August 22, 2014
A week ago I was in Boston preparing my niece for her wedding to her current fiancé. It was a gracious time for me to see someone whom I had baptized, given first Communion and concelebrated during her Confirmation getting ready to be married.
At St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Grand Rapids, we have many weddings week after week, and I do my share of witnessing to the couples who are ministering to one another in the Sacrament of Marriage. Sometimes we forget in the midst of all the hoopla around a wedding that the really important part of the festivities is the time at Church in which the couples pledge fidelity to each other for the rest of their lives. Marriage is also the only sacrament the Church gives us in which the people themselves are the ministers of the sacrament. The priest or deacon presider is, in this sacrament, a witness of the Church to the promises made by the couple.
I often tell couples that marriage is a covenant. It is a covenant as deep and as true as the covenant that God had with his people. Two things stand out in characterizing the covenant. Those two important elements find themselves in the Hebrew words, hesed and emet.
“The most important expression for understanding mercy is hesed, which means unmerited loving, kindness, friendliness, favor and also divine grace and mercy.” That’s a whole lot of words to describe an amazing concept to a couple about to be married, but that’s part of what their covenantwith each other is all about.
The other biblical concept that speaks to covenant is emet. Emet basically means faithfulness, and regardless of what God’s people did in trying to keep the covenant, because they often failed, God continued to be faithful to them. It is the awareness of those two concepts of unlimited love and faithfulness that form the basis of a Christian marriage. “In this comprehensive sense man and woman are created for love and therein are an image of God, who is love.”
The sacrament of marriage demands faith in God. In fact such faith is indispensable for a Christian Catholic. And for the marriage to succeed it is important for the couple to believe in divine providence. We need to believe that God does indeed intend for us to live happily and to achieve life’s goal which is salvation in Jesus Christ.
Thoughts like the one’s above are not easy to grasp while a couple prepares for a wedding, but it’s important for a couple to realize that the step they take into marriage is a lifelong commitment to love and family. When we gather as friends and family of a bride and groom that’s why we gather – to help the couple understand that we are delighted for them and praying with them that the sacrament of marriage will be what they have always dreamed it would be. And I pray the same for my niece Erin, and her fiancé Conor.