Father Stephen P. KelleyWhen a man and a woman enter into the covenant of marriage, they make a promise to each other before God and in the love of God to love, honor and respect each other for as long as they both shall live. And just as important, implicitly, they make a promise to nourish and protect the relationship between them, the bond of the love that joins them, which has its own unique personality. The two persons become one, by way of the third, the relationship of love between them. This is the image of the Holy Trinity, in whose image we are made. God as the Holy Spirit is the third divine person, the divine relationship uniting God the Father and God the Son in the superabundant love which overflows and gives being and life to all of Creation.
God entered into the covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai, having delivered them from the slavery and sin of Egypt, to form them into his own peculiar people. Reading through the books of the law, such as Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, we often think of the covenant in legal terms of the laws with their blessings and curses, rewards and punishments. But when we read the books of the prophets, such as today’s first reading from Isaiah, the prophets reveal that when God and Israel entered into the covenant at Mount Sinai, it was really a nuptial covenant—a wedding—between God as the loving bridegroom and His people as His beloved bride. The legal terms of the covenant were given by God to help the people of Israel (1) to be united together into a holy concern for one another as one family, and also (2) to teach them how to love, honor, and respect the divine dignity of their bridegroom, God, and also (3) to faithfully honor, nurture and protect their covenant relationship with God. This is why the prophets often condemn Israel’s sin of idolatry as really being the sin of adultery: of being unfaithful to their promise that they wed themselves only to God, and not to take to themselves the gods and ways of the other peoples around them.
God powerfully and fiercely loves His bride and protects her. In this light, we can see how he laid her enemies to waste to protect her integrity and honor, wiping out peoples and nations before her, who would threaten her life, to bring her home from captivity, heal her of her wounds, and to share His glory with her. And so, God laments His pain for her wandering eyes and heart in places like the prophetic writings of Hosea and Psalm 81: “O that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways! In a moment I would humble their foes and turn back my hand against their oppressors. …But Israel I will feed with the finest wheat, I will satisfy them with honey from the rock.”
In our first reading, Isaiah is promising Israel in exile that as they repent of their sinfulness and adulterous infidelity, that God will take them back as His beloved bride. “No more shall people call you Forsaken, or your land Desolate, but you shall be called My-Delight, and your land Espoused. For the LORD delights in you and makes your land His spouse. As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride so shall your God rejoice in you.”
In the incarnation of God as Jesus, Emmanuel, God-With-Us, St. Paul in his writings reflects profoundly on the concept of Christ the Bridegroom, who has come to fulfill the promise of God to make a new, greater covenant. On the Cross, Christ the Divine Bridegroom consummates His New Covenant in His blood, the bridegroom giving new life, His own divine life, to purify and redeem the sinful humanity of His bride. Now it is not just Israel—but all of humanity—who are invited to enter into this covenant.
In his book, “Christ the Bridegroom,” Catholic author Dr. Brant Pitre points out that the bible begins with a wedding—Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden—it ends with a wedding—the Lamb and the Bride in the garden of paradise—and the first miracle, the first sign, that Jesus performs revealing his messianic and divine identity, is at a wedding. At the Wedding Feast of Cana, the scriptures never identify who the bride and groom are. However, when the wine for the feast runs out, Mary is the first to respond, telling Jesus that they have no wine, and Jesus responds to her, and not only provides more wine, but the best wine, and a superabundance of it. So Mary (representing daughter Zion, the people of Israel), and Jesus (who is God incarnate) are fulfilling the role of bride and bridegroom, in providing the wine for the family feast. And this is in part fulfillment of Old Testament images of God providing the choicest wines for the feast of the Messiah, or the feast of wine and fine food that divine Wisdom prepares for all who will accept the invitation.
And the last line of our gospel reading is, “Jesus did this as the beginning of His signs at Cana in Galilee and so revealed His glory, and His disciples began to believe in Him.” This is the point of the story. And not only that we might believe in Him, but that we would also believe that as He could change the very nature of water into the nature of wine, so also can He change the very nature of bread and wine into His Body and Blood for our sharing in the wedding feast of the lamb and the bride, in which we the people are the bride, and Christ the lamb has provided the best wine—the blood of the new covenant in which we receive His divine life of freedom from sin and reconciliation with God.
And I want to end by looking at our second reading, from the beautiful first letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians. The main focus of much of this letter is to explain to them that the charisms of the Spirit, the gifts they possess, are for the building up of the Church community in the love of God, and in fact divine love is the wisdom that guides the use of all the many gifts, each gift given to be shared for the good of others.
We in the Church, and also we in our nation and world, must continue the work to heal the various divisions and tensions within our community, to love, honor and respect each other. The Enemy wants to plant weeds of separation, isolation, fear and all the vices. We need to be—and God wants us to be—one Body, one Church, one people, espoused to the Lord as His beloved and loving bride, virtuously devoted to each other and working together to build up the body of Christ and the dignity and call to holiness of all humanity, to witness to others the blessings and gifts of God that are available through the Church and a living faith relationship with God. Our God, our greatest love, the divine bridegroom of His people, who wills that in the same divine Spirit of love of the Father and the Son, that we might all be one, in Him.
(Father Kelley is the pastor of St. Francis Xavier Parish in Gettysburg.)
By Father Stephen P. Kelley, Special to The Witness
