The Meaning of Marriage

WRITTEN BY DREW MATZ

What needs to be restored in the Christian understanding of Marriage?

What is Marriage?

Marriage is one of the most foundational of all of God’s created orders. God designed marriage to function in several different ways. The first is to create an icon of the manner in which God loves his people, and in particular, the manner in which Christ loves his bride, the Church. This is why St. Paul encourages husbands to “love their wives as Christ loved the church, and gave himself up for her” (Eph 5:25). It is through this lens that Christians view marriage, and with this being the case, it differs vastly from the many secular interpretations and perversions that modern society has projected upon it. Even in the Church today, this Christological framework has often been forgotten or neglected. Divorce remains at a high rate, and many young parishioners are forgoing marriage all together for a cohabitating alternative. 

What Went Wrong?

At the heart of this neglect for the true purpose and telos of marriage is essentially the increasing secularization of society. Many young people today no longer understand marriage as a divine institution but is rather no more than a simple cultural construct that can be re-defined as society sees fit, usually to accommodate whatever is popular at the present time. Even the Pharisees in Jesus’ time had forgotten the sanctity of this divine order when Jesus says to them: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?  So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mt 19:4-6). Thus, in a way, this neglect is nothing new but is perhaps just resurfacing over and over again under different forms. 

How Can the Church Respond?

With God’s order being so often neglected, Pastors and other church workers need to know how to lovingly and compassionately care for Christians who find themselves in situations where God’s order of marriage is being compromised, especially with so much of the parish is made up of broken homes, broken families, and broken hearts. Perhaps the saddest part of the undermining of God’s order is that it will only lead toward more despair and destruction. Since the order of marriage is designed for mankind and not vice-versa, man will struggle to construct counterfeit versions of that which was given as a good gift. They will never succeed in finding the kind of fulfillment that marriage was designed to provide. Pastors and teachers would do well to communicate the loving-kindness of God in providing such a wonderful source of fulfillment in marriage, and how Christians can cherish, uphold, and protect it from the evil one.