Some of you may remember that I was a part time wedding DJ at one point in my life. It started off with a request from my good friends Mike and Natalie and went forward from there, with multiple different gigs at different friends’ weddings. I had such a fun time doing this job. Wedding receptions are a great moment of celebration where two families and a whole load of friends share the beginning of married life for a happy couple.
I got to help with many special moments as a wedding DJ: father-daughter dances, mother-son dances and first dances were always really touching. One of my favorite special dances was the Anniversary dance, where I would call all of the married couples out onto the dance floor. Then, as the music played, I would say, “If you’ve been married less than 24 hours, please leave the dance floor.” This would get a laugh, as the first ones off would be the couple just married. Then I would increase the cutoff, slowly whittling it down until the only couple left on the dance floor was the longest married. It was always so touching to see that last couple left, oftentimes married for more than 40, 50 or even 60 years. There is something special about the longevity of those married couples. It’s inspiring to see spouses who have stuck together in good times and bad, sickness and health. In just a couple of years, my parents will be celebrating their 50th. I can’t wait!
It isn’t just the perseverance that inspires us in a married couple who have been together for that long of a stretch. Although, for those of you celebrating those big anniversaries, I’m sure that you can attest that just persevering is sometimes the name of the game! In all seriousness, there is a reason why long-married couples capture our hearts. Especially when we examine marriage from the Christian worldview, it points us to the very depths of love, to the core of God’s relationship with all of humanity. When we look at a long-standing marriage, we see what the power of choosing the good of the other means. This is what love is in the deepest sense, not just a feeling, but the habitual choice of what is good for the other person. For spouses, this means making that choice to support and care for each other on days when it’s easy and especially when it’s hard. If the marriage is blessed with children, married love entails countless sacrifices for the good of those kids, even when they end up making inevitable mistakes. Love looks like discipline for those mistakes with a goal to helping them grow. The love of husband and wife, when freely given, radiates out to so many people – their friends, relatives, co-workers, even strangers. When husband and wife lean together into that grace of the sacrament, their love becomes a powerful reflection of the love which we celebrate and examine this Sunday: the love of Jesus, the ultimate spouse.
For each of us who have seen the power of a solid and lasting married love, we can see the love of Christ shining forth. Jesus gave us Christian marriage to be a channel and shining image of His love for us as His bride, the Church. At the Last Supper, when Jesus pronounced the words: “This is my body, which will be given up for you,” and when He spoke of His blood being poured out for the sake of the “new and eternal covenant,” Jesus was pointing toward a marriage–the ultimate lasting marriage, the exchange of love between a perfect bridegroom and a bride made perfect by His grace. This is what we all are invited into, that amazing exchange between Bridegroom and Bride.
This is why, when Jesus begins His public ministry in today’s Gospel, He does it in the context of a wedding feast. He’s telling us that what He’s about is capturing each of our hearts through His spousal love. He takes water and transforms it into wine to give us a beautiful, tangible image of what will happen because of Jesus’ spousal self-gift to the Church: each of us will have the opportunity to be transformed from the inside out by the love of Jesus. Water becomes something entirely new because of Jesus’ power. The same thing happened in the depths of our souls at our Baptism. We were transformed into new creatures by His grace, inserted into the new life that Jesus won through His Passion, Death and Resurrection. We went into the waters of Baptism unredeemed and rose redeemed and renewed.
We see echoes of this reality in those marriages which span decades. The love of husband and wife touches and changes both them and many others. That is why we can’t help but be drawn in when we see that couple still dancing together even after 50 years. Jesus invites us into something even more powerful, that ultimate spousal relationship with Him where we are transformed by His love, where we learn to lean on Him in good times and bad, sickness and health. And just like any marriage lasts through the weathering of storms, through moments of struggle followed by reconciliation, so it is in our relationship with the Lord. When we turn away from Him, He lovingly calls us back, renewing our hearts with His perfect, supernatural love in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. What a gift we have in being called to participate in the ultimate dance of love between bridegroom and bride, the dance which will continue and come to fullness in eternity! The question we can each ask ourselves this Sunday is: how am I responding to the spousal love of Christ as a baptized person?
The better we respond to Him, the more His love will transform us to love others more perfectly.
+ Heavenly Father, thank you for choosing each of us for the spousal love of Christ. Jesus, help us to turn away from whatever would keep us from more fully responding to your love. Holy Spirit, stir up our hearts to give ourselves more and more to Jesus, our Heavenly Spouse. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen. +