Internet Edition of the Electronic Library "Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh" (mitras.ru/).

MARRIAGE, MONASTICISM, CHURCH

Marriage as an image of supreme joy.

  A number of suggestions were made to me on what we should talk about today; and among other things, I was asked to talk about the Church, and also about marriage and monasticism. And I want to try to combine these two topics in some respect. They are combined in my consciousness in the following way. There can be nothing essential in the Church, expressing its essence, that would not be at the same time an expression of the entire life of the Church, that is, not only speculative, but also everyday life, work and human creativity. And so, marriage and monasticism are two aspects of the Church's nature, the Church's essence. Marriage and monasticism are not, in ecclesiastical experience, simply a way of life chosen by one person or another; marriage and monasticism are, as it were, two sides, two expressions, exhausting, from a certain point of view, the nature of the Church.

If you read the Old Testament and the New Testament, especially the Book of Revelation, you will see that the image of marriage is the image of the fullness of life, completeness, perfection of life. In this respect, marriage appears to be the ultimate victory of love, that is, the ultimate triumph of God, but not over man: God does not triumph over man, but the triumph of God in man himself, the fulfillment of the fullness of both Divine and human life. The Old Testament gives us many images of fullness, happiness, joy, bliss in the pictures of marital love; and in the New Testament, in the book of Revelation, it speaks of the marriage of the Lamb, of that union in love – love already indissoluble, love both victorious and victorious – which unites all creation with God.

And so marriage expresses something that is the essence of church life: it is a miracle, it is a wonder that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that the world might be saved (John 3:16), so that the world would find such a bottomless depth, the dimension of which is God Himself and God alone.

And on the other hand, the Church is also expressed by the image of the Bride of the Lamb. You probably remember this expression; To some it seems strange, almost mythological, almost fabulous. What does "the bride of the Lamb" mean? The bride is the one who has managed to love so much, with such integrity, with such inseparability, that she can follow her beloved to the end of the world, follow him both in joy and in sorrow, to be wherever he is. The Lamb in the expression "bride of the Lamb" is the Lamb of the slaughter, the Lamb of Whom St. John the Baptist proclaimed when he saw Christ: "Behold the Lamb of God, Who taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29); that Lamb Who in Isaiah's prophecy chapters 52-53 is called the Man of Sorrows. After all, it is the Son of God who became the son of man in the act of the Incarnation, which made Him one of us, the conjugal love of God for creation.

But the way of the Lamb is the way of the cross; The man of sorrows, Christ, the Lamb of whom the Old Testament speaks, is destined to give his life – to give freely, to give out of love for the next world, for that creature which God loved so much that He gave Him for the salvation of this creature. And the Bride of the Lamb is a creature that responds to the love of God with love; a love that is ready to share with God incarnate, Who entered the world for death, and death on the cross, His entire earthly fate.

In this sense, there are two completely different aspects of the Church. It is the miracle of the meeting of God and man, of all creation with God; it is a miracle and exultation that God is so infinitely close and has become so dear, so his own. One of the Fathers of the Church says that the word God is much less significant for us than the word Father, for the word God means the difference between us and Him, the word Father emphasizes kinship: we are His children, we are His relatives, we are His own; and this miracle of God's love, which is given to us and to which we can rejoice and rejoice, is already the realization of everything. The Incarnation of Christ is in time, in the midst of time, while history is still developing and flowing, but this is already its fullness, its realization; This is already a victory, the end is everything.

In this respect, there is a deep rejoicing in the Church, and the Church is not just a human society, not just a society of people who are gathered in the name of God, who are obedient to His covenants, who live by His gifts; The Church is a much greater miracle. It is a body, a living body, an organism that is both divine and human, in which, on an equal basis – because love makes the unequal equal – God and man meet, unite, become inseparable. The Church is the place where this miracle of meeting, of mutually surrendering love, of eternity that has already come, of the victory of love over all discord, takes place.

In this respect, the Church already contains, in a sense, the marriage of the Lamb. Saints - what am I saying: not only saints, but also sinners know this: at some point we suddenly feel that God is so close; that His love is so tender and quiet; what happiness is to know Him and to be loved by Him, and to respond to love with love as much as possible.