"Love of Christ Makes Christian Marriage Beautiful and Luminous": Bishop Paolo Martinelli

The 47th Asian Conference of Marriage Encounter takes place at Ras Al Khaimah from 26 - 30 August 2022. People from 12 different countries are participating in this event.

His Excellency Bishop Paolo Martinelli and His Excellency Bishop Paul Hinder were present for the inaugural Mass and the opening session today, 26 August 2022.

Below is the full text of the homily delivered by Bishop Paolo Martinelli during the inaugural Mass.
 

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Dear Brother and Sisters, dear participants in the 47th Asian Conference of Marriage Encounter,

May the Lord Jesus give you Peace and Paschal Joy.

We begin this important meeting by celebrating this Eucharist. Jesus has gathered us in this Church in Ras Al Khaimah to celebrate the Holy Mass.

In a certain sense, we can say that the most important gesture of this conference we are making at this moment of celebrating the mass. In fact, the center of the Church's life is the celebration of the Eucharist, the source and summit of all Christian life. This is not to say that the rest of our lives and all the other things we do are unimportant. But rather because every other word or gesture in the life of the Church and of our Christian life is related to the Eucharist. The celebration of Mass gives shape and meaning to our being and action.

In every Holy Mass, we celebrate the meaning of life; we live the memorial of the gift that Jesus made of his own life: this is a gift that Jesus made perfectly, once and for all. In every Eucharistic celebration, we enter fully into a relationship with the ultimate and definitive meaning of life. Eucharist is also fundamental to the life of every Christian marriage. This is more evident when we say the Eucharist is the “Sacrament of Love” – Sacramentum Caritatis, as Benedict XVI says, quoting Thomas Aquinas. In the Eucharist, we are made partakers of the gift that Christ fulfilled perfectly in the paschal mystery: it is a spousal gift because it is the definitive gift of His body and blood to the Church, his Bride. The Eucharist is the sacrament of the bridegroom and the bride.

For this reason, as the entire magisterium of the Church from the Second Vatican Council to today has emphasized, there is a profound link between Marriage and the Eucharist. The spouses find the source of their love and joy in the Holy Mass.

In this light, we welcome the profound call of sacred scripture that we have heard. At the center of everything is the new commandment that Jesus gives us in the Gospel. That is, “love one another as I have loved you”. Where is the novelty of this commandment? Properly in the expression "as I have loved you". During his mission, Jesus had already spoken of the great commandment of the first covenant: love God and love your neighbour as yourself. But having reached the end of his mission, Jesus inserts something new in the greatest of the commandments: love each other as I have loved you. How did Jesus love us? He loved us until he died for us. He offered his body totally to us.

In this way, Jesus seems to remove all limits to love. He includes the love of neighbour in the new commandment but goes beyond it in the direction of his love for us. Love each other as I have loved you.

What a great mystery love is! What a great mystery is the love between man and woman! We are therefore called to love without measure. And if we reflect carefully, it is the nature of love to continually go beyond oneself. Love always wants more. Those who live the experience of love know well that we cannot be satisfied with the minimum; love by its nature tends to totality; love takes all of ourselves. Already in the ancient covenant, the commandment asks to love God with all oneself, with all one's strength, with all one's mind, with all one's soul, with all one's heart. Because love cannot be something next to another: love takes everything, love is everything.

This is why marriage expresses this radical call to love in the day-to-day way of life.

In all this, we can be surprised because the vocation to love seems to ask us for something that surpasses our human strengths. Love makes us desire greater things than we can achieve. The human condition seems contradictory: in love, we desire more than we can.

This is why it is crucial to understand that true love can only be realized if we open our hearts to the love of God that Jesus has communicated to us.

From this perspective, we understand the strong words that the Apostle John pronounces in his first letter regarding the nature of love. The first emphasis I wish to make concerns the radical expression of the beloved disciple: “God is love.” It does not just say that God loves, but that God is love. From the concrete way God loves us, sending his Son into the world and giving the Holy Spirit without measure, we understand that God himself is nothing but love. This is why the word love describes not only an action of God but his divine nature. This is decisive for every man and every woman; in fact, we are created in the image and likeness of God who is love. So we are created in the image and likeness of divine love.

The God who revealed Jesus Christ to us is the Trinity of Love. In fact, a lonely God could not be defined as love. Because love needs the other to love. Love needs difference, the total gift of self to the other, and the fruitfulness of the relationship. God is Trinity because the Father loves and eternally generates the Son and the Son corresponds from eternity to this love. The Holy Spirit thus appears as the profound unity of love that goes beyond itself.

St. John Paul II, in the document Mulieris Dignitatem, strongly affirms for the first time that not only man and woman were each made in the image and likeness of God, but also their relationship. The relationship between man and woman was made in the image and likeness of the Trinitarian life. Pope Francis reiterated and deepened this doctrine in Amoris Laetitia. It is love, therefore, that does not tend to fusion between lovers but to preserve the good of difference and fruitful reciprocity.

We love and indeed welcome somebody only if we welcome somebody as different from ourselves. The difference between man and woman is the first and fundamental relationship in which we learn to love each other and to accept each other as different as they are.

Please, not different in dignity! Equal in dignity, but different because man and woman are two different ways to be human beings. Man cannot understand himself without being related to a woman and vice-versa.

The Trinitarian mystery illuminates the love between man and woman: the divine persons are different but are an undivided mystery of love.

The second thought that I want to emphasize concerns the definition of love that we still find in the first letter of St John. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice. It is a strange definition because Love is defined by the same word Love but in a passive form. Love consists in letting oneself be loved by God. Love begins when one lets oneself be loved. Sometimes we can find it hard to let ourselves be loved; we painfully prefer to remain closed in on ourselves, within our limits and mistakes. Life changes when we allow ourselves to be loved until our sins are forgiven.

This divine love that Jesus revealed to us makes our love beautiful, makes the love of man and woman beautiful, a love called to be fruitful: as Jesus tells us in the Gospel, we are chosen to be loved and to love and thus to bring fruit.

In this perspective, we can think of how Christ's love really makes His Bride, the Church, beautiful, purifying her from the sins of her children. Precisely in the Eucharist, Jesus renews His love for His Bride who is the Church, that is, all of us.

In this way, we can interpret the words of the Ecclesiasticus we heard about the good wife, perfect wife, and the beauty of a good wife. With these words, we can understand the beauty of the whole Church, which is the Bride of Christ; the Bride of Christ is made beautiful by the love of Christ.

Saint Bonaventure, in his theology of marriage, speaks of the Son of God as the most beautiful expression of the Father. God in Christ makes deformed things beautiful, makes beautiful things more beautiful, and makes more beautiful things most beautiful.  
Thus, we pray that the love of Christ may make married couples, Christian marriages and our families ever more beautiful and luminous.

May the Lord greatly bless your precious ecclesial reality: Couples, priests, consecrated persons, always be at the service of God's love which is also expressed within the concrete human condition.

May the Lord renew in you the gift of the Holy Spirit and give it to all families so that they may be witnesses of God's love.