WEDNESDAY HOMILY: God Reveals His Faithfulness in Holy Matrimony

Do you think God doesn't know what you suffer?  Do you think He doesn't know what this break down feels like?  Do you think you are alone?  Look at the Cross.  There you see what faithful love looks like, but you also see that Jesus knows exactly what you are going through and that He endured all infidelity on the Cross and returned it with His own perfect faithful love.

P>HYTHE, KENT, UK (Catholic Online) - It is no mistake that Jesus says to the Pharisees, and to many like them when speaking about the covenant of marriage, "You are greatly misled."

This age of convenience finds itself greatly misled by its own infidelities.  The average person's understanding of marriage, if they allow the voices of egoism, consumerism, and the spirit of our times to inform them, will be profoundly distorted.

Marriage is about God.  It is a sign of His covenant faithfulness to us.  When your wife kisses you, when you husband holds you, when your spouse makes a decision to love you - you must realize that it is God wanting to love you through them.   When you make a decision to serve your spouse, to go against the grain of your own selfish tendencies, you are making a decision to love God, to be faithful to Him.

The distortion of marriage is a distortion of God.  It is an attack not only on some idea of the family that religious people have but an attack on God who is in His deepest identity a covenant of faithful love.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks about marriage: "God who created man out of love also calls him to love the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love. Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes. And this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation: 'And God blessed them, and God said to them: 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.'"

God is the author of marriage.  It is to Him we must look to understand it and to Him we must look when it is painfully attacked or breaks down.

Tobit's daughter in the first reading was at the end of her rope about marriage.  She had a demon attacking her and trying to make her lose hope.  She was lead to the threshold of suicide.  She was led to her knees, where she begged God to intervene.

He did.

God intervenes in marriage when you ask him.  It seems that every marriage, every covenant relationship is humbled before God to beg Him for His merciful intervention.  It is at this moment, when a person's heart is broken open, that God is permitted to enter into the situation and reveal once again His faithful love.

Because Sarah offered to God a heart truly pierced and humbled, He could not refuse her prayer.  God at that very moment when seeing His child weeping before Him, sent the Archangel Raphael to her to find her a husband and to heal the blindness of her father.

What humiliation, what broken-hearted situation, what pain and ache must we suffer to bring our hearts to true humble and sincere trust of His Holy Will so to pray like this?  Usually it is our relationships that make us truly realize God's faithfulness to us.  It is the break down of human love that we realize the perfect and eternal fidelity of divine love.

Do you think God doesn't know what you suffer?  Do you think He doesn't know what this break down feels like?  Do you think you are alone?  Look at the Cross.  There you see what faithful love looks like, but you also see that Jesus knows exactly what you are going through and that He endured all infidelity on the Cross and returned it with His own perfect faithful love.

May Our Lady, who faithfully accompanied the Lord Jesus at the Cross, show us the path of faithful love.

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Father Samuel Medley, SOLT, is a priest of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity, and is based in Hythe, Kent, United Kingdom.  He speaks to groups around the world on Blessed Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body.  Visit his homily blog http://medleyminute.blogspot.com or his blog on sexual ethics http://loveandresponsibility.org

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