+ Today’s gospel reading is about the most misunderstood
sacrament in the Catholic Church: and that would be “marriage!” The
way God intended it to be “in the beginning” – and the way it is even with the
best of intentions today are lightyears away from each other. Marriage in the
beginning was a way for the man and the woman, God’s highest form of creation,
persons, like himself, to mirror the blessed life of the Trinity – a “family of
self-donation, self-giving, for the glory of God.”
When we get it into our heads
and hearts that “it is all about God” and “not about ourselves at all – then we
are seeing things rightly – seeing them as God intended them to be seen in the
beginning. God’s greatest happiness is to see man and woman happy, but they can
only be happy when they fully forget themselves and seek him, be accepted by
him, and then live the dynamo of love that is life in the Holy Spirit.
We are however living in the
last stages of the restoration of this original plan, after it has been almost
decimated by the man and the woman. Almost, in that while the man and the woman
still retain the likeness of God, they are still persons, but they live a
wounded image of him – and must spend their lives on earth seeking to conform
that image to the image of Christ the Redeemer, so to be ready to enter the
heavenly marriage banquet.
And this is where we depart
into a brief explanation of marriage as it is intended to be. For a couple to
say: “We want to get married, because we love each other” – and that is the most
important reason – then they have no idea what sacramental marriage is all
about – and should not be married in the Catholic church. “We want to get
married because we love God, and want to mirror his own Trinitarian being, in
our lives of self-giving – which will be, God willing, creative of new life:
children.” This is the correct answer in so many words. So, it’s not about them,
it’s about God. And God enters fully into that kind of willingness to be a
visible sign of his own life, and the marriage will flourish!
And this stance is to be a
“coming attraction” if you will, or “marketing tool” in our day and age, for
the end of time, the end of history, the end of the world, when the invited,
who accepted the invitation, and are wearing their garments of self-sacrificial
love and donation, will enter the Marriage Banquet of the Lamb of God – Jesus,
the Messiah, Lord, Redeemer, Savior – and the new heavens and the new earth
will begin!
What an amazing future we
have, but we can participate in it now, we do participate in it now, when we
try to understand it now, and live lives in the likeness of God, the likeness
of Christ his Son, the likeness of true children of God!
What
God has joined together, now human can separate!
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