Focused Link: A Basic Theology of Marriage

I grabbed this from http://catholiceducation.org/articles/sexuality/se0096.html# and I've posted some key paragraphs in this blog to whet your appetite. This was written by Christopher West.

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The Centrality of Marriage in God's Plan

"Sacred Scripture begins with the creation of man and woman in the image and likeness of God and concludes with a vision of the 'wedding feast of the Lamb.' Scripture speaks throughout of marriage and its 'mystery,' its institution and the meaning God has given it, its origin and its end, ...the difficulties arising from sin, and its renewal 'in the Lord.'" Throughout the Old Testament, God's love for his people is described as the love of a husband for his bride. In the New Testament, Christ embodies this love. He comes as the Heavenly Bridegroom to unite himself indissolubly to his Bride, the Church.

Marriage, then, is not a peripheral issue in the Christian life. It finds itself right at the heart of the Christian mystery and, by means of its grand analogy, serves to illuminate it. All analogies are inadequate in their attempts to communicate God's mystery. Yet, speaking of marriage and the family John Paul states, "In this entire world there is not a more perfect, more complete image of God, Unity and Community. There is no other human reality which corresponds more, humanly speaking, to that divine mystery."

Pope John Paul II goes so far as to say that we cannot understand the Christian mystery unless we keep in mind the "great mystery" involved in the creation of man as male and female and the vocation of both to conjugal love. According to the analogy, God's eternal plan is to "marry" us (see Hos 2:19). He wanted this eternal plan to be so present to us that he stamped an image of it in our very being by creating us male and female and calling us to marriage.