God’s Plan for Marriage

This Sunday’s readings afford us an opportunity to look at the difference between a civil union and a sacramental marriage. It’s a bit of a sensitive issue, but we shouldn’t shy away from looking at God’s plan for marriage. After all, it’s a love story.

Let’s start at the beginning. After God created the heavens and the earth and all the living things, He immediately made marriage by forming the human person in His own image, male and female, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply.” God was with Adam and Eve in the garden; He was with them in their marriage.

But Satan, an archangel who rejected the privilege of seeing God’s face and so hates the image of God in the human person, deceived Adam and Eve into taking their lives into their own hands, no longer inviting God into their marriage.

Soon after, they and their children were unhappy and fighting all the time. The whole world felt the weight of their fall from grace. We call it the Original Sin. God was still with Adam and Eve, but their shame caused them to suffer the same fate as Satan, that of losing the beatific vision and being unable to see God.

For centuries upon centuries God would try to reestablish that first covenant, revealing Himself to Noah and Abraham and Moses, and instituting smaller covenants, all with the hopes of being invited back into the relationship between man and woman - back into that first holy covenant of marriage.

Then there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and His disciples were also invited to the wedding. When the wine ran out, Mary said to Jesus, “They have no wine.” And, as you know, Jesus told the servants to put water into jars before transforming the water into wine.

If that couple had not invited Jesus and his mother to their wedding they would have suffered the humiliation of emptiness. But they did invite them! And as the New Adam and the New Eve who always “walk with God in the garden,” Jesus and Mary were able to bring God into that couple’s marriage.

That miracle was the first of Jesus’ signs. And its symbolism is clear. The wine of the original marriage of Adam and Eve had run out because of their fall from grace. But the grace of God, now fully present in Jesus and Mary who were conceived free from sin, enables God to restore what was lost. The water of natural marriage between a man and woman can be transformed into the wine of Holy Matrimony.

A civil union is a legal contract. The bond between the partners in such an arrangement is a man-made law. The man and woman in this marriage have an earthly bond only as strong as the State. It is a centuries-old wine, as old as the Fall itself, and it runs out. Even Moses knew it would and so permitted divorce.

Holy Matrimony, on the other hand, is a covenantal love between persons. And the bond between the husband and wife, married in the Church, is God Himself. The two become one flesh again, and this is the new wine of holiness, ever-ancient, ever-new. This wine never runs out because it flows from the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. +