This week’s homily was given to the archdiocesan permanent diaconate aspirants and their families during their weekend of formation.
Marriage and the end of the world… the classic combination. While this thought may create some light-hearted jokes among spouses, our readings today take this connection very seriously. As beautiful as marriage is, it’s more of a “coming attraction” preview of not just the end of this world, but the beginning of life in the new world to come.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that, in heaven, people “neither marry nor are given in marriage.” If marriage is a holy sacrament, why is there no marriage in heaven? Well, there is. Now, I’m not contradicting Jesus here. In heaven there is marriage, but there’s just one marriage. All of us will be “married” to God. As intimate as the connection is between husband and wife on earth, this is only a sign of the intimacy that we will have with God in heaven.
God wants to marry us. That’s the story of the entire Bible in a nutshell. In this world, our love is limited. But in heaven, our love with be perfected. It’s not that we won’t know our earthly spouse(s) in heaven; it’s just that we will be able to know and love everyone who ever lived. This thought was far from the mind of those questioning Jesus in the Gospel and I fear that it is often far from our minds as well.
If we know that we are meant to live forever in marital intimacy with God and all our brothers and sisters, then we ought to ask ourselves how we’re doing right now with these relationships. Maybe your relationship with God needs a second honeymoon right now. Marriage takes effort on our part. Scripture refers to the end of the world as “the consummation of the ages.” If you understand that we are made for marriage with God, then death and the end of this world is indeed “a consummation devoutly to be wished.”
1 comment
If God created paradise with humanity ordered in pairs, then paradise restored must also include this fundamental unit. A female for a male, and a male for a female. All created in the image and likeness of God.
Marriage of Christ and the church doesn’t have to *replace* marriage of husband and wife, and the individual marriage can be a place where the higher marriage can be experienced. I think the fact that Jesus Himself cited Adam and Eve as the model for human marriage (“Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so”) indicates that He was upholding it as a model.
The “marriage” that the Sadducees were talking about in their question, and that Jesus referred to in his reply, is not “marriage” as we understand that relationship today. Levirate marriage is unlike regular marriage, for it only exists because of death. It is not that sexual differentiation and and sexual intercourse do not exist in the world of God. If any individuals should mutually decide to pursue a partnership throughout eternity, I see no reason to think that this would not be allowed.