INSIDE america

Marriage
as Witnessing to Christ
The current discussion about the nature of marriage gives us the opportunity
to witness to what it means to those who have encountered Christ

My soul is thirsting for the Lord, when shall I see His face? Like the deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is thirsting for You, my God.
These words are taken from Psalm 42. In his homily on this psalm, St. Augustine asks, “Who is speaking these words?” And he answers: it is not the individual believer. The one yearning and thirsting to see the face of God, is the Church–not as a group of individuals, but the Church as “one single body,” the “body of Christ.”
But how are we to understand this oneness? To see this unity with our eyes, to grasp it with our hearts as a reality, as a verifiable fact of life, a unity that makes us long so strongly for a vision of the face of God?
The answer of Scripture is that we grasp this mystery in the union between man and woman through the sacrament of marriage. In this sacrament, the unity between God and His people becomes a visible reality in this world. This sacrament is the fulfillment of the words of the prophet Hoseah: I will espouse you to me forever; I will espouse you in right and in justice, in love and in mercy; I will espouse you in fidelity, and you shall know the Lord.
Marriage is the sacrament that Fr. Giussani calls “the greatest sign of the identification between humanity and Christian faith.” This is the sacrament that makes visible the unity between Christ and the human. The power of the sacrament is shown in how it increases our mutual longing for God.
It is Christ who fulfills the words of Hoseah; it is in Christ, that God gives Himself totally to us, espousing His people in fidelity; it is in Christ that we know the Lord. It is Christ for whom husband and wife long together. Their unity will increase as their longing together for Christ increases. This longing is the truth of our humanity, and as Fr. Giussani said, marriage is “that sacramental act that most values the human.”
We can hear these words but it is not enough. These words must become flesh for us to be certain of what they proclaim. We need the witness of those who have lived this mystery, whose longing for Christ has been the heart of their marriage, the truth of their marriage. We need the witness of the saints for whom marriage as a mutual longing for Christ has been the path to sanctity. We need the witness of one like Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, who was born in 1907 in a small village near Salzburg, Austria. In 1936, he married Franziska Schwaninger, a girl from a nearby village. A Catholic by birth, he experienced a religious awakening, apparently about the time of his marriage.
When German troops moved into Austria in 1938, Jägerstätter was the only person in the village to vote against the annexation of Austria. Although he was not involved with any political organization he remained openly anti-Nazi, and publicly declared he would not fight in the war.
After many delays, Jägerstätter was called to active duty in February 1943. By this time, he had three daughters with his wife. He maintained his position against fighting for the Third Reich, was imprisoned and beheaded on August 9, 1943, at age 36. In June 2007, Pope Benedict XVI authorized the publication of the decree that declared Jägerstätter a martyr. The beatification ceremony took place on October 26, 2007, in Austria. The ceremony was attended by his 94-year-old widow and his daughters.
It is important to underline that Blessed Franz was not a pacifist, nor was his refusal to fight in Hitler’s army a political decision, nor was it a consequence of his moral principles. He simply could not do it and still consider himself as someone who belonged to Christ in the Church. His wife initially begged him to seek a compromise and return home to his family but she finally realized that their life together was inseparable from his faith. In a letter to her from prison, he wrote: “All external suffering and persecution cannot break the inner resistance of one in whom Christ lives and works... Where one sees Christ in another, it is not difficult to subordinate one's self, at the very least in one's marriage and family… The husband is the image of Christ, the Redeemer of His Body the Church. The wife is the image of that devotion of Christ’s beloved Church–the bride of Christ. They were not brought together by their own self desire, but rather the will to mutually sanctify one another. One will become the second ‘I’ for the other… Marriage is therefore infinitely more than a worldly thing.”
Marriage is “more than a worldly thing” because it is a sign of the Presence of Christ in the world as the One who satisfies the thirst and the longing of the human heart.