as World Marriage Day (Sunday, Feb. 12). With this in mind, we say that from a theological perspective, one way of understanding marital love is by contemplating the mystery of the Holy Trinity—that dumfounding concept of God’s inner-life, that can seem so remote and perhaps even arbitrary: What does this Divine Mystery have to do with me, my problems, my accomplishments, my relationships, my family or especially, my marriage?

Actually, it has everything to do with human existence and says a whole lot about us, because the mystery that is the dynamic communion of the three Divine Persons, lives within each of us. We are told that “God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26). This likeness isn’t so much physical, but instead spiritual. It’s a likeness each of us bears, regardless of how well we comprehend it or whether it matters to us. John Paul II said, your body bears a theology, as a living sign of the mystery of God that has been hidden in God for eternity (Theology Of the Body).

With that in mind, consider a couple more things. First, that dynamic within the Most Holy Trinity that we declare in the Creed: that the Father begat the Son. And from that moment, the two existed in a powerful and dynamic exchange of love that spilled forth, generating the life we call the Holy Spirit: ….who proceeds from the Father and the Son. It’s not hard to see how that dynamic is reflected in the loving union between man and woman, and the children that can be generated from that union. God created them in his image; male and female he created them. God blessed them and His first command to them was to be fruitful and multiply (Gen 1:27). We can see, the life of the Holy Trinity—the inner mystery of God—is inherently reflected in marriage and the human family.

But secondly, consider that marriage is the common theme throughout the Bible. It begins with Adam and Eve. She was bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh, each completed the other. The texts of Scripture refer to Eve as his wife, saying that in their marriage they became one body (Gen 2:23-24)—his wife; not his girlfriend or friend with benefits. A close reading of those creation texts reveals that marriage was the very reason God created two distinct genders, male and female.

But the Bible also ends with marriage. In the Book of Revelation, St. John envisions our future: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth…coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband….’” (Rev 21:1-3). God’s ultimate plan is to make a marriage of Himself to humankind.

All of it tells us that our bodies, these living signs of the mystery of God, were made for love, here and now, but also and ultimately, in eternity. And as is true with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, true love instinctively seeks another, with whom to share love, to be in loving communion. There’s a particular form of love, reflected in the Holy Trinity, that we call marriage. Having said that, I realize that love, sex and marriage have become thorny subjects that have us wondering what to believe, what is true.

Mixed into this is the reality that our bodily appetites—and our emotional appetites—can move us to respond in ways that aren’t always healthy. As is true with our appetites for food, we tend to struggle with our bodily and emotional appetites.

Further, understand, every person needs intimacy, to give and receive love—whether young, old, married, divorced, widowed, single, celibate, or attracted to the same sex. God put that desire in us all. But not all love, even healthy love, necessarily constitutes marriage. Just as the reality of God as three divine Persons is something very distinct, so is marriage. Just as God who has revealed Himself to us as three Divine Persons, does not ask us to re-invent Him in whatever way pleases us, He doesn’t ask us to do so with His gift of marriage.

So, if marriage and family are at the very heart of our sharing in the life of the Holy Trinity, and even the very building block of human society, it should come as little surprise that the devil would want to weaken it. That too many marriages don’t last, and that too many marriages that seem to be merely enduring: life-draining, rather than life-giving—we may well see marriage as a failed institution. But like all things of God’s design—human existence itself, our Church—like those things, marriage is God’s creation, not ours. The solution does not lie in abandoning it, like a failed experiment. Instead, our task is to redeem it, restore it, and to boldly reveal it.

On this World Marriage Day, we reflect upon and celebrate the truth that God, who lives within Himself as a life-giving exchange of love, who has patterned our hearts for love, is Himself undying love and He desires to draw us into marital covenant with Him in heaven. This Mass is a foretaste of a wedding feast. In the meantime, for the benefit of the world around us, you and I are called to reflect that love in our lives, our families and our marriages, through the beautiful mystery that lives within each human being, the mystery of God that lives within our very bodies.