At the beginning of time, God created the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon, the oceans and the mountains, the plants and animals and pronounced each of them “good.” On the sixth day of creation, he created man and called him “very good.”
But the first time God found something “not good” is when the Lord God said, “it is not good that the man should be alone.” On one level, of course, Adam was not alone — there was God, all of the animals and all of creation. But something — or better, someone — was missing. Even though he was perfectly in the state of grace, Adam was lonely.
That’s why God said it was not good for him to be solitary and created a fitting helper for him. When Adam saw Eve, he was finally able to rejoice in his existence, “This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”
He recognized in Eve an equal — taken out of his side so that they could stand side by side in front of God — and through her existence he finally learned how to love: to love another, to love himself through her eyes, and analogously to love God. God had created man in his image and likeness and, as St. John tells us, God is love; so for man to be most God-like, and for him to be most human as God made him, he needed to learn how to love. He learned that through human love. The family based on marriage is the greatest and deepest image of God in the world. The book of Genesis says, “God created man in his image and likeness; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them,” because man is most fully in God’s image and likeness when he is united to the woman in a communion of persons in love.
Just as in God, the mutual love of the Father and the Son eternally generated the Holy Spirit, so the mutual love of husband and wife can generate a third person, who is both a living fruit of their love and a means for that love to grow. In God’s plan, marriage is a singular sign and participation in God’s image and likeness.
But God’s plan for marriage goes even further than this. St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Ephesians that every Christian marriage participates in Christ’s marriage to his bride the Church and is called to model that love. “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the Church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy,” he instructs; “Women, be under this mission of your husbands as you are under the Lord’s mission.” When he cites the passage from Genesis, which the Lord Jesus Himself quotes in today’s Gospel — “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” — St. Paul says something stunning: “This is a great mystery, which applies — not principally to human marriage but — to Christ and the Church” (Eph 5:31-32).
Christ has left His Father in heaven and has become one flesh with His Bride the Church, which is why Christians are members of His body. Everything we understand about the meaning of human marriage, especially Christian marriage, comes from this nuptial union between Christ and the Church. Since Christ is always faithful to His bride, human spouses are called to be faithful. Since Christ’s union with the Church is fruitful — overflowing in acts of love — so the human couple is called to make love, to be fruitful and multiply (Gn 1:28). And because Christ will never abandon His bride, no matter how many times she (or we individually) may be unfaithful to Him, human marriage is indissoluble.
In recent days, however, the wisdom of God’s plan has been getting challenged from both inside and outside the Church. Many have begun to question openly whether God’s plan for marriage, taught courageously and consistently by the Church since Christ founded her, is true and relevant. These doubts or confusions about marriage are fraught with enormous consequences, for since God designed marriage to help us to discover who we are in His image and likeness and to reflect by analogy God’s own relationship with His people, if we misunderstand what marriage is, we will misunderstand who we are, who God is, and how we’re called to live our life in God’s image and likeness.
It is very important, therefore, for us to flesh out what these questions or doubts about marriage are, and like Jesus’ contemporaries, take them directly to Jesus. How would Jesus respond? I think He would respond in the same way He did 2000 years ago, by taking us back to what marriage really is. I think Jesus would challenge our contemporaries to overcome the “hardness of heart” due to sin that would cloud their judgment on marriage. Then I think He would repeat the same words about the origin, meaning and mystery of marriage that He said to the Pharisees: “In the beginning, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Father Roger J. Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, ordained in 1999. After receiving a biology degree from Harvard College, Fr. Landry studied for the priesthood in Maryland, Toronto, and for several years in Rome. He speaks widely on the thought of Pope John Paul II and on apologetics, and is presently parochial administrator of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River. An archive of his homilies and articles can be found at catholicpreaching.com
This article is adapted from one of Father Landry’s recent homilies.
