#21 - St. JPII's Meditation on Mary

[MariaChristi]

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Hopefully, those who’ve been following Mulieris Dignitatem, have been blessed by Saint John Paul II’s insights into Mary, as Mother and Model for everyone. Continuing Chapter 7, “The great mystery” of the Church as Bride of Christ:

…Since the human being - man and woman - has been created in God’s image and likeness, God can speak about himself through the lips of the Prophet using language which is essentially human. In the text of Isaiah quoted above, the expression of God’s love is “human”, but the love itself is divine. Since it is God’s love, its spousal character is properly divine, even though it is expressed by the analogy of a man’s love for a woman. The woman-bride is Israel, God’s Chosen People, and this choice originates exclusively in God’s gratuitous love. It is precisely this love which explains the Covenant, a Covenant often presented as a marriage covenant which God always renews with his Chosen People. On the part of God the Covenant is a lasting “commitment”; he remains faithful to his spousal love even if the bride often shows herself to be unfaithful.

This image of spousal love, together with the figure of the divine Bridegroom - a very clear image in the texts of the Prophets - finds crowning confirmation in the Letter to the Ephesians (5:23-32). Christ is greeted as the bridegroom by John the Baptist (cf. Jn 3:27-29). Indeed Christ applies to himself this comparison drawn from the Prophets (cf. Mk 2:19-20). The Apostle Paul, who is a bearer of the Old Testament heritage, writes to the Corinthians: “I feel a divine jealousy for you, for I betrothed you to Christ to present you as a pure bride to her one husband” (2 Cor 11:2). But the fullest expression of the truth about Christ the Redeemer’s love, according to the analogy of spousal love in marriage, is found in the Letter to the Ephesians: “Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (5:25), thereby fully confirming the fact that the Church is the bride of Christ: “The Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer” (Is 54:5). In Saint Paul’s text the analogy of the spousal relationship moves simultaneously in two directions which make up the whole of the “great mystery” (“sacramentum magnum”).

The covenant proper to spouses “explains” the spousal character of the union of Christ with the Church, and in its turn this union, as a “great sacrament”, determines the sacramentality of marriage as a holy covenant between the two spouses, man and woman. Reading this rich and complex passage, which taken as a whole is a great analogy, we must distinguish that element which expresses the human reality of interpersonal relations from that which expresses in symbolic language the “great mystery” which is divine.

How few, it seems, among clergy and laity in the Catholic Church take enough time to read and re-read what God reveals to us in Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium of the Church! How many really listen to Scripture as “God speaking to us”? I wonder how many have ever read Mulieris Dignitatem, or taken time with the Letter to the Ephesians and/or the other books of the Bible which Pope St. John Paul II references.