Arelia and Thomas, as I said in my greeting at the beginning of our celebration today, for both of you “this is a moment of unique importance.”1 Today you come to God’s house and, in the presence of your families, your selected witnesses, and the Church’s minister, pledge yourselves to each other for the rest of your lives. This is a big undertaking. A tremendous act of hope, of trust in God and in one another.
Too often, as Catholics, when we speak about vocations, that is, the calling God issues to the baptized, we refer only to priesthood and/or religious life. This is a mistake. Marriage, too, is a vocation, a divine calling. Like becoming a priest or a deacon or entering a religious order, marriage that is really a marriage requires a lifelong commitment. As such, it requires prayerful discernment. It is no small thing to publicly commit the rest of your life to another person no matter what happens.
Like ordination, marriage is a vocation confirmed and strengthened by the grace of a sacrament. Together with Holy Orders, Holy Matrimony is a sacrament at the service of communion. Very often we call the Sacrament of Orders “Holy Orders.” In my view, we should only refer to it that way if we also always refer to the Sacrament of Matrimony as “Holy Matrimony.”
Sacraments are symbols. Symbols are necessary for grasping reality. For example, rather than actually being the things to which they refer, words are symbols. The rings you will exchange in this rite are symbols of your love for one another, which love flows from God, who is love- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.2
What Holy Matrimony is supposed to sacramentally symbolize is the unfailing, undying love of Jesus Christ for his Bride, the Church. Rather than a private arrangement between two people, or even between two families, Christian marriage is a public witness to the love of God given us in Christ Jesus, which love is the foundation of the Church.
The readings you have chosen for this celebration indicate that you understand this very well, maybe even better than you realize. Whether it is Saint Paul’s disquisition on love from his First Letter to the Corinthians or the passage from Saint John’s Gospel, the original Greek word translated into English as “love” in these passages is agape.
Unlike English and other Western languages, koine Greek, the original language of the New Testament, has four words for love. Philia is brotherly love, which is why Philadelphia is called “the city of brotherly love.” Storge refers to the love of a parent for her/his child. Eros, the root of our word “erotic,” describes the intimate, romantic love between two people.
Eros is the only one of these four words not used in our uniquely Christian scriptures. Agape, by contrast, appears more than two hundred times throughout the New Testament. Agape is best understood as self-giving, self-sacrificing love- the kind of love demonstrated by Jesus giving his life for our sake.
As our first reading from Proverbs states, “Charm is deceptive and [physical] beauty is fleeting.”3 Life together, usually sooner rather than later, presents challenges. As anyone who has been married for even a few years can tell you, if you look for reasons to leave, you can find them. The secret to staying married is to look for reasons to stay and being determined to stay.
How do you find those reasons? Our reading from 1 Corinthians, in addition to being beautiful, is very practical. It bears noting that in its context this passage is not addressed to couples, but to the whole Church. What Saint Paul has given us is a very detailed definition of agape. Above all, through life’s inevitable difficulties, agape “bears all things…hopes all things, endures all things.” Because of this, “Love never fails.”4
True love, true agape, never fails because “God is love” and God never fails.5 So, make God the center of your life together. Do not be hesitant to cross the final frontier of intimacy with each other. No, I am not referring to that! I am talking about praying aloud together.
Because it is a call from God, marriage is a way for you both to become like Christ. Being like Christ means being perfected in love. Being perfected in love means to love like Christ, to love perfectly. This is precisely where the grace of the sacrament of Holy Matrimony becomes so important. Through this sacrament, your “intention to enter into Marriage” is “strengthened by the Lord with a sacred seal.”6
The rites that the Church celebrates are first theology. In other words, they instruct us on living as Christians. And so, as the Order of Matrimony states, through this sacrament, which only begins today and is lived out for the rest of your lives, “Christ abundantly blesses the love that binds you. Through a special Sacrament, he enriches and strengthens those he has already consecrated by Holy Baptism.”7
What does Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, strengthen you both for in and through the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony? He strengthens you to “be faithful to each other for ever and” to “assume all the responsibilities of married life.”8
Among the responsibilities of married life, as the vows you take reveal, is the responsibility of accepting “children lovingly from God and [bringing] them up according to the law of Christ and his Church.”9 What is the law of Christ? As our Gospel reading tells us, the law of Christ is the law of love.
Pope Saint John Paul II identified “the Christian family as a true ministry through which the Gospel is transmitted and radiated, so that family life itself becomes an itinerary of faith and in some way a Christian initiation and a school of following Christ.”10 There is a reason we call our homes “the domestic Church.”
So, Thomas and Areli, today, taking a cue from the Gospel reading you have chosen, remain in Christ’s love. The way you remain in Christ’s love is by loving one another as Christ loves each of you- in a self-giving and self-sacrificing way. Make participating in the Eucharist together a habit from the very start. Don’t be strangers at the confessional. Be willing to ask forgiveness of each other and extend forgiveness to each other.
1 Order of Celebrating Matrimony. Without Mass, sec. 87.↩
2 1 John 4:8.16.↩
3 Proverbs 31:30.↩
4 1 Corinthians 13:7-8a.↩
5 1 John 4:8.16.↩
6 Order of Celebrating Matrimony, Without Mass, sec. 93.↩
7 Ibid.↩
8 Ibid.↩
9 Order of Celebrating Matrimony, Without Mass, sec. 94.↩
10 Pope John II. Apostolic Exhortation, Famliaris Consortio, sec. 39.↩
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