Marriage As the End Goal of History | S4 E5

This is The Extraordinary Story, a podcast that tells the story of the life of Jesus Christ. God himself entered the confusing maze that is our world to transform it into a path that leads to him today and always. The Extraordinary Story is brought to you by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. I’m Tom Hoopes. I’m a writer in residence here at Benedictine College.

In this episode of The Extraordinary Story, as Jesus faces his imminent death in the final week of his earthly life, he reveals that the end goal of history is marriage. We’ll learn in what way Jesus considers his relationship with us a marriage, why we won’t be married to our spouses in heaven, and how to fight the darkness that threatens to swallow us whole while we wait for the wedding. Does that sound like fun? It didn’t the way I said it, but it should be. I’m going to start with a parable in Matthew 22. This is the parable of the great wedding feast.

“And again, Jesus spoke to them in parables saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a marriage feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to come to the marriage feast. But they would not come. Again, he sent other servants saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, ‘Behold, I have made ready my dinner, my oxen and my fattened calves are killed, and everything is ready, come to the marriage feast.” But they made light of it, and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them. The king was angry, and he sent his troops, and destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready. But those invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the thoroughfares, and invite to the marriage feast as many as you find.’ And those servants went out into the streets, and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad. So the wedding hall was filled with guests. But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment, and he said to him, ‘I’m friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness. There men will weep and gnash their teeth, for many are called and few are chosen.'” That’s the end of the gospel.

Jesus is coming in this final week of his life to restore the Garden of Eden, and we saw what that means when we considered all the very literal ways he wants to rebuild the Garden of Eden. First, he compared his kingdom to plants. Then we looked at how he compares the work of the kingdom to the work of tilling the garden and working in his garden. Now we’re going to see how he compares it to the two people who lived in that garden, Adam and Eve. I’m taking three parables Jesus addresses on the week of his death about the kingdom of heaven being like a marriage, or better, the kingdom of heaven being a wedding, being a marriage. Jesus gives us a lot of analogies for the kingdom, a field, a merchant, a net, a storehouse, etc. So we know it isn’t reducible to any one of them. It’s a multifaceted reality that goes beyond human summation. But many of his analogies mention a wedding, a king leaving for a wedding, a master coming back from a wedding, a wedding banquet ghosted by the invited guests, and wise and foolish virgins, as we’ll see, waiting for a groom.

But one person is missing from all of Jesus’ wedding parables. The bride. We never meet a bride in any of these stories. Why not? Because we are the bride. In these parables, we are meant to see ourselves in the place of the bride. We, as members of the Church, are singly and collectively the bride. We’re bathed in baptism, like an ancient wedding bath. We receive Jesus Christ into our bodies in the Eucharist. In other words, we receive Christ like Mary did, the original spouse of the Holy Spirit. Our marriage starts now and is completed in heaven. Heaven is a wedding banquet where we will celebrate the wedding feast of the Lamb, the wedding feast of Christ the Bridegroom to us, to all the members of the Church. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s go in order through the parables as Jesus tells them. The vineyard parables which we talked about can be summed up as your life on earth is like an honest day’s work. And that’s good. That corrects a number of misunderstandings. First of all, we’re the help on earth, not the landlords on earth. Secondly, we owe God, not the other way around. And third, nonetheless, God wants us to be co-creators of what he is doing on earth. The wedding banquet parable can be summed up as heaven is your royal wedding day. “Invite homeless people.” It corrects some other misunderstandings.

Heaven is a love story, not a bureaucratic story. We don’t get into heaven by being in the right organizations or by passing some legalistic test, but by changing our lives to fit the beloved. And heaven requires change on our part. People who refuse to change have no place in heaven. So, in this story, the king summons the invited guests to the feast, but they say, no. So, he markets the dinner a little bit more, specifies the menu and increases the urgency. Again, the people refuse. Why? One went to his farm to attend to his home life. Another went to attend to his workplace. Then, shockingly, the rest laid hold of his servants, mistreated them and killed them. The king’s reaction is also shocking. The king was so enraged, he sent his troops, destroyed those murders and burned their city.

Well, that escalated quickly.

This parable is a startling mix of merriment and violence and seems like a very strange way to tell a love story. The key to remember is that this is a parable about the end of history, about the moment that God will make all things new. The king and his prince are the father and the son, and the wedding he is talking about is described in the Book of Revelation this way: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, and I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.'”

In the language of the parable, this is a very high honor. We’re being invited to be an honored guest at a royal wedding. In God’s language of love, it’s even more than that. It means being invited to an intimate union with God ourselves. So if you wonder why this escalated so quickly in the parable, ask yourself, why does the king invite these people? And why do they not only say “no,” but murder the heralds who brought the king’s invitation to them?

The answer is that he invites them because he loves them and wants to live forever with them. They murder those who invite them because they want nothing to do with the king. They want him out of their lives. They find his very existence a bother. This makes the king very angry. But remember, angry is not the opposite of love. Indifference is the opposite of love. When the Bible describes something as making God angry, what it really means is that God cares a lot about us. Would we rather that God was indifferent to us? Would we rather he shrug his shoulders and say, whatever, when he sees us walk away?

How would we feel if the person who we love most didn’t care if we stayed or went? If you want to see the opposite of love, you can find it here in the parable. Right before those invited to the wedding kill the king’s messengers, the heralds say, “Tell those who are invited, ‘Behold, I have made ready my dinner. My oxen and my fatted calves are killed, and everything is ready. Come to the marriage feast.’ But they made light of it and went off, one to his farm, another to his business.”

That, my friends, is the opposite of love. God longs to have us join him, but we are free and don’t have to choose him. And when we don’t choose him, what do we choose? The alternative to choosing him is rejecting the author and giver of life. And what happens when you reject the author and giver of life? You choose death. That’s the tale this parable tells. So, in the parable, the king goes to an impromptu new plan. He says, “go out, therefore, into the main roads and invite to the feast whomever you find.”

To the original Jewish audience, this meant that Jesus was moving on and would invite the Gentiles to be Christians in their place. In our day, there are many things it can mean. It could mean that the religious types who are too caught up in their own pride will miss out while God will welcome those who are too broken or trampled down by life to be proud. It could even mean that if we refuse to choose God and his work, those of us who are affiliated with the church Jesus Christ founded on Peter will watch our numbers drop while others who are not affiliated with the church but who are more willing to live a Christian life will see their numbers rise. We’re seeing that in many places today. The fathers of the church saw this story as a sign not just of the heavenly church but the church on earth. After all, the king’s servants gathered all they found, bad and good alike, and the hall was filled with guests.

If we think we are better than people who aren’t at church, we’re wrong. And if we think anyone that we meet might be too much of a sinner to be at church, we’re wrong again. The church is a church of sinners. And all along we should be very conscious that we are God’s Plan B people, the scruffy, non-chosen people God resorted to after his chosen people let him down. But then when the king came in to meet the guests, says Jesus, “He saw a man not dressed in a wedding garment. The king said to him, ‘My friend, how is it that you come in here without a wedding garment?’ But he was reduced to silence. Then the king said to his attendants, ‘Bind his hands and feet and cast him into the darkness outside.'”

That sounds harsh. Then we need to understand the nature of this event. This totally undeserved wedding banquet is extravagant. This is the heavenly spread described by Isaiah as a feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure choice wines. Don’t imagine a cafeteria line. Imagine a White House state dinner. Think of it this way. Imagine that you were somehow made Belgium’s minister of charity. And then you were invited to a state dinner by the president in the state dining room of the White House. The proper attitude towards such a feast is humble gratitude and a willingness to do and wear whatever is appropriate to be in such a place. But there’s more.

What is a wedding garment? There are a number of ways to think of it. Some suggest it was a kind of prayer shawl worn at ancient weddings or other celebrations, a kind of uniform showing the unity of the guests. The fathers of the church often go straight to the spiritual and describe it as a baptismal gown or as the cloak of our faithful prayers and acts of grace. You can think of it as putting on Christ, becoming the new person God wants us to be. But I have a simpler way to think of it. A wedding garment is a wedding dress or a wedding suit, if you prefer, or to cover both sexes in the language of the parables time and place, a wedding tunic.

We are together the church, the bride, and each of us can only receive what the bridegroom gives. So the mystics of our faith from the Old Testament Song of Solomon to St. John of the Cross, all see our souls, not as he’s but as she’s when it comes to God. The Song of Songs is a great example. The Song of Solomon, as it is sometimes called, is a love poem, but it is about Israel marrying God, or about the church marrying God, or about each of our individual souls in our love relationship with God.

It opens with these lines. “Oh, that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your love is better than wine. Your anointing oils are fragrant. Your name is oil poured out. Therefore the maidens love you. Draw me after you. Let us make haste. The king has brought me into his chambers. We will exalt and rejoice in you. We will extol your love more than wine. Rightly do they love you.” This ancient Jewish love poem is in scripture, and it’s consonant with a number of other scripture passages where prophets again and again say God wants to marry us. This is the relationship that we have with God.

I remember reading a line from the Song of Songs that was repeated in the book Kristin Lavransdatter, the novel. It really captured my imagination. It’s, :I am my beloved’s, and my desire is to him.” One of the characters in the novel is taken by that line, and I was taken by it too. I began repeating it, and it became kind of a cornerstone of my prayer. “I am my beloved’s, and my desire is to him.” It was only years later that I realized the book had it wrong. The real quote is this, “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is to me,” which I like even better and pray often.

Well, in not wearing a wedding garment, the person in the parable is saying, “I am not my beloved’s, and my desire is not for him.” Or, better, “I am not my beloved’s, and though his desire is for me, I couldn’t care less.” But even on the terms of the story, as Jesus tells it, please notice that the king gives this errant guest a chance. The king asks him in a personable way, “My friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?” Very non-threatening sounding. It seems like the man could have replied, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know, let me fix it.” But the man said nothing at all to the king at the wedding banquet. Did he turn a cold shoulder? Did he dismiss him with a wave of his hand? We don’t know. But he seems to be like those earlier guests who simply refused to come. He is indifferent. And indifference is the opposite of love. That’s the biggest warning here. Don’t be indifferent to what God is offering you. More on that later.

But first, another parable or sort of from Matthew.

A few verses later, Matthew writes, “The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection. And they asked him a question, saying, ‘Teacher, Moses said if a man dies, having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now, there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother. So too, the second and third down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, to which of the seven will she be wife? For they all had her.’ But Jesus answered them, ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God? ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.’ And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.”

In this passage, the Sadducees, those Jewish leaders who disbelieved in the resurrection and were sometime rivals of the Pharisees, tried to make the very idea of the resurrection from the dead seem absurd. Jesus answers by pointing out that keeping the status quo forever is absurd. In Jewish law, if a woman’s husband died, it was her duty to marry her single brother-in-law to produce offspring for the deceased. A Sadducee invents a scenario where this one poor woman has to marry seven brothers one after the other. Whose wife will she be in heaven? Jesus answers by saying, “Those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” In other words, marriage isn’t the place to look for your ultimate happiness.

Marriage and family life is crucially important. It is the vocation for most of us, and God raised it to the level of a sacrament to show its importance. But if we decide that our marriage is going to fulfill us completely, we will be sadly disappointed. Ultimately, marriage, like the other sacraments, is a sign and source of grace that comes from elsewhere. It’s not in the sacraments themselves that we find ultimate happiness, but in the One who is present in them, Jesus Christ. Our marriages won’t deliver the happiness we long for, but if we live them properly, they will lead us to the beloved who will.

Saying, “I want to stay married to you forever” may be a nice sentimental thought, but if you think about it practically, it loses its charm quickly. April Hoopes does not want an infinity of Tom Hoopes, but if we live our marriage right, then like any other sacrament, it will deliver Jesus Christ to us and happiness in him. Not ourselves. So there’s that.

But I think that Jesus is getting at something much deeper. Jesus doesn’t say your relationships are not meant to be forever. Instead, he talks about a relationship that is meant to be forever. He says “You are wrong because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.” So let’s see, what do they miss about the scriptures? For one, they miss the love relationship in God Himself. When Genesis describes the creation of mankind, the Old Testament sounds very Trinitarian suddenly.

God says, “Let us make man in our image after our likeness.” Then, God created mankind in His image. “In the image of God, He created them. Male and female, He created them.” So God, who is a Trinity, one God, but also one God who here says us, says He’s making man and woman, man and woman together, in His singular image.

Marriage is a sign and image of the unity of the Trinity. Marriage is mankind fully in the Trinitarian image of God. Two persons who are very different from each other, like the Father and the Son, are made one through the Holy Spirit, love. But the unity of the marriage we begin on earth is only a sign of the family we will enter into in heaven, when his image is fully revealed. So, when he says, you don’t know scripture, he means that, for starters. And he might also mean another bit of scripture from Genesis.

From the Garden of Eden on, married couples had one primary command, “be fruitful and multiply.” As the Catechism puts it, “By its very nature, the institution of marriage and married love is ordered to the procreation and education of the offspring, and it is in them that it finds its crowning glory.” But when Jesus establishes a new heaven and a new earth, the time for fruitfulness will be over. There will be no longer any reason to fill the earth. So you won’t need marriage for that anymore. But marriage is not just about procreation.

Earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus himself emphasizes the other aspect of marriage. “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning, made them male and female? And for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one?” So just as the procreative aspect of marriage will no longer be needed at the end of time, the unit of aspect of marriage will be complete also when we are in heaven.

That’s what Don Renzo Benetti, the founder of the Great Mystery Project, in Italy, told me. At a conference in Rome, I asked him why we won’t be married in heaven. And he said, “When they unite in marriage, each spouse carries a little of the other. You become a new person because of the other. Your spouse becomes a new person because of you. You now each include the other. In heaven, spouses will be who they made one another to be.”

So marriage to our spouse makes us into a different person, imprinted in a way by their qualities and their complementarity, and the virtues, their flaws brought out in us, and vice versa. And taking this another step, this means our song of songs marriage with Jesus Christ, our mystical marriage, will imprint us with his image as well, and vice versa, it would seem, in some mysterious way. Because the next scripture Jesus brings up is when he says, “Have you not read what was said to you by God? ‘I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He is the God not of the dead, but of the living.'”

It’s remarkable to hear God naming himself by his beloved creatures. Think of him saying, “I am the God of Tom, I am the God of Dan, I am the God of April, I am the God of Sheila.” Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were all changed by their relationship with God to be more like him. But God made himself not just the God of all of his people en mass, but the God of each of us, like a marriage. And that brings us back to Jesus’ insistence that his kingdom is like a wedding. A wedding is where we sacramentally bond ourselves to one another in Christ. Jesus himself is the bond of our marriage.

The Catechism says, “The grace proper to the sacrament of marriage is intended to perfect the couple’s love and to strengthen their indissoluble unity. Christ is the source of this grace. Just as of old, God encountered his people with a covenant of love and fidelity, so our Savior, the spouse of the Church, now encounters Christian spouses through the sacrament of matrimony. Christ dwells with them, gives them the strength to take up their crosses and so follow him, to rise again after they have fallen, to forgive one another, to bear each other’s burdens, to be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ, and to love one another with supernatural, tender, and fruitful love.”

In the joys of their love and family life, he gives them here on earth a foretaste of the wedding feast of the Lamb. We become one with each other and with Jesus in marriage. We also become one with Jesus in the Eucharist. And just as we won’t need the sacramental, real presence of Christ in the Eucharist anymore when Jesus is standing right in front of us, we won’t need marriage anymore when the foretaste is over and the real wedding feast of the Lamb begins. Christ will be all in all. He will be the God of Abraham, the God of Jacob, the God of you, and the God of me. The gospel ends, and when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching. We should be too.

Okay, but that brings us to one last story. Jumping ahead a few chapters in Matthew, but still the same week before his death, Jesus says this: “Then the kingdom of heaven shall be compared to ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them. But the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept. But at midnight, there was a cry, ‘Behold the bridegroom, come out to meet him.’ Then all the maidens rose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘Perhaps there will not be enough for us and for you, go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves.’ And when they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut. Afterward the other maidens came also, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I say to you, I do not know you.’ Watch therefore, for you neither know the day nor the hour.”

Brother Simeon, who writes under the name I knew him by, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, compares this parable to the parable of the wedding banquet guests and says, “These guests themselves are in fact the bride. Collectively or better, ecclesially, they constitute the bride of the king’s son, the wife of the lamb, in other words, the church.” In the present parable, the same applies all the more so to the ten virgins. It must be so, for otherwise, in both cases, we would have a brideless wedding, which is clearly an absurdity.

So there you have it. The wise and foolish virgins are the bride. We are the bride, waiting for the big moment when bride and bridegroom unite, in our case, for eternity. Not in the physical way of an earthly wedding, but in a total way, like Mary and Joseph, perhaps, or finally, like Mary and Jesus. And we are like the virgins waiting out in the dark. And if we don’t make an effort to brighten it, darkness will surround us. But darkness is not the only thing at stake. Our meeting with the bridegroom is also at stake. The ten wise and foolish virgins seem to be doing everything right. They responded in eager yes to the invitation, and are dressed and ready for the banquet in the right garments. They also seem to have their moral lives in order. Their one identifier is virgins, after all.

So why do the foolish ones fail? They needed to do something that can’t be done at the last minute. They needed to collect and conserve enough oil to last the night. They can only do that over time, day after day. By analogy, they can’t build a relationship with God worthy of marriage overnight. A relationship needs emotional and spiritual fuel. That means a process of getting to know him, spending time with him, bringing our worries and joys and sorrows to him, and seeing over time the subtle and not so subtle ways he responds to us. It also means developing the habit of service to others for his sake.

That also requires a slow daily effort, as Mother Teresa once explained. I’ll quote her at length when she said, “What is necessary is to continue to love. How does a lamp burn, if it is not by the continuous feeding of little drops of oil? When there is no oil, there is no light, and the bridegroom will say, ‘I do not know you.’ Dear friends, where are our drops of oil in our lamps? They are the small things from everyday life. The joy, the generosity, the little good things, the humility and the patience. A simple thought for someone else. Our way to be silent, to listen, to forgive, to speak and to act are the real drops of oil that make our lamps burn vividly our whole life. The little drops of oil have to accumulate over time or we will be left in the dark.”

That’s what was foolish about the foolish virgins. The foolish thought that the lanterns stay lit without any effort. The wise know that light comes at a personal cost. It’s fed by habits of a life of holiness. The foolish thought you can borrow lantern oil, but you can’t borrow someone’s habits. You have to build them up yourself, applying effort over time.

Think of the ways the foolish virgins are presumptuous. First they assume they will be safe, forgetting the world is a dangerous place. It is now and it was then. To enter into darkness without being prepared to have light, is to be a blind duck waiting for predators. Second, the foolish virgins misunderstand the nature of the event and their place in it. They would have been ready if the bridegroom had come on their timetable.

They presume he would. They presume his timing is theirs, and he exists to meet their terms. In fact, we exist to meet his terms, and we have to be prepared that his timing will be out of step with ours. The failed ladies-in-waiting aren’t bad exactly. They’re good even, committed celibates. But that isn’t enough. Simply skipping the pleasures of the world is not enough. A positive witness is required. You have to be light. Truly, death takes a lifetime of preparation.

Several priests have shared that they met many people in hospitals or sick beds who are coming to the end of their life and realizing that their faith is weak and the relationship with God is superficial. The choices they made over the years have locked God out. They never prayed, so God is foreign to them. They never got in the habit of service, so they are imprisoned in their own egoism. Their lamps are empty and the darkness is closing in and they’re frightened.

But the scarier stories are the ones priests never hear. Many Catholics who are catechized, receive the sacraments and once believed in Jesus Christ are dying and not involving the church at all. Their faith is so long gone that they feel no need for the sacraments. They’re out of oil, waiting in the darkness, and they don’t care. They’re like those wedding guests who say, “Nah, I don’t want to go to the feast.”

The fact is, there is no one alive who should feel safely in the wise category, however. There are two kinds of presumption, says the catechism. “Either a man presumes upon his own capacities, hoping to be able to save himself without help from on high, or he presumes upon God’s almighty power or his mercy, hoping to obtain his forgiveness without conversion and glory without merit.”

The sin of presumption is a twin to the sin of despair, and both reject the idea that God is there to save us. But the wise ones, those with the oil, have a lot to look forward to. They have the re-edenization of the world to look forward to. When the kingdom comes, kingdom virtues will be everywhere. If the kingdom is the place where we marry our God, then it is the ultimate place of family virtues. Vatican II in the document Lumen Gentium says, “The Christian family loudly proclaims both the present virtues of the kingdom of God and the hope of a blessed life to come.”

Today, we have the church and we have our families, which are domestic churches. When the kingdom finally comes, family virtues will shape all of our life. Because each marriage is a sign of one great marriage to come, says St. Paul. “Marriage is a great mystery and I mean in reference to Christ and the church.” When the true bridegroom comes and marries his people, our spiritual intimacy with him will leave us delighted by what he made. Thus, the God of love begins and ends his story with us as marriage.

It was Adam and Eve in the beginning and it’s the wedding feast of the lamb in the end. The purpose for these parables is clear. The time and place to start having the right attitude isn’t later in heaven, but right here and right now. We do have one excellent check on how we’re doing. The attitude that we have toward God will be clear in the attitude we have toward the blessed sacrament, which is Jesus Christ himself, body, blood, soul and divinity.

The Eucharist is therefore a rich and abundant feast. It’s on earth a foretaste of the wedding feast of heaven. If we get an invitation to the Eucharist, the proper response is, I am not worthy, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed. And then to put on the new you in Christ when you attend. You do that by repentance and sacramental confession. If we receive the Eucharist casually, we will one day treat the king casually too. They are one and the same. And the king will reject us as certainly as he rejected the guest with no wedding garment and shut the door to those who have no oil. We need to learn now to behave in the way appropriate to the king’s table, now at the Eucharistic table. It’s there that our story meets his extraordinary story.

The Extraordinary Story is written by Tom Hoopes and produced by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Benedictine College is transforming culture in America through our mission of community, faith and scholarship. If you enjoy this podcast, please follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Leave a review and share with a friend. Help us tell others about The Extraordinary Story.