Follow the Breadcrumbs

Learning how important marriage is in Christianity

11/25/2023

Lk 20:27-40 Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, came forward and put this question to Jesus, saying, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us, If someone's brother dies leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman but died childless. Then the second and the third married her, and likewise all the seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be? For all seven had been married to her." Jesus said to them, "The children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.

It is no exaggeration to say that if we get marriage wrong, we get virtually everything else wrong in the Catholic religion. If we can’t quite nail it when it comes to marriage, we sort of blow it when it comes to the rest of Christianity. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it is not. There is something fundamental and foundational about marriage that kind of opens up the whole of Christianity, or else it remains a closed book.

In a sense marriage is like the breadcrumbs that lead us not only back to the Garden of Eden, but also forward into heaven and paradise. Marriage is not only something that happens on earth, but it also gives us a clue as to what it was like in the Garden of Eden, and if we follow marriage like breadcrumbs we end up back in the Garden with Adam and Eve.

There is a beautiful line in the Nuptial Blessing, that long blessing that a priest gives a couple on their wedding day. It says that marriage is that one blessing that was not forfeited by original sin or washed away by the flood. What that means is that there was one sacrament that existed in Eden. Adam and Eve were married. Gn 2:24 refers to marriage: “A man will leave his father and mother and cling to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.”

Notice how Adam and Eve did not get baptized, nor did they receive First Communion, nor go to Confession or receive Confirmation, or the Anointing of the Sick. But there is one sacrament they received, namely, marriage. So marriage in a sense is like breadcrumbs which if we follow it, leads us back to the Garden of Eden.

But marriage is also breadcrumbs that lead us forward into paradise and heaven, because that is the one sacrament that will be there in heaven, too. There we will not need any other sacraments: no one will be baptized in heaven, nor go to confession, or receive Holy Communion, or receive the Anointing of the Sick. But everyone will be married in heaven.

Even though Jesus says in today’s gospel from Luke 20 when we get to heaven there will neither be marriage, nor being given in marriage. Nonetheless, there is a marriage in heaven, a mystical, eternal, spiritual, supernatural marriage. The whole Church, which is the Bride of Christ, will be married to her spouse Jesus.

That is exactly why the Sadducees get marriage wrong. They are still thinking very narrowly about earthly marriage. You marry a guy, you don’t have any kids, so you marry is little brother, again no kids, and marry his little brother. When they all die and get to heaven, whose wife is she going to be? Maybe you have thought the same thing: if someone marries after their spouse dies, who do you pick as your spouse in heaven? That is a very earthly way of thinking and also very mistaken.

But if we get marriage right, as Jesus and the Bible teach us, and we follow the breadcrumbs of that marriage, we can get both to paradise and back to Eden, and surprisingly you find a marriage in both places. And so there will be a kind of marriage in heaven, between the whole Church, which is the Bride of Christ, and Jesus, the Bridegroom.

And this, by the way, is the whole reason why priests and nuns do not get married. We are waiting for that eternal marriage. It is not that we don’t want to get married at all, but rather, just not now. We are willing to wait for the best Spouse, and we will be married in heaven, and so will everyone else who gets to heaven.

This is why it is so important to get marriage right, and not monkey with it. That is what we are doing in our modern culture talking about silly things like same-sex marriage. That is getting marriage wrong. Consequently, we lose the breadcrumbs, and we cannot get back to Eden. Such thinking makes us foolish like the Sadducees, and we cannot get up to heaven. We lose our way.

This is why the Church is so insistent about what marriage is and what it isn’t. Marriage is our ticket home, so don’t tear up the ticket! Two or three times a week I sit down at my computer and work on annulments. I am looking for ways to help people annul their previous marriage, so they can get married to someone else, and have that marriage blessed in the Church.

And there is a very important pastoral purpose for that: to help people return to the sacraments. But there is also a kind of downside, a negative, to that, namely, we are eroding our understanding of marriage. What is marriage? And when we get it wrong, we lose our way. We don’t know where we came from in Eden, and we don’t know where we are going to in heaven. Marriage is our ticket.

Finally, this is why Pope St. John Paul II called marriage the “primordial sacrament.” And by that I think he meant that marriage is the breadcrumbs because marriage was present in some mysterious, mystical way with Adam and Eve in Eden, and marriage will be present in some mysterious, mystical way in heaven. And that is why we have to get marriage right.

Praised be Jesus Christ!