The Second Word, Part 1

Undertaking the heart work of marriage preparation

05/06/2024

Last year we studied Pope St. John Paul II's theology of the body in a series of homilies. We looked at Christ's First Word and Third Word. I now want to dedicate a few homilies to Christ's Second Word. I celebrate a lot of weddings every year. In fact, one friend who works at the diocese and processes marriage certificates for the whole diocese said that I do more weddings than any other diocesan priest. I feel like Adam Sandler in the movie, “The Wedding Singer.” My brides don’t want to hear a song, they want to hear a sermon. When a young couple comes to me for marriage preparation, I try to break-down the rather complex process by saying: “Think of marriage preparation like trying to fill three buckets. The first bucket is called “paperwork” and we fill it with baptismal certificates, marriage license, parish registration, etc. The second bucket is called “heart work”, which sounds a lot like “hard work” because it is. You will give your heart to another person and they will entrust their heart to you. You must both learn how to hold it with tenderness and care. The third bucket is called “wedding work,” like the rehearsal, the music, the photography, etc. of the big wedding day. But by far the most critical bucket is the heart work, the hard work, of giving and receiving another person’s heart.

In Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the body, the Holy Father believes that the heart work is also indispensable, and in a sense, central. John Paul II divides the first half of his monumental work called Man and Woman He Created Them into three chapters (chapters sound more classy than my buckets, but my buckets are more memorable). The first chapter he devoted to discussing Christ’s first word on our original experiences modeled by Adam and Eve: Original Solitude, Original Unity, and Original Nakedness. These Edenic experiences preceded Original Sin which fundamentally changed all subsequent human experiences, and set in motion human history marred by sin and death. John Paul’s third chapter was dedicated to study the resurrection of the body, life in heaven, which will essentially be a wedding. Rv 19:9 virtually read like a wedding invitation: “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” Surprisingly, John Paul’s first and third chapters correspond closely to my first and third buckets. The first chapter, like the first bucket, is concerned with preliminaries like paperwork and setting the proper stage for marriage preparation to commence. The third chapter, also like the third bucket, focusses on the wedding work, the completion of marriage preparation and the celebration of love.

If we step back to survey all human history in the light of these three chapters or three buckets, we discover that humanity’s sojourn on earth is nothing other than living chapter two (or my second bucket) of Pope St. John Paul’s theology of the body. This is the answer to the basic question all sane people sooner or later ask: “What is the meaning of my life?” The answer is: “We are here to learn how to love.” That is, we must dedicate ourselves to the heart work, which is really the hard work, of being a human being created in the “image and likeness of God” (Gn 1:26). And what we finally learn is that earthly life is truly marriage preparation, initially to a human spouse, but ultimately to our divine Spouse, Jesus. That is what is going on here.

The pope uses a distinctive word highly suggestive of marriage preparation, namely, pedagogy, which is a form of education. He writes at the end of chapter two, as if in summary of what had preceded: "If Christ appeals to the human “heart” and, before that, his appeal to the “beginning” allows us to construct or at least to outline an anthropology that we can call “theology of the body,” this theology is at the same time a pedagogy. Pedagogy seeks to educate man by setting the requirements before him, giving reasons for them, and indicating the ways that lead to their fulfillment."

Do you remember the beginning of the old television show called “The Six Million Dollar Man”? In a sense, that introduction describes the reeducation or reconstruction of the heart that John Paul wants to undertake. The show began after the crash of a space shuttle, when the voiceover says: “Steve Austin, astronaut, a man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before, better, stronger, faster.” John Paul’s purpose in the theology of the body is not so much making the body better or bionic, but the heart.

And when we remember that earthly life seen as marriage preparation, which really means giving your heart to another person and holding another’s heart with unspeakable tenderness, then we don’t want to exchange broken heart barely alive, but healed and whole hearts. Because of Original Sin – with damage compounded by our own sins – our hearts are more mangled and mutilated than Steve Austin’s body was after his near-fatal crash. In other words, the technology that scientists had to rebuilt Austin’s broken body parallels the theology that John Paul II presents to rebuild humanity’s broken heart. Indeed, as the pope will explain in this second chapter, our hearts have to be even “better, stronger, and faster” than normal because our Spouse is Jesus Christ, the perfect Man. Many years ago a friend of mine shared his two rules for dating women. First, never date a friend, because if you break up, you lose the friend as well. Second, never date a woman who’s better looking than you because you will always be jealous. Well, humanity has broken both those rules by falling in love with Jesus, who is our best Friend, and also better looking in every possible way.

This capacity of the human heart to love in a way that is “better” or “bionic” is what St. Paul called “life according to the Spirit.” The Holy Father elaborates on these new-found powers of the heart:

"If mastery in the sphere of ethos manifests and realizes itself as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-mastery” – as we read in Galatians – then behind each of these realizations, these forms of behavior, these moral virtues, stands a specific choice, that is, an effort of the will, a fruit of the human spirit permeated by the Spirit of God, which manifests itself in choosing the good." That is, the principal Protagonist in this marriage preparation program called the theology of the body will be the Holy Spirit. Only the supernatural technology of the Holy Spirit can teach, train, and finally transform our human hearts to love our divine Bridegroom, Jesus.

This second chapter – or second bucket – of the theology of the body is also based on a word of Christ. You will recall that in our Lord’s first word, the pope analyzed Mt 19:3-8, where Jesus invited his interlocutors (and us) to return to the beginning in Genesis 1-2 to understand God’s original plan for marriage. Jesus’ third word that the pope examined came from Mt 22:24-30, where Jesus pointed the Sadducees (and us) to consider the resurrection of the body, and life in heaven, as the full realization of God’s plan for human love, ultimately in a mystical marriage to Christ. And now the pope-saint devotes no less than one hundred and fifty-three pages to Christ’s second word taken from our Lord’s magnificent Sermon on the Mount, particularly Mt 5:27-28. There Jesus declares quite surprisingly: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” As he begins this new chapter the pope is quick to point out: “At that time [in chapter one], we were able to realize how vast was the context of a sentence, or even just of a word, spoken by Christ." In other words, the pope urges us to buckle-up for an adventure as we explore this second chapter of the theology of the body, the second bucket of marriage preparation, the Second Word spoken by Christ.

Praised be Jesus Christ!