Part 1, Chapter 3: “Christ Appeals to the Resurrection”

The pain of the old widower in Natalie Merchant's "Beloved Wife" is palpable.  He has lost his soul mate, his best friend.  Would it be OK for him widower to pack it in?  Like a geriatric Romeo mourning his septuagenarian Juliet, would it be OK for him to turn his “face away from the light [and] go with her tonight?”  Absolutely not!  Our marriages must proclaim what Christ tells us about eternal life!

• “At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven” (Matthew 22: 30).

Pope John Paul II looks at what the resurrection reveals about marriage, as well as at foregoing marriage “for the kingdom.” 

Marriage and procreation are incredible goods of monumental importance, intended to lead us to salvation.  Though men and women will not be married and will not bear children in Heaven, we will be drawn even closer to each other, in God!  With our present finite understandings, the awesomeness of this eludes our grasps.  “What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, [is] what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9)!  “He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them (as their God).  He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, (for) the old order has passed away” (Rev 21:3,4).  We are meant to see God face-to-face!

• “we should go back to the words of the Gospel in which Christ appeals to the resurrection, words that have a fundamental importance for understanding marriage in the Christian sense and also the ‘renunciation’ of conjugal life ‘for the kingdom of heaven’” (11/11/81)

• [Marriage] “belongs exclusively ‘to this world.’  Marriage and procreation do not constitute man’s eschatological future” (12/2/81).

• “In the resurrection, the body will return to perfect unity and harmony with the spirit; man will no longer experience the opposition between what is spiritual and what is bodily in him.  ‘Spiritualization’ signifies not only that the spirit will master the body, but, I would say, that it will also fully permeate the body and the powers of the spirit will permeate the energies of the body…. This ‘eschatological experience’ of the Living God will…reveal to him in a living and experiential way the ‘self-communication’ of God to everything created and, in particular, to man….Eternal life should be understood in an eschatological sense, that is, as the full and perfect experiences of the grace (charis) of God in which man can share through faith during his earthly life” (12/9/81).

• “For the construction of this image – which corresponds in its content to the article of our profession of faith, ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body’ – a great contribution is provided by the awareness that there is a connection between earthly experience and the whole dimension of man’s biblical ‘beginning’ in the world” (1/13/82).

• “The resurrection is not, therefore, only a manifestation of life that conquers death – a final return, as it were, to the tree of Life, which man was distanced from at the moment of original sin – but also a revelation of man’s destiny in all the fullness of his psychosomatic nature and of his personal subjectivity….This ‘heavenly man’ – the man of the resurrection, whose prototype is the risen Christ – is not so much the antithesis and negation of the ‘man of the earth’ (whose prototype is the ‘first Adam’) but above all his fulfillment and confirmation” (2/3/82).

• “St. Paul’s entire anthropology (and ethics) are permeated by the mystery of the resurrection, by which we have definitively received the Holy Spirit” (2/10/82).

• “Christ speaks about continence ‘for’ the kingdom of heaven.  In this way he wants to underline that this state, when it is consciously chosen by man in temporal life, the life in which human beings ‘take wife and take husband’ has a single supernatural finality.  Even if it is consciously chosen and personally decided, continence without this finality does not enter into the content of Christ’s statement….Christ emphasizes – at least indirectly – that, in earthly life, this choice is connected with renunciation and also with a determined spiritual effort” (3/17/82).

• “continence ‘for the kingdom of heaven’ carries above all the imprint of likeness to Christ who himself made this choice ‘for the kingdom of heaven’” (3/24/82).

• “The ‘superiority’ of continence to marriage never means, in the authentic tradition of the Church, a disparagement of marriage or a belittling of its essential value” (4/7/82).

• “The perfection of Christian life is measured, rather, by the measure of love…Still the evangelical counsels undoubtedly help one to reach a fuller love….spousal love that finds its expression in continence ‘for the kingdom of heaven’ must lead in its normal development to ‘fatherhood’ or ‘motherhood’ in the spiritual sense….physical generation also fully corresponds to its meaning only if it is completed by fatherhood and motherhood in the spirit, whose expression and fruit is the whole educational work of the parents in regard to the children born of their bodily conjugal union” (4/14/82).

• “If someone chooses marriage, he must choose it exactly as it was instituted by the Creator ‘from the beginning’; he must seek in it those values that correspond to the plan of God; if on the other hand someone decides to follow continence for the kingdom of heaven, he must seek in it the values proper to such a vocation.  In other words, he must act in conformity with his chosen vocation”….It is a characteristic feature of the human heart to accept even difficult demands in the name of love, of an ideal, and above all in the name of love for a person….in this call to continence ‘for the kingdom of heaven,’ first the disciples and then the whole living tradition of the Church quickly discovered the love for Christ himself as the Bridegroom of the Church, Bridegroom of souls, to whom he has given himself to the end (cf. Jn 13:1; 19:30) in the mystery of his Passover and of the Eucharist.  In this way ‘continence’ for the kingdom of heaven,’ the choice of virginity or celibacy for one’s whole life, has become in the experience of the disciples and followers of Christ the act of a particular response to the love of the Divine Bridegroom, and therefore acquired the meaning of an act of spousal love, that is, of a spousal gift of self with the end of answering in a particular way the Redeemer’s spousal love; a gift of self understood as a renunciation, but realized above all out of love” (4/21/82).

• “Contemporary mentality has become accustomed to think and speak above all about the sexual instinct, thereby transferring to the terrain of human reality what is proper to the world of living beings, to the animalia.  Now, a deepened reflection on the concise text of Genesis 1-2 allows us to show with certainty and conviction that ‘from the beginning’ a clear and unambiguous boundary is drawn between the world of the animals (animalia) and man created in the image and likeness of God” (4/28/82).

• “a conscious and voluntary renunciation of marriage….is possible only when one admits an authentic consciousness of the value constituted by the spousal disposition of masculinity and femininity for marriage” (5/5/82).

• “The Apostle underlines with great clarity that voluntary virginity or continence flows only from a counsel and not a commandment” (6/23/82).

• “St. Paul clearly says that both conjugal relations and the voluntary periodic abstinence of the spouses must be a fruit of the ‘gift of God,’ which is their ‘own,’ and that the spouses themselves by consciously cooperating with it, can keep up and strengthen their reciprocal personal bond together with the dignity that being ‘temples[s] of the Holy Spirit who is in [them]’ (see Cor 6:19) confers on their bodies” (7/14/82).

• “To understand all that ‘the redemption of the body’ implies…, an authentic theology of the body is necessary.  We have attempted to build one, appealing first of all to the words of Christ.  The constitutive elements of the theology of the body are contained in what Christ says when he appeals to the ‘beginning’ concerning the question of the indissolubility of marriage (see Mt 19:8), in what he says about concupiscence when he appeals to the human heart in the Sermon on the Mount (See Mt 5:28), and also in what he says when he appeals to the resurrection (see Mt 22:30)….The ‘redemption of the body’…expresses itself not only in the resurrection as a victory over death.  It is present also in the words of Christ addressed to ‘historical’ man….In his everyday life, man must draw from the mystery of the redemption of the body” (7/21/82).