The focus of this chapter is the wedding service and its connection to the Eucharist in the divine liturgy. In Ephesians, the holy apostle Paul teaches that marriage is “a great mystery” in its image on earth and in its spiritual meaning that points to the kingdom of God. Marriage wasn’t exclusively a liturgical event in Paul’s times. But the wedding was considered a sacrament of the Church because it directly reflected the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and God’s unity with the Church as the Bride of Christ.
The holy scriptures give us more insight into the meaning of the wedding service in Genesis. Mankind isn’t an “individual,” not he, she, or it. But we are “they,” Metropolitan Hilarion teaches. Man is “dual” in nature. The first man came from the Breath of God and created earth, woman came from man’s body in his sleep, and children come from a woman’s body through marital union, and so the begetting of our race is followed like this. That way of giving birth shows us the love of the Holy Trinity, since God is three persons in one. Likewise, man, woman, and child are three persons, but one in essence or human nature. So, the “fullness of mankind” is seen in marriage since our image is found in the Holy Trinity’s divine love. Christ was sent from his Father in heaven, from his home to be betrothed and wedded to the Church and humanity itself. The attraction given to us by God leads us to “leave father and mother” and be united to a “wife.” The marital union itself – the bodily joining of man and woman – is trinitarian. That’s the first meaning that Metropolitan Hilarion draws out in this chapter. The next meaning is the begetting of children as the flow of the trinitarian image within us. Love breeds life. The book of Genesis gave the commandment to be fruitful and multiply before the Fall of Mankind and the temptation and trick for false life. The battle for how to build up life had begun. The lying Serpent came against this divine fruitfulness, the holy harvesting, and the growth of grace. It seems that the Liar wanted to persuade Adam and Eve to take their gaze away from each other’s love and the first commandment from God that was given to us to make love. Adam and Eve were commanded to be sexually united with each other, not food or spiritual authority or divine knowledge, and bring about a deeper unity with God. But they only fulfill that command after the fall when they see that their children are not growing toward righteousness and the fullness of unity with God, and food has become a burden of mankind and not a way of living forever. We want to multiply like God or not multiply at all by taking some short-cut by eating the fruit instead of being fruitful with our bodies and souls through the first marital union. And Christ’s first miracle brings us back to that very same point in humanity: marriage and sex and communion with God. It was God’s will that we become fruitful and grow so that we fill up the earth with God’s grace as He also fills up the universe and creation. So, the first sin was committed, as it seems, in a state of bodily virginity. But our first father and mother had not grown into a state of chastity in which sexual union was blessed. Christ blessed that union between spouses in the first miracle at the Wedding at Cana. The Serpent’s plan targeted marriage’s meaning as defined by God in the book of Genesis. The Devil sought to throw down that very trinitarian image in our body and soul by undoing the divine unity that God keeps together by grace so that humanity doesn’t carry out the mystery of salvation to be fruitful, bountiful, and grow in Christ Jesus toward a fuller union with the Holy Trinity who fills all things.
Marriage has been marred by sin and death, and that’s evident in how many cultures have expressed and governed marital relations and family. Howbeit, God still uses his pre-eternal plan to bring about the mystery of salvation through the Messiah and the Jewish people where the culmination of fruitfulness, righteousness, and love is found in the Holy Theotokos who gives birth to the Godman Jesus Christ. The meaning of marriage is fulfilled and revealed. Christians replenish the earth and bring love and blessings to all people. Metropolitan Hilarion focuses on this deeper teaching of Orthodoxy and says that “the welfare of spouses” was not the most sought-after ideal according to the Levirate Law in Deuteronomy and Matthew 22. Rather the Jews looked to the reproduction of children as a divine commandment that they took seriously. The icon of the Descent into Hades teaches that Christ is victorious over the prison of death and sin where unions are separated. The Serpent tempted Adam and Eve to cause a divorce between not only man and woman, but between God and man. Christ also brings victory for marriage as the mystical union of man and God, and the kind of love we ought to have within us. The poetic book of the Song of Songs is the Hebrew and Orthodox view of love that explicitly points out the physical aspects of marital love in the context of divine love for God. Against that, the widespread Greco-Roman view on love wasn’t as romantic or sensitive. The Mediterranean civilizations during apostolic times saw marriage generally as cohabitation for offspring, the continuation of male inheritance and honor, and a contractual relationship. It wasn’t a very erotic view of married love. Often Greek and Roman free men had children strictly with their legal wife while they fulfilled lusts with concubines and servants – both male and female ones. Very much like our current secularism in the United States, the Roman law nuptias non concuppitus sed consensus facit meant that consent alone was enough for a nuptial ceremony to be legalized and considered socially acceptable. Consent makes any expression of sexuality good is the common practice in our culture. Marriage mostly in the Roman mind was about consent to legal ramifications rather than the fulfillment of love as the divine image of God found in the holy scriptures.
Zeno of Verona and John Chrysostom called sex the mystery. Whereas other cultures focused on the wealth, consent, legality, social status, and parties of marriage, Christians simply focused on the sex itself and its spiritual meaning as something greatly to be admired. This great mystery is seen in the Sunday of the Prodigal Son who left his home and didn’t find a wife or marriage but harlots and debauchery. But when he returned to the father’s house in repentance, he was loved, given a ring, expensive clothes, and a fatted calf. Everything appears to be a wedding feast in this image of love and repentance.
The order of the wedding service has a betrothal and a crowning. Crowns symbolize victory over sin, martyrdom, and glory as well as intelligence and wisdom. Crowns were often used as gravestone markers in the Roman catacombs. The connection between marriage and the eucharist wasn’t separate in the 9th c. But they gradually grew apart due to political and historical circumstances. Theodore the Studite taught that “before all people the rite was performed with the Eucharist.” Metropolitan Hilarion explains that the Eucharist is “the celebrated marriage by which the most holy Bridegroom espouses the Church.” God’s love is shown fully in the Eucharist so that all the mysteries of the Church are connected to this divine thanksgiving in the Body and Blood of Christ, and the Eucharist is the “ideal of Christian marriage.” In the 10th c., emperor Leo VI of Byzantium taught that marriage not blessed by the Church is not a marriage. That idea along with the growing number of Christians in the empire created a situation where the Church had to deal with citizens who dissolved and divorced rather than the state. But Orthodoxy has always seen the end of the Christian wedding service in the couple both receiving holy communion together. The link is so close that the structure of the Eucharistic liturgy and the marriage rite look alike in many ways.
Our betrothal of God is like the journey of Pascha, the passing over into the next world. It's noteworthy that like Pascha – having both a crucifixion pascha and a resurrection pascha – marriage is both a call to self-sacrifice and struggle as well as a merry-making mystery of joy and oneness of mind. Metropolitan Hilarion shows that the patriarchs of the Old Testament found their wives because God ordained it to be so. The prayers of the betrothal service, then, teach that God is “the arranger of the marriage.” Whether we think our parents and culture choose our spouse or choose a spouse on our own, for Orthodox Christians, God plans a marriage. Betrothal is about the pledge of God’s fidelity and our faithfulness in response. The crowning rite points to the Cross while at the same time it points to the Resurrection. There is a “bright sadness” in accepting marriage as primarily a way of martyrdom, and the liturgical service and order reveal that self-sacrificial meaning. The cross is a symbol of joy and suffering. So, the service speaks of St. Elena who found the Holy Cross and St. Sebaste the Soldier and the Forty Women Martyrs. That Orthodox teaching is directly contrary to the idea that marriage is keeping abreast with the world, the fulfillment of personal desires, the cumulation of wealth and influence. Marriage is a preparation for letting go of our will, changing our hearts, and dying to ourselves so that we can be dead to the world. Marriage is death to the world by dying to our desires. The crowns of marriage do not symbolize the hope that worldly success will always flow, but that the married couple will win crowns of martyrdom in this life. In his Letters 232, Gregory the Theologian teaches that “water to wine” meant that something and someone becomes better. Marriage ought to make us better like baptism, chrism, unction, confession, and the Eucharist. The Martyr Precopius urged young Christian women taken under persecution to “go to your death as to a [wedding] feast.” This is the Orthodox Christian attitude toward marriage. There are many paths to martyrdom, and some may not become married to another person here on earth. The next chapter discusses the monastic tonsure service and its many similarities to the mystery of wedded life. All the mysteries of the Orthodox Church are rooted in the Eucharist, and the monastic tonsure is also a sacrament found with eucharistic and marital themes.