By Andrew J. Sodergren, M.T.S., Psy.D.

Note: This article is part of an ongoing series on Pope St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body (TOB).”

We have been exploring Pope St. John Paul II’s meditations on Ephesians 5 in Theology of the Body. In that famous biblical passage, St. Paul draws an analogy between spousal love in marriage and Christ’s relationship with the Church. He brings this analogy to a crescendo by saying,

“Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:28-32).

The Greek text underlying the above expression “great mystery” has here great theological significance and history. In particular, the Greek word “mysterion” in this verse is typically rendered as “sacramentum” in Latin, from which we get the word “sacrament.” Pope St. John Paul II saw in this a deep connection between God’s salvific plan of man and the sacramentality of marriage. He tended to use the word sacrament in a broader sense than speaking of the seven sacraments of the New Covenant. For him, the purpose of a sacrament is “to reveal” and “to realize” an aspect of God’s plan for humanity, so anything that has this role of “revealing” and “realizing” the divine plan for our salvation can be thought of as sacramental.

For John Paul II, marriage was the first sacrament that God instituted in the beginning when He created our first parents and gave them to each other. Before Original Sin, they existed in a state of holiness and friendship with God, and in that context, marriage was a vehicle for divine grace and a veiled sign of God’s plan for humanity. It signified that, from creation, God willed to give Himself to us, like a husband to his bride whom he has chosen to be his own forever and whom he bestows with a love that is both tender and strong.

After our first parents’ fall from grace, human marriage could no longer convey divine grace, but it continued to serve as a sign pointing to God’s plan to unite Himself with us. Through the prophets of the Old Covenant (e.g., Isaiah, Hosea, Ezekiel), God continued to speak the language of marital love to His chosen people to prepare them for Christ’s redemption. Yahweh is portrayed as a bridegroom and Israel as His bride whom He has chosen and toward whom He remains ever faithful. Israel is often portrayed as an unfaithful, adulterous wife who repeatedly breaks her covenant while Yahweh takes her back again and again, extending mercy and calling her to holiness. This imagery culminates in the New Testament with the spousal analogy of Christ and the Church, which we see in Ephesians 5 and is echoed in other passages. God definitively reveals His spousal love through Christ’s “total and irrevocable gift of self” to man. He gives himself to all of us both in the collective sense (the Church) and to each individually, personally. This gift consists of a “participation in the divine nature” by which we are saved, sanctified, and glorified (TOB, 95b.4).

In light of this, Pope St. John Paul II saw spousal love as central to God’s plan for humanity. While the mystery of God’s plan for our salvation is “absolutely transcendent” with respect to any human analogy we use to describe it, the analogy of spousal love “helps us to penetrate into the very essence of the mystery” (95b.1). The sign of marriage helps us to see all God has done and continues to do for us as an expression of the tender love of a spouse for his beloved. Indeed, Christ’s redemptive, spousal gift of self to the Church brings about the forgiveness of sin and re-establishes us in intimate union with Him. As we will see, then, “all the sacraments of the New Covenant find their prototype in some way in marriage” (98.2).