From time to time you can read comments that suggest that the institution of marriage is under threat. People produce statistics that show the number of church weddings declining. I also meet young people from time to time who say that they don’t want a church wedding because they don’t want all the expense and fuss that goes with it. When I question them on this I discover that they equate a church wedding with what they call a traditional wedding. They don’t want the hassle that seems to go with this – things like the fancy reception, the intricate planning, the flowers, the music, the expensive dresses and suits, the invitation list where you have to decide who to invite and often haggle over who can be left off. In short, they are reacting against the commercialisation of the modern Australian wedding. It seems that some young people today (not all) are rejecting what has become a wedding industry.
As I listen to these comments I always want to reply by telling them that I haven’t heard anything here about a church wedding. In fact, you don’t need any of that if you don’t want it. I have often wanted to tell young people that they can get married in the church without all the fuss of flowers, fancy clothes, musicians, and a church full of people. You can wear your street clothes and be married with just two people as witnesses to the vows you make to each other before God. In other words, I try to challenge them to think what they are rejecting. Is it the church wedding or is it the modern wedding industry that in fact has nothing to do with the church or with God?
Of course, once people come to the church they have already made up their mind that they want a church wedding. Sometimes even these people get so caught up in the secular wedding industry that the church wedding becomes a minor prelude to the big party.
The question I ask myself in both of these scenarios is how can we better understand Christian sacramental marriage. I think there are some clues in today’s gospel. We need to remember that Jesus was responding to particular questions that arose in his day, and these are not our questions. The religious leaders were trying to trick him by wanting him to take sides in a rather esoteric dispute about divorce. They were trying to trick him about an interpretation of the law. He was good at avoiding these types of trap and managed to turn the question around so that rather than get involved in an internal dispute among the scholars he spoke in a positive way about the meaning of marriage. So while the dispute is of little interest to us, the teaching on marriage is of great interest. If we listen carefully to what he said we may find a way of deepening our understanding of marriage and its place in our world today.
The first thing that Jesus says when he responds to his questioners is that they will never fully understand marriage as long as they see it simply as a legal entity – in other words as a contract. The Pharisees had asked him about the Law of Moses. Jesus wouldn’t answer on these terms and switched it back to God’s plan in creation. The positive thing he said was that marriage is part of God’s creation. He quoted from the Book of Genesis where it says that it is not good for someone to be alone, and that God has made man and woman for each other. In other words, God has made us so that we achieve our fulfilment by being in relationship with someone else. Rather than seeing this in terms of a legal contract Jesus saw it as a sacred covenant. The problem with the contract idea is that all it does its set out the bare limits of what has to be honoured by both parties. A scared covenant, on the other hand, sets people in relationship in such a way that they reach their full potential. If a contract sets out the bare minimum, a covenant opens up a vast horizon of possibility for the relationship. The covenant Jesus was referring to is made before God, who has made human beings for fullness of life and happiness. It is in this sense that he referred to the man and woman leaving their father and mother and becoming one flesh. Their unity is what the covenant looks like in concrete terms. It is never something that is simply offered as a gift and received, but is achieved over a lifetime together. Good marriages are good because the couple work at them together.
There is one other thing that we should say about Christian sacramental marriage. Jesus does not make a big thing about it in this conversation because it would have been completely understood among those listening to him. It is that marriage is never a private matter, never just about two people. Marriage is social, and it affects other people beyond the couple. In the first place we can speak of the children of the marriage. But even beyond that, we can say that the way a couple live their marriage becomes a sign to others. In the context of today’s gospel and the gospel readings of the last few weeks we have a fuller picture of marriage in God’s plan. As a couple live the sacrament of marriage day-by-day they become a sign in the world of what the love of Jesus looks like. The reign of God is not just a nice idea; we’ll never understand it if we can’t recognise it around us. In Jesus’ mind, married couples should be a sign of that reign, a sign of hope for our world.
Fr. Gerard Kelly
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