The Second Voyage, Part 2

Setting out on the high seas of spousal love

06/20/2025

As we embark on this second voyage of the Theology of the Body through the seas of Sacred Scripture and spousal love, we should define the scope of our journey. Do you remember the scope of the U.S.S. Minnow’s misadventures on Gilligan’s Island?

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale

A tale of a fateful trip

That started from this tropic port

Aboard this tiny ship

The mate was a mighty sailin’ man

The skipper brave and sure

Five passengers set sail that day

For a three hour tour, a three hour tour.

Our skipper is John Paul II, and I will be your “mighty sailin’ man” the first mate. And we will soon discover how choppy the seas of Scripture become as they recount the love story between God and man, specifically, God’s covenant faithfulness and man’s covenant failures. Smooth sailing doesn’t last long for spouses, about five minutes after they get home from the honeymoon.

So, here is our scope: we will narrow our attention to only two distinctive features of the six covenant/marriages of the Bible. First, we will explore how each successive covenant/marriage expands to include all humanity.

And second we will consider how each covenant mediator – Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and finally Jesus – faces a test to prove his love and win the bride. That is, we will look at covenant/marriage first through the eyes of the bride, that is, humanity, and second from the vantage of the Bridegroom, namely, God, represented by each covenant-mediator.

First, a little full disclosure. I will steal most of my material on covenant/marriages from Scott Hahn’s book "A Father Who Keeps His Promises." Hahn provides this helpful overview, a map to plot our course:

As you study Scripture, you’ll see how covenant laws [the requirements to marry God] are not arbitrary stipulations but fixed moral principles which govern the moral order. Moreover, they reflect the inner life of the Blessed Trinity. In short, “covenant” is what God does because “covenant” is what God is (29).

That is, this 3-hour tour is not some sight-seeing joyride to the Bahamas, but a journey to the heart of God, which Hebrews describes as “an all-consuming fire.” Or as St. Augustine memorably put it: “To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him the greatest human achievement.” And the good news is that God is chasing us even more than we are seeking him.

First, let’s consider covenant/marriage from the bride’s point of view, humanity as God’s beloved. When we survey the covenant/marriage landscape of the Bible, it becomes quickly apparent how each successive covenant grows and expands. For example, God’s first covenant was forged with a married couple, Adam and Eve. Only two people were betrothed to each other and to God.

God’s second covenant was established with Noah and his family (3 sons, their wives, and their children). The covenant package had become family-size. The third covenant with Abraham grew to tribal proportions embracing everyone in the patriarch’s household, or as we say today, all of Abraham’s “kith and kin”, both blood and non-blood relations.

God fashions a fourth and far grander covenant with Moses. Now an entire nation gathers at the foot of Mt. Sinai, and swears covenant fidelity to God through the mediation of Moses. And for his last Old Testament covenant, God works through King David, “a man after God’s own heart” (1 Sm 13:14) to rule over a kingdom.

Scott Hahn explains how a kingdom, unlike a nation, is virtually unlimited in size:

As covenant mediator, King David…gradually transformed the national family of Israel [under Moses] to…a dynastic kingdom. The difference [between kingdom and nation] is subtle but crucial. A nation maintains sole sovereignty, whereas a kingdom exercises sovereignty over other states and nations (214).

In other words, finally under David, the bride reaches her proper proportions, that is, the People of God is truly “catholic” a Greek word meaning “present everywhere.”

And lastly, Jesus, the only perfect covenant-mediator, because he is the God-Man, will build on this “catholic conception” of his Bride by commanding his disciples to complete what King David began: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:19).

Can you see the concentric circles of God’s covenant plan laid out throughout Scripture? Or, as we gush and sing at weddings, “Here comes the bride, all dressed in white…” That white wedding gown bespeaks not only betrothal but also Baptism, which incorporates us into the Church, the Bride of Christ.

Perhaps a more dramatic way to appreciate the depths of God’s covenant love for humanity is when the north winds blow and the waves crash over the bow submerging the ship of spousal love. Again and again, the prophets used the metaphor of adultery to identify Israel’s covenant/marriage infidelities in their religious observances with God.

John Paul highlights how the prophets treated idolatry (worshiping alien gods) synonymously with adultery (having other lovers):

While Isaiah emphasizes in his texts above all the love of Yahweh, the Bridegroom, who in all circumstances goes to meet the Bride, overlooking all her infidelities. Hosea and Ezekiel abound in comparisons that show above all the ugliness and moral evil of the adultery [idolatry] committed by the Bride, Israel (274).

Ironically, it is exactly Israel’s infidelities that underscore emphatically God’s covenant faithfulness. Or think about it this way: what husband or wife today would stay in a marriage when their spouse commits adultery? Well, that unconditional, unheard-of, devotion is how the prophets described God’s love for his Bride.

Therefore, both positively and negatively, we see how God perfects and purifies his people for an eternal covenant/marriage to him. Again, Scott Hahn states it succinctly:

From a sinful, shameful couple cast out of paradise, to God’s glorious redeemed world-wide family of saints at home forever in heaven – that miraculous transformation is the covenant story of the Scripture…From the beginning the Father planned that Adam and Eve would be the first members of a world-wide family circle, swept up into the eternal love of the Trinity” (36).

“Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of the fateful trip…”

Praised be Jesus Christ!