Amos 9:11-15/Ephesians 5:22-33/St John 2:1-11
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
It is not good that man should be alone because God, who alone is good, is not alone. He exists, from all eternity, in the Blessed Holy Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He created man to abide in His presence, to be the object and recipient of His unconditional love. Until the Lord God used the very body of man to build woman and bring her to the man, the man was unable to love as God loved, in self-sacrificing service to another.
And briefly, while they were perfect, holy, unblemished and without sin, that man loved his wife unconditionally, as a gracious lord; without resentment or exasperation. He loved her as his own body, fashioned in the image and likeness of the Lord. He nourished and cherished her, without compulsion and without discontent. And though he was a lowly man, a dirt-man, Adam was a philosopher-poet who spoke eloquently concerning his beloved, saying, This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called Woman, for she was taken out of Man.
And in return the woman joyfully submitted to her husband; not in inferiority or passive aggression, but willingly. She cleaved to him as one and the same with her own flesh. He loved her and she honored him, which is “a far higher thing because honor includes not only love, but also modesty, humility, and submission to majesty hidden in him” (LC I 106).
They gazed upon one another in self-sacrificial love and devotion, not noticing their own nakedness nor ashamed of the other’s, for they beheld one another in beauty and splendor.
Sin ruined everything. It rent asunder the one flesh union, turning husband and wife from gazing upon one another to being curved inward on themselves. For the first time they noticed their own nakedness. And they knew shame. But more, sin tore down the booth of David, broke the house the Lord had built; it uprooted them out of the land He had given and ripped them from their union with the Blessed Holy Trinity. Divorced them from His gracious lordship and wed them to His enemy, now your ally in the flesh, Satan.
This is your inheritance.
And this is why when you now hear the exhortations of St Paul you scoff and chafe, you cover your shame with fig leaves and attempt to hide yourselves from God and from one another. Since the Fall it is difficult to grasp what gracious lordship and joyful submission look like. You hear it in the letter to the Ephesians, which is a letter to you, describing the perfect marriage, the profound mystery of the perfect bridegroom and bride, and you squirm.
This is because you are curved inward on yourself. You do not hear the pleasant voice that calls to you in the Table of Duties. The voice of your heavenly Bridegroom.
Hear again: husbands and wives, love and submit, as Adam and Eve, as the Man and Woman, as Christ and the Church. “For a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.
You chafe and squirm because you suppose St Paul is indicting you, when actually he is preaching to you of Christ! For you cannot know what it means to be a man, a woman, or a child apart from Jesus Christ and His Church. You cannot comprehend the significance of marriage and family, except by way of Christ and His Bride the Church. For man is made in the image of God, which is to say, man is made in the image of Christ Jesus.
And marriage and family belong to that divine image. The Father, who eternally begets the Son; the Son, who from the foundation of the world woos His Bride, His elect, His Church; the eternal Spirit, eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son, gathers the Bride of Christ, the children of the heavenly Father, into the mystical union of the family of the Church.
It was not as though St Paul reached back into the creation account and analogized the image of Christ and the Church. Rather, from before creation, Christ and the Church is the eternal reality of which one man and one woman marriage is the image; the earthly icon.
And so it is that the only Son of the Father who has come to redeem and sanctify His Bride, comes now to a wedding at Cana in Galilee on the third day, which is a nod to the day of His resurrection.
The mother of our Lord is there also, for she is for us, a picture of the Church. For note how she brings her request before Him in the confidence of faith and the trust of His promises: They have no wine. Even as you are taught to pray, entreating upon the gracious lordship of your heavenly Father for the sake of His Son: give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses.
Woman, what does this have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come. She is not insulted by His reply, but faithfully submits to His gracious lordship and instructs the servant, Do whatever He tells you. This, also, is her advice to you. For these are the final words of the Mother of our Lord in the Gospels; and they are addressed to all her children, to you, the Bride of Christ, who faithfully submit to Christ your Lord.
For He is the true Bridegroom who has come to repair the booth of David, to rebuild the house of the Lord, over whose threshold He shall carry His Bride, and bring her into her own land. Here He takes six stone jars - six for the number of the days of creation, the day of man’s creation - and miraculously transforms water into the choicest wine, blessing this marriage in Cana and all true marriages with His word and promise. This is the first of His signs in which He epiphanied His glory.
Later, in the culmination of His signs, He shall be lifted up from the earth and draw all men unto Himself. For Christ the second Adam, the exact imprint and image of God, shall, on the sixth day, as the first Man before Him, be put into the deep sleep of death. From His side shall spill forth water and blood. By these His Bride is fashioned, made for Him, from His own body. Water that fills the font, in which you, beloved, are baptized, cleansed by the washing of water with the word.
And you are presented to Him in splendor, without sport or wrinkle or any such thing, holy and without blemish. For Christ who left His Father in heaven and His Mother at the Cross, wed Himself unto you, holding fast to you in love and faithfulness for all eternity.
You are bone of His bone and flesh of His flesh. You are called Christian, for you were taken out of Christ.
This mystery is profound. It is the mystery of Christ, which we proclaim. The mystery that He has made Himself one flesh with you, and sought your companionship within the Blessed Holy Trinity. You are no longer naked or ashamed, for you are covered with the baptismal robe of His righteousness, the eternal wedding garment. Nor are you alone, but are given to dwell in the presence of the Blessed Holy Trinity and given to live at peace with one another, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives joyfully submitting to your husbands as to the Lord. Husbands loving your wives in gracious lordship as Christ loved the Church and died for her. For it is in His Cross that Christ reorients lordship and submission once more; restoring what was lost. For you did not chose Him, but He chose you. And this is how He has appointed you, within your various stations, that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.
Thus, husbands are called to sacrifice themselves in order to give life to their wives. And wives are called to trust Christ in their husbands, to receive life from Him through them, and so to bear in faith and love the children that God the Father gives.
And fathers and mothers together bring their children to Christ in His Church, and to God the Father in heaven, understanding that children are created and born for life with God, both now and forever. Withholding them from Christ and His Church, in order to make a life for them in this world instead, would be a grave offense and a serious stumbling block.
As it is written, Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who attempt to build their own (Ps 127:1).
Dearly beloved, here your heavenly Bridegroom receives you to Himself, to have and to hold unto eternal life. With His own wounded hands, and by the bloody sweat of His brow, He has built you a house that shall remain. His labor has not been in vain, but He shelters you with His good work and His perfect righteousness. Whatever hardness of heart you have harbored, whatever animosity or stubbornness or contempt you have nursed, He has opened to you and given to you His own beating heart of flesh and blood, He has cleansed you and given you a clean conscience, and enduring faith toward Him and a fervent love to one another.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
It is not good that man should be alone because God, who alone is good, is not alone. He exists, from all eternity, in the Blessed Holy Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He created man to abide in His presence, to be the object and recipient of His unconditional love. Until the Lord God used the very body of man to build woman and bring her to the man, the man was unable to love as God loved, in self-sacrificing service to another.
And briefly, while they were perfect, holy, unblemished and without sin, that man loved his wife unconditionally, as a gracious lord; without resentment or exasperation. He loved her as his own body, fashioned in the image and likeness of the Lord. He nourished and cherished her, without compulsion and without discontent. And though he was a lowly man, a dirt-man, Adam was a philosopher-poet who spoke eloquently concerning his beloved, saying, This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called Woman, for she was taken out of Man.
And in return the woman joyfully submitted to her husband; not in inferiority or passive aggression, but willingly. She cleaved to him as one and the same with her own flesh. He loved her and she honored him, which is “a far higher thing because honor includes not only love, but also modesty, humility, and submission to majesty hidden in him” (LC I 106).
They gazed upon one another in self-sacrificial love and devotion, not noticing their own nakedness nor ashamed of the other’s, for they beheld one another in beauty and splendor.
Sin ruined everything. It rent asunder the one flesh union, turning husband and wife from gazing upon one another to being curved inward on themselves. For the first time they noticed their own nakedness. And they knew shame. But more, sin tore down the booth of David, broke the house the Lord had built; it uprooted them out of the land He had given and ripped them from their union with the Blessed Holy Trinity. Divorced them from His gracious lordship and wed them to His enemy, now your ally in the flesh, Satan.
This is your inheritance.
And this is why when you now hear the exhortations of St Paul you scoff and chafe, you cover your shame with fig leaves and attempt to hide yourselves from God and from one another. Since the Fall it is difficult to grasp what gracious lordship and joyful submission look like. You hear it in the letter to the Ephesians, which is a letter to you, describing the perfect marriage, the profound mystery of the perfect bridegroom and bride, and you squirm.
This is because you are curved inward on yourself. You do not hear the pleasant voice that calls to you in the Table of Duties. The voice of your heavenly Bridegroom.
Hear again: husbands and wives, love and submit, as Adam and Eve, as the Man and Woman, as Christ and the Church. “For a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.
You chafe and squirm because you suppose St Paul is indicting you, when actually he is preaching to you of Christ! For you cannot know what it means to be a man, a woman, or a child apart from Jesus Christ and His Church. You cannot comprehend the significance of marriage and family, except by way of Christ and His Bride the Church. For man is made in the image of God, which is to say, man is made in the image of Christ Jesus.
And marriage and family belong to that divine image. The Father, who eternally begets the Son; the Son, who from the foundation of the world woos His Bride, His elect, His Church; the eternal Spirit, eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son, gathers the Bride of Christ, the children of the heavenly Father, into the mystical union of the family of the Church.
It was not as though St Paul reached back into the creation account and analogized the image of Christ and the Church. Rather, from before creation, Christ and the Church is the eternal reality of which one man and one woman marriage is the image; the earthly icon.
And so it is that the only Son of the Father who has come to redeem and sanctify His Bride, comes now to a wedding at Cana in Galilee on the third day, which is a nod to the day of His resurrection.
The mother of our Lord is there also, for she is for us, a picture of the Church. For note how she brings her request before Him in the confidence of faith and the trust of His promises: They have no wine. Even as you are taught to pray, entreating upon the gracious lordship of your heavenly Father for the sake of His Son: give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses.
Woman, what does this have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come. She is not insulted by His reply, but faithfully submits to His gracious lordship and instructs the servant, Do whatever He tells you. This, also, is her advice to you. For these are the final words of the Mother of our Lord in the Gospels; and they are addressed to all her children, to you, the Bride of Christ, who faithfully submit to Christ your Lord.
For He is the true Bridegroom who has come to repair the booth of David, to rebuild the house of the Lord, over whose threshold He shall carry His Bride, and bring her into her own land. Here He takes six stone jars - six for the number of the days of creation, the day of man’s creation - and miraculously transforms water into the choicest wine, blessing this marriage in Cana and all true marriages with His word and promise. This is the first of His signs in which He epiphanied His glory.
Later, in the culmination of His signs, He shall be lifted up from the earth and draw all men unto Himself. For Christ the second Adam, the exact imprint and image of God, shall, on the sixth day, as the first Man before Him, be put into the deep sleep of death. From His side shall spill forth water and blood. By these His Bride is fashioned, made for Him, from His own body. Water that fills the font, in which you, beloved, are baptized, cleansed by the washing of water with the word.
And you are presented to Him in splendor, without sport or wrinkle or any such thing, holy and without blemish. For Christ who left His Father in heaven and His Mother at the Cross, wed Himself unto you, holding fast to you in love and faithfulness for all eternity.
You are bone of His bone and flesh of His flesh. You are called Christian, for you were taken out of Christ.
This mystery is profound. It is the mystery of Christ, which we proclaim. The mystery that He has made Himself one flesh with you, and sought your companionship within the Blessed Holy Trinity. You are no longer naked or ashamed, for you are covered with the baptismal robe of His righteousness, the eternal wedding garment. Nor are you alone, but are given to dwell in the presence of the Blessed Holy Trinity and given to live at peace with one another, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives joyfully submitting to your husbands as to the Lord. Husbands loving your wives in gracious lordship as Christ loved the Church and died for her. For it is in His Cross that Christ reorients lordship and submission once more; restoring what was lost. For you did not chose Him, but He chose you. And this is how He has appointed you, within your various stations, that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.
Thus, husbands are called to sacrifice themselves in order to give life to their wives. And wives are called to trust Christ in their husbands, to receive life from Him through them, and so to bear in faith and love the children that God the Father gives.
And fathers and mothers together bring their children to Christ in His Church, and to God the Father in heaven, understanding that children are created and born for life with God, both now and forever. Withholding them from Christ and His Church, in order to make a life for them in this world instead, would be a grave offense and a serious stumbling block.
As it is written, Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who attempt to build their own (Ps 127:1).
Dearly beloved, here your heavenly Bridegroom receives you to Himself, to have and to hold unto eternal life. With His own wounded hands, and by the bloody sweat of His brow, He has built you a house that shall remain. His labor has not been in vain, but He shelters you with His good work and His perfect righteousness. Whatever hardness of heart you have harbored, whatever animosity or stubbornness or contempt you have nursed, He has opened to you and given to you His own beating heart of flesh and blood, He has cleansed you and given you a clean conscience, and enduring faith toward Him and a fervent love to one another.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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