Where would the “bride” fit in? I’ve always heard the Church was the Bride Of Christ. Can you give me more?
I hope this is not too awkward, but let me try to tie in some theology on the matter. You know the
parable of the talents where the master gives varying degrees of money to the servants and they go and invest/not invest that in various ways. In this parable, as Cardinal Journet and others have noted, the money (talents) are the graces we are given. We are then to go forth with the gift and bear fruit with that gift (the parable speaks of how the first two servants made “more” with what they were given).
Keeping this in mind, the Church is both bride and mother. A bride “receives” a life-giving gift from the bridegroom in a spousal relationship. The bride also brings forth life as a result of receiving the gift. These are figures of course. As Joe 5859 wisely said, don’t take things too mechanical. Take them theologically.
Take the example of Mary. Mary receives the “word” (Luke 1:38). She is in this sense the spouse of the Spirit which “overshadows” her. (Luke 1:35). And what does she bring forth but the “word” personified, Jesus Christ. Mary is also mother. She is both a bride and a mother simultaneously.
Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) expounds on much of this in several of his books such as Daughter Zion, or Mary: The Church at the Source. For instance, he says: *The grain of wheat does not remain alone, for it includes the maternal mystery of the soil—Mary, the holy soil of the Church, as the Fathers so wonderfully call her, is an essential part of Christ. The mystery of Mary means precisely that God’s Word did not remain alone; rather, it assimilated the other—the soil—into itself,
became man in the “soil” of his Mother, and then, fused with the soil of the whole of humanity, returned to God in a new form. (Ratzinger, Mary: The Church at the Source)
The Church is likewise called to “be” fertile soil. We are to receive grace (i.e. be a bride) and bear fruit (i.e. be a Mother). Ratzinger continues:[T]he
Gospel explains how men can become fruitful soil for God’s Word. They can become this soil by providing, as it were, the organic elements in which life can grow and mature; by drawing life themselves from this organic matter; by becoming themselves a word formed by the penetration of the Word; by sinking the roots of their life into prayer and thus into God.*None of this precludes that the Church is also our mother, even though there is a sense in which we look to the figure of a mother to recognize how we are called to bear fruit with God’ gifts. The great thing about typology is that it is not exhausted once one type is identified. For instance, Jesus is both the new Adam and also a type of Isaac. Being a type of one does not forbid him from being a type of another. In the same way, the Church is in a sense mother, the Church is in a sense our mother, and the Church is in a sense bride.
