A flash of fire

A flash of fire

I have just come from celebrating a wedding and I am reminded again of the wonder of it. The Christian faith gives a solemnity and air of eternity to something which, I suppose, was not there before. Traditionally, and in our modern way, you can withdraw from a marriage after a time if it is not working. And many do not even enter into a formal marriage. It is seen as an agreement between two people; something they feel will enrich their lives. If it works out; well and good. If it doesn’t, well, I can try again with someone else. We no longer condemn people for the decisions they make. We start from the premise that they do what they do for good reason, even if their choices make us uneasy.

An understanding of marriage evolved in the Church as people reflected on the words of Jesus. Despite the perceived understanding that the Catholic Church in particular should keep out of the bedroom and back off forever insisting on regulations governing marriage, recent teaching, say since the Second Vatican Council, has pointed to a horizon of marriage which is far beyond the daily round normally experienced by husband and wife. Their love, ‘merging the human and the divine, leads the spouses to a free and mutual gift of themselves, a gift proving itself by gentle affection and by deed. Such love pervades the whole of their lives’ (GS.49). And in the recent Synod in Rome, someone spoke of the family as ‘a sanctuary of holiness.’

While trying to show deep respect for the choices people make the Church raises our minds to the divine behind the ordinary, and often messy, reality of daily married life. The couple, whose wedding we had today, chose for their first reading a passage from the Song of Songs (8:6). ‘Love is strong as death, passion as relentless as Sheol. The flash of it is a flash of fire, a flame of Yahweh himself.’ How many married couples in the intimate expression of their passionate love see what they do as a, ‘flash of fire, a flame of God’?!

The passionate love, expressed by poets, artists and novelists, includes a place for tragedy. Jesus’ ‘love one another as I have loved you’ (John 15:12) means loving unto death. Jesus died for love and that is love’s horizon. Think of Romeo and Juliet. The ‘as I have loved you’ was Jesus’ passion and death. That is what it is all about. ‘No one can have greater love that to lay down his life for his friends.’ That is what he did and that, ultimately, is what married people do for one another and for their children.    

26 October 2014                     Sunday 30 A

Exodus 22:20-26                     I Thessalonians 1:5-10                        Matthew 22:34-40