Gospel of John, chapter 2:1-2

Think a minute about some of the most important days in your life. Most traditional cultures and ancient wisdom mention: the day of birth, the day of death, the first day of your career, the day of ordination, and the day of marriage. Today I want to talk about one of those days – the wedding day. It was at a wedding that Jesus performed His first miracle of changing the water into wine.

Marriage was always important for a variety of reasons. It marked the beginning of adult life. It was a kind of insurance policy to protect couples in the future. And, most important, it was a sacred sign of the relationship between God and His people. Marriage talk today is almost always about trends and problems. Let’s focus our attention on something different, the spiritual side of this union; the deep togetherness that is itself an image of Christ’s relationship with His flock.

The news media thrive on tragedy. An earthquake is news. A day without a natural disaster is not. A war will make the headlines. A time of peace will not. It is the nature of the media to seek out what is unusual or perhaps wrong and to inform us of it. The trouble is that we may begin to think everything is abnormal since that is all we see and hear on our TV sets and in our newspapers.

It is the same with marriage. The media reports all that is problematic with contemporary marriage-divorce rates, child abuse, sexual deviations, unfaithfulness, and more. Yet, at the same time, millions of couples are deeply in love with each other and express that love through lives of devoted self-sacrifice. It is they who are symbols and signs of the union of God and His people. Their unions are a sacrament of a loving God.

In the old marriage ceremony, there was a beautiful admonition which was read to the couple just before they exchanged their vows. One section of it read: “Sacrifice is usually difficult and irksome; only love can make it easy, and perfect love can make it a joy.” Love, then, is more than good feelings. It is the day-in and day-out dying to self and rising to a new life. In a way, it is a repeat of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

We cannot afford to be condemnatory of broken marriages today since the pressures on married couples and families can be almost overwhelming. Think of the economic and personal burdens some families have to bear-the trials of a marriage in which both parents have to work; the threat to intimacy in a family when a parent must be absent from home for long periods of time. We long for the simple days of the past when these kinds of obstacles didn’t exist and when the smaller family was supported by the larger community or extended family.

Yet, many of today’s marriages are a joy to behold. They uplift our spirits because they are what they should be: a sacred sign of the relationship between God and his people. When God and ‘doing His will’ enters into the relationship between two people in marriage, great things can and do happen.

Fr. Hugh Duffy