The Bridegroom and the Bride: the making of a Father and a Mother (Passion for Pascha!)

Last updated on: April 30, 2021 at 2:22 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

The Bridegroom and the Bride: the making of a Father and a Mother (Passion for Pascha!) 2021-04-30T14:22:23-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Easter, Pascha, makes our life normal. Death is defeated by life. We are given a future.

We are all the Bride of Christ and the Bridegroom is coming!

There is joy, natural, healthy, joy in the Bride of Christ coming to the Bridegroom. This is Pascha: normality restored. Jesus Christ will bring us as His consort to a city that will be kept in safety for all time: the City of God.

When humans rejected God in the Garden, we fell from normality. Easter restores the normal. We think this miraculous only because we have lost hope. The Bridegroom is coming.

This is good news if we are prepared for the coming of the Bridegroom. We need only consent to God’s grace and we will be transformed by our Lord. We will have a future. We will start having spiritual children. God comes and fills us with His Spirit and we conceive Emmanuel: God with us.

Humanity is feminine to the masculine of God. We receive and are transformed.

The Church gives us this theological reality in the liturgy. Each marriage made in the Church is an icon of a deeper truth: God the Father, humanity as the mother of God in the world. Whatever any other relationship may be, only one human relationship is fecund. Only one love transforms a man and woman into a father and mother.

Nature gives humanity an image of this spiritual truth. The spiritual and the natural reality parallel and cooperate synergistically. Our children are born from mothers and fathers. There is no escaping this reality whatever words we apply. The two are one and from that unity comes a child.

Science tells us that every mother carries in herself gifts from each baby conceived in her womb. A natural mother gains something new when she conceives a child. That baby gives the mother cells that can heal her heart and changes her body for all time. A mother can be identified by a brain scan, not so with a father. The father gives to the mother, but he does not change the way the mother changes.

This beautiful transformation, the reality of motherhood, is a powerful image. All lesser images in the Church reflect this truth.

In the performance of the liturgy, the Church always has reserved the priesthood to males: the father to the mother church.

This is good iconography: the outer image mirroring theological and biological reality.

At the time of Jesus, the Greeks had many priestesses, but the Church rightly rejected this confused image. If being a priest was a job, a series of tasks, women could naturally do the job. There are no tasks from ruling to teaching that saintly women have not done!

Most of us, the faithful, wait to receive the gift of the Spirit of God. Our liturgical service as a whole (not as individuals) is an image of the Bride of Christ waiting for the Bridegroom. The faithful image the Church as many become one in worship. Mary, the Mother of God, is our paradigm as the faithful.

We hear the Word of the Bridegroom, do it, and so are blessed.

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