Marriage and the Cross
One
“I Don’t Want to End Up Like That”
I know a guy who was teaching a catechism class to adults. Everyone was gathered together in the chapel for the lecture and he was talking about how the sacrament of marriage is supposed to be animated by the same kind of love that Christ showed when He died on the cross. Christian marriage is supposed to be selfless, as Christ’s love was selfless. It’s supposed to be sacrificial, as Christ’s love was sacrificial. And Christian marriage is supposed to extend to death, just as Christ loved us to death.
While this guy was talking, a woman in the audience was getting increasingly agitated. Finally, she raised her hand, and she said, “That doesn’t work for me.” And then she pointed to the Crucifix, suspended over the altar, and she said, very simply, “Because I don’t want to end up like that.”
That perfectly expresses why Christian and Catholic marriage is in the state of total crisis it’s in today. Because people don’t want to be like Jesus.
Two
St. Paul and the Cross as the Model of Marriage
In Ephesians 5, St. Paul explains Christian marriage in terms of the relationship between Christ and His Church. He says, “Husband, love your wives as Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself up for her.”
That’s an intense principle but it’s just applying to the Sacrament of Marriage the same rules Jesus gave all His Disciples. For it was Jesus who said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” It was Jesus who said, “No one has greater love than this, that He lay down His life for His friend.”
So marriage is where we make it official. It’s where we say to our spouse, “You. You are the one in whom I will concentrate my efforts to love like Christ loved us. You are the one for whom I will lay down my life.”
All Christians are called to this kind of selfless, sacrificial love. But as St. Paul shows, marriage is where you focus that love on one fellow human above all others. And that’s your spouse.
Three
Sacrament of Service
It’s amazing how many people talk about “how their needs aren’t being met” in their marriages. Or, again, they’ll say, like that woman in the classroom to the crucifix, to distance themselves from Jesus, they’ll say that the marriage isn’t working for them.
All of this implies an attitude in which marriage is about you, that you get married for your own benefit. But that’s not how the Church understands marriage. In fact, marriage, along with holy orders, is classified as a sacrament of service.
So, for instance, In paragraph #1533, the Catechism says, “Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist are sacraments of Christian initiation. They ground the common vocation of all Christ’s disciples, a vocation to holiness and to the mission of evangelizing the world. They confer the graces needed for the life according to the Spirit during this life as pilgrims on the march towards the homeland.”
So, what this passage is saying is that these three sacraments – baptism, eucharist, and confirmation – they’re for you. They’re for your benefit. You’re welcome.
But then, in the next paragraph, #1534, the Catechism says, “Two other sacraments, Holy Orders and Matrimony, are directed towards the salvation of others; if they contribute as well to personal salvation, it is through service to others that they do so. They confer a particular mission in the Church and serve to build up the people of God.”
Did you hear that? Priesthood and marriage only are of benefit to you insofar as you serve others. What this passage is saying is that these sacraments are not for you. If you benefit from them at all, it’s only as a kind of ricochet effect. But you don’t do it for yourself. You don’t do it based on what you can get out of it. You do it to serve.
Is that how we see our marriages?
Four
Relentless Self-Gift
If our marriages are supposed to be like Christ’s love for humanity, then that tells us that we never, ever stop giving. Christ didn’t stop giving on the cross until He drew His last breath. All the difficult situations of marriage were acted out at Calvary so that we know not to quit loving the other person under any circumstances.
Every scenario someone can bring up to try to get out of the marriage was prefigured by Christ on the cross.
“Yeah, but what if it’s torturous?” Yes, Christ was tortured on the cross but He remained.
“Yeah, but what if the other person is unfaithful?” Yes, humanity in the nation of Israel, in the person of Jesus’ disciples, and in all of us has always been unfaithful to the Lord but He remained on the cross.
“Yeah, but what if your spouse wants you to leave?” Yes, they cried to Jesus to come down from the cross. To abandon His commitment, to end His sacrifice, but He remained on the cross.
Marriage is relentless self-gift. No matter what crosses come with it, you stay true till death do you part.
Five
The Joy of Christian Marriage
But remember that in Christian marriage, as in the Christian life as a whole, crosses are joined to joys. Calvary is sandwiched in between the Transfiguration and the Resurrection. The pains of labor come after the pleasures of romance and before the joys of parenthood. The inevitable challenges of fidelity and forgiveness are, in a Christian marriage, surrounded and contextualized by intimacy, family, friendship, celebration, and knowing that you are indelibly important, irreplaceable, to others.
It’s part of Christian discipleship to carry our crosses, including the crosses we have to carry as part of marriage, but the Lord tells us that His yoke is sweet, and His burden is light.
When the woman pointed at Jesus hanging on the cross and said, “I don’t want to end up like that,” she didn’t realize that she was really saying, “I don’t ever want to be happy.” As Fulton Sheen used to say, the cross isn’t an obstacle to happiness, it’s a ladder to happiness.
For sure that’s true of Christian marriage, the more committed you are to carrying its crosses, the more surely it will turn into the greatest source of happiness this life can offer. That’s the secret of the Christian life. And that’s the secret of the Sacrament of Matrimony.