Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers, everyone out there in radio-land. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, the Very Rev. Dr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, 855-AFRADIO. Matushka Trudi is taking those calls tonight, and we’re going to get to those in the second part of our show.

But before we do that, on October 26-29, 2023, at the Antiochian Village in western Pennsylvania, which I do not live near—that is the other Pennsylvania. I mean, it’s fine, but I just don’t live there. We’re going to be holding the first-ever Lord of Spirits Conference. Fr. Stephen and I are going to be there, as well as Frs. David Subu and Lucas Christensen, and we’re very happy to mention that Archbishop Alexander (Golitzin) will be speaking as well.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Really, folks. Folks! If you see Archbishop Alexander, do not harass him about Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, please.

Fr. Stephen: Leave Vladyka alone. Leave him alone.

Fr. Andrew: Right. We’re just very happy that he’s coming.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he might reconsider.

Fr. Andrew: Don’t walk up to him in a bat costume and expect that he’s going to know what that’s about.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: He might, but… There will be a D&D tournament, as Fr. Stephen has forced me to mention on air. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Repeatedly and emphatically.

Fr. Andrew: We’re still working on the schedule, but, God-willing, we’re going to get some details out to you very soon. I have to say, though, that rooms are selling very fast, like, really fast! It’s crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy how fast they’re selling! So if you want to come, I suggest you make up your mind to come. You can register and see what details are currently available at store.ancientfaith.com/events.

Fr. Stephen: If the rooms sell out, I think we need to go— When the rooms sell out, I think we need to go straight to opening up an area for tent camping in the mud and just turn this into, like, Lord of Spirits Woodstock.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There we go. Yeah. That’d be good in some ways, but not in others. [Laughter]

Tonight, though, we’re going to be continuing our series on the sacraments of the Orthodox Church, and we’re going to be discussing the mystery of holy matrimony. Is marriage merely a human institution? Does it exist outside the Church? Did the Church invent it as a sacrament in the fourth century? What does the rite of marriage actually do? That’s what we’re going to be discussing. And this is also one of those episodes that we have to say, even though we will not be getting graphic: Parents, please listen to this one before you consider sharing it with younger kids. Just FYI.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly. So is this episode all about how marriage is just a thing that any two people who really love each other can go ahead and do?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: That’s what I thought.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Also, once again, I have talked to you folks—I’m including you in this, Fr. Andrew, now—

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: I’ve talked to you folks at Ancient Faith repeatedly about not wanting to be associated with that guy who was talking before we went live. [Laughter] He’s frankly a heretic. He should not be on your airwaves. I don’t even want to listen to him. I have never listened to him, but the little bits I’ve had to hear have set my teeth on edge, as it were.

Fr. Andrew: Well, the 15,000 people who are not listening to this live do not even know what you’re talking about, but so much the better.

Fr. Stephen: Well, just in case: disassociated. Shunned. Anathema.

Fr. Andrew: Amen, amen.

Fr. Stephen: But, as you mentioned, “mawwiage is what bwings us togevvah today.” Did you even get that reference?

Fr. Andrew: I do. Of course I do.

Fr. Stephen: Good, you got that one.

Fr. Andrew: I saw that when it first came out, as I’m sure you did as well.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yes, many of our listeners were zygotes at the time, but…

Fr. Andrew: Back in the 1980s when life was so much simpler and most of the popular music was so much happier.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that’s true, actually. Not all of it, though.

Fr. Andrew: Not all of it.

Fr. Stephen: Not the stuff from Britain.

Fr. Andrew: Well.

Fr. Stephen: Wham aside. Well, anyway, we’re digressing. [Laughter] We’re going to do what we usually do and start our discussion with the creation of humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Just a lot of good material in Adam, I tell you.

Fr. Stephen: Was that a deliberate pun?

Fr. Andrew: I’ll let you take that. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay. So as we’ve talked about, of course, many times on the show, that humanity is created to bear the image of God, and we’re phrasing it that way on purpose, as long-time listeners will know, because this is sort of a verbal idea. The image of God is not a static thing or a quality or something, but is a capacity that we are commanded to exercise in the world. And right off the bat, the first time humanity as male and female, the first time we get the two biological sexes, is in actually the end of Genesis 1 when we’re told that humanity is created in the image of God, and male and female God created them.

This is— We’ve heard this so often it doesn’t strike us, and we’re also living in a world which, as secular and materialistic as it may have become, is still deeply informed by Christianity, so that this doesn’t hit us in the way it would have originally: not just the idea that both male and female humans bear the image of God in the world, but even that they’re both human is pretty big for the late Bronze Age.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, not only that—that ancient pagans generally regarded humans from various parts of the world as not even being from the same origin, so the idea of humanity all kind of coming from one thing is not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, from one source. And then you get to the details of men and women in particular. You find somebody like Aristotle in the fourth century BC, who is a bold innovator, virtually a feminist by fourth-century standards—

Fr. Andrew: Revolutionary.

Fr. Stephen: —because he’s the first person we know of to break with preceding Greek thought and say that men and women are the same species.

Fr. Andrew: But…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, there’s a “but,” but he did think they were the same species! If you read the Hippocratic corpus, which you may be able to tell from the name—like the Hippocratic oath is the oath that physicians take—the Hippocratic corpus is sort of a collection—not all of it goes back to Hippocrates himself—but a collection of Greek medical texts. They’re very clear that men and women are not the same species. They are two different types of organisms. [Laughter] But Aristotle says they are the same. He’s only a feminist for his time, because he says that female humans are sort of defective male humans.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, isn’t the idea that the fetus tries to become male, and the ones that fail are female?

Fr. Stephen: Are born female, yes. So he kind of thinks women are a birth defect—but they’re still human! But that— Aristotle’s medical stuff is fascinating to me, because it’s so elaborate and so well worked-out and so systematic and it makes so much sense, except—none of it’s true. It’s all completely wrong! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Amazing. He’s like a great world-building fantasy author.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! There’s just no connection to actual biology. But so if that, in the fourth century BC—if that’s a bold innovation, we’re talking about a text that has its roots at least we’ll say 700 years before that, at least 700 years before that that says not only are not only male and female humans both human, both created by God, both bearing the image of God, and therefore presented as being of equal value as human beings.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s crazy in the ancient world.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, this is radical. This is radical. Here we go. Somebody’ll quote this. The Bible teaches radical egalitarianism! ...for the Bronze Age. [Laughter] They’ll leave off the “for the Bronze Age” part.

Fr. Andrew: It’s going to be somebody’s phone ringtone.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and just quote the rest. And send your angry emails, when you read that quote, to Fr. Andrew at Ancient Faith dot com.

Fr. Andrew: Amen.

Fr. Stephen: So we then get into chapter two of Genesis. We’re not going through the whole Bible this slow. I know that’s the kind of thing we might do someday on this show, but not today; today is not that day. But we get into the second chapter, and there is this problem of Adam’s aloneness.

Fr. Andrew: He’s all alone!

Fr. Stephen: This is the first time where God says something is not good. Everything else he created he says is good; he says it’s not good that man is alone on the earth. And we tend, as we do, as modern Western people, to think of this in sort of psychological terms.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, Adam just feels really bad.

Fr. Stephen: Adam’s lonely. He’s a sad boy in the garden, because he’s all alone. And then, you know, the naming of the animals follows this, and I have literally heard people teach this as if the animals were brought before Adam to see if he could mate with any of them!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… Already we’re hitting up against the parental advisory with the mention.

Fr. Stephen: Like: “Oh, no! I can’t marry this zebra!” [Laughter] “Not a goat, either!”

Fr. Andrew: And God throws up his hands, like: “Come on, Adam! Look at all these animals I made you. Pick one!” [Laughter] No.

Fr. Stephen: No-o-o. None of that is true. That is fractally wrong, that whole foregoing interpretation.

So in actuality, the idea of “aloneness” here is talking about the fact that there’s only one of him, because, remember, there’s two commandments given to humanity: to fill the earth and subdue it. Put things in order; fill them with life. Adam can’t fill the world with life by himself. He can’t reproduce by budding; that’s not a power or capacity that he has. So that’s what the aloneness is about. As we’ve mentioned on the show before, the naming of the animals—we have, especially in Hittite excavations, images of the king standing with a rod and naming wild animals. And so this is an image of the king’s authority to establish justice, that he’s putting things in order. So the wild animals are sort of being tamed or domesticated by him, by virtue of him naming them, comprehending them.

So that’s Adam doing that part of the job. The idea is that Adam can do this one part of the job, but he can’t do the other part of the job. So for that to happen, God says he needs, in Hebrew, an ezer kenegdo.

Fr. Andrew: Which is the name of my next band.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I thought he was that guy who got his arm cut off in the Mos Eisley cantina. [Laughter] Wait, that was Ponda Baba. Never mind.

Fr. Andrew: That’s probably true. It does sound like a George Lucas-style name! I really didn’t think about that.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, like if I saw the Hasbro Black Series Ezer Kenegdo figure, it would totally fit. [Laughter] If there was like a Hammerhead in there or something, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this gets translated in the good old King James as “help meet,” which you see as sometimes a single word, “helpmeet,” but really it’s— which, I mean, you can do that in English, but really it’s “help” and then “meet,” as the more slightly archaic usage of “meet,” meaning appropriate, like when we translate the Axion Estin hymn as “It is truly meet”—

Fr. Stephen: Yes, “It is meet and right.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, “It is truly meet and right,” which in Greek is just Axion estin, just two words.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because it assumes the “it.” So yeah, ezer there is like a helper or an assistant, someone who’s going to cooperate in some sort of work; and then kenegdo means roughly fitting. This has a literal sense that refers to the biology of male and female organisms fitting together, he said euphemistically, but it goes beyond that. It includes that, but goes beyond that. It’s like two puzzle pieces that fit together, two halves of a whole that sort of dovetail and sort of meet in the middle and form one thing.

So Adam at this point already—and I’m saying this to distinguish from certain other theories that you’ll find in certain ancient authors— Adam is not an androgynous being at this point.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because if he needs someone to fit together with him, then that means he’s not both things, or… There’s a lack.

Fr. Stephen: He’s not both things; he’s not neither thing. He is one of the two things.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, the puzzle piece without the other puzzle piece.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s just implied in the language. So in order to create this other person—I’m now going to ruin some more Sunday school; we may have talked about this on the show before, so it may be pre-ruined, but just in case—

Fr. Andrew: It could be, but I get to play the etymology jingle for this, though! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Yeah, in a minute.

Fr. Andrew: In a second, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t jump the gun! I know you’re hovering on that button!

Fr. Andrew: I am. It’s been a while since I’ve played it.

Fr. Stephen: You were probably told at some point that Eve, even though she doesn’t get called Eve until after the expulsion from paradise, that Woman is made from Adam’s rib.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: That’s not what it says.

Fr. Andrew: Right. We’ll talk in a second about how it seemed to say that.

Fr. Stephen: In Hebrew or Greek. In Hebrew or Greek, that is not what it says. So the word that’s used there— If you look up the Hebrew word, and I think also the Greek word, in most biblical lexica, you will find the meaning “rib” listed. But then if you look at the instances where it is used in the Bible, in either case, Hebrew or Greek, you will find that the only place where it’s translated “rib” is here, and everywhere else it’s translated differently. That should tip you off that something’s up. [Laughter]

Everywhere else where this occurs, this refers to a “side,” and it’s a side like dorsal/ventral. It’s very often used architecturally to refer to one half of a symmetrical building. So the idea here actually in the text is that Adam is pulled apart. That’s why he goes into this [death]-like sleep, because God is going to pull him in two! And then the two halves get built up to be man and woman, ultimately Adam and Eve. Now you can go with the button.

Fr. Andrew: All right! Here we go. [Laughter]

[Inaugural theme music] Father Andrew’s Etymology Corner! [Baby cheer]

Hey! All right. So how did we get “rib”? We spent— Well, this is my fault, probably, but we spent several minutes yesterday trying to figure out where the “rib” thing comes from, because the word— As you said, the word in Hebrew and in Greek, they do not mean “rib.” I can affirm for everybody that English translations of the Bible, from at least the eighth century, have been translating this word as “rib.” So Old English, Middle English, modern English: this is a grand old tradition of translating—

Fr. Stephen: Wait, wait, wait, wait a second. Did you just say, “English translations from the eighth century”?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, oh yeah.

Fr. Stephen: You mean all that Reformation history stuff I was taught was wrong?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, that the Bible didn’t exist but in Latin until then?

Fr. Stephen: Anyway, go on.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that’s right. Yes, right. Yes, I have read parts of the Bible in Old English. It’s great, actually. It’s really cool. So, yeah, the earliest translations that we have into English translate this word as “rib,” and they’re translating not from the Greek or the Hebrew; they’re translating from the Latin Vulgate. So I thought, “Okay, well, maybe the Latin has the word ‘rib’ in there.” So the word that’s there—and this is the inflected form—is costam, and when you look up— If you look that up in a Latin dictionary, the first definition will be “rib,” and then after that it says side, side, side: for various things it means side.

So it’s not super clear exactly, actually, why it is that English translations have been using “rib” for 1300 years, but it seems that possibly there was an earlier sense of “rib” that meant— It goes all the way back into Proto-Indo-European. The root seems to mean something like roof or covering, and so then that gets used metaphorically to refer to the ribcage, the thing that covers or holds all the organs in. So, English, you’re going to see “rib” typically, but it just doesn’t quite mean that. But this is one of these translations that doesn’t seem to— We can’t seem to quite shake it. It’s not in every modern English translation of the Bible, but it sure is in a lot of them.

One thing, see—this is the other part where the parental advisory kicks in now. So “rib” has been used in English for a long time as a slang word to refer to women. And then I actually discovered a weird sense from I think the 16th century, the phrase “rib joint,” which I thought and always has been for me like a barbecue place, but apparently it’s used to refer to brothels. So there you are, everybody. If you needed a good reason not to say “rib” any more when you’re looking at Genesis, the opening chapters of Genesis, there you are!

Fr. Stephen: I should have known better, that as soon as we put that parental advisory that you’d just go completely out of control.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Etymology can be pretty racy at times.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’re in a dangerous place, because I was already out of control, and now...

Fr. Andrew: Nothing’s holding us back except Trudi!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, who could shut this whole thing down before we’re through.

Fr. Andrew: She could, right! [Laughter] Obviously we haven’t offended her enough, so…

Fr. Stephen: We’ll get there.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “Side,” like “side of beef”!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So Adam, when he awakens from his death-like sleep, looks, sees her, says, “Whoa, man!”—no.

Fr. Andrew: Hard-hearted harbinger of haggis!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] In Hebrew, “man” is ish, and “woman” is ishah. And so you have a similar kind of wordplay to “man” and “woman,” that there’s a little added element. He says, “I will call her Woman, because she is from the Man: from ish, from me, from the man.” And this is why he says, “Surely this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” He means that literally. [Laughter] He could even call her his “better half” and mean it literally.

And this is why it is said that the two will be one flesh, and there’s the whole bit about leaving your father’s house and cleaving to your wife. Leave and cleave.

Fr. Andrew: Leave and cleave. And this is just another one I had to point out. “Cleave” is one of those amazing English words that means something and its exact opposite.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And also means attacking up to three adjacent opponents in World of Warcraft, but that’s a whole other topic.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true!

Fr. Stephen: So this is here at the beginning of Genesis, so this is at the core. We’re going to see that Christ himself is going to come back to this when talking about marriage, but this is sort of the core of marriage here, that humanity is divided into men and women, and in marriage, at least for those two persons, they come back together and form one flesh, one being. So this is the core understanding.

And this is already in Genesis 2. This is before the expulsion from paradise and everything else. This is the foundational level that marriage— In our sacrament series, none of the other ones have gone back this far yet! This is the earliest one. We’re going to come back to why it’s the earliest one, but to telegraph, as we’ve seen from the discussion we’ve already had tonight, marriage is uniquely linked to the purpose for which man was created to exist in the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s a foundational, almost the original sacrament, really.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And then when we move further in Genesis, when we get—starting with chapter 12, we get into Abraham, we get into what are called— Chapters 12 through 50 are what are called the patriarchal narratives; we have the stories of the patriarchs. And that patriarchy doesn’t get smashed. [Laughter]

What makes these especially relevant to our discussion is, if you’re Orthodox or have ever been to an Orthodox wedding service, we reference these marriages in particular within the prayers, within the marriage blessing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they all start with, “Bless them, O Lord, as thou didst bless Abraham and Sarah. Bless them, O Lord, as thou didst bless Isaac and Rebecca,” on and on, without really saying much about them, just sort of name-dropping. We assume everyone reads their Bible!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we assume everybody knows who that is, which we should. Which we should. I was thinking something else, but I will leave that unsaid.

And that, of course, starts with Abraham and Sarah. The dynamic between Abraham and Sarah in the story of Abraham is interesting, because Abraham, both in Genesis and then, as that is read by, for example, St. Paul—Abraham is sort of the archetype of faithfulness in the Torah. Abraham is the faithful one. He’s faithful even to the point of being willing to sacrifice his son. The one place where he has problems with faithfulness is with his wife, Sarah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s always trying to pawn her off as: “No, this is my sister. Go ahead, take her! I would prefer not to die.”

Fr. Stephen: He says this to Pharaoh, Abimelech. And the whole issue with Hagar… This is the one place where he sort of struggles. When I say he struggles with faithfulness, I’m not doing a pun in being faithful to his wife, though obviously that’s a problem here, too, but in each of those cases, it’s actually—the core issue is his faithfulness to God, because God has told him that he’s going to have a son by Sarah, when he goes and sleeps with Hagar.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so he’s always trying to come up with some alternate solution.

Fr. Stephen: And the reason he passes her off twice as his sister is because he’s scared someone is going to try to kill him to take her. So it’s a lack of trust in God for protection that that manifests. That’s the one point of the struggle. And so part of what happens in the relationship between Abraham and Sarah over the course of their lives, over the course of their relationship with each other as it plays out in the story of Abraham, is him learning how to be faithful to God by treating her with the kind of dignity and respect that she is due. And that really culminates at what is really a very touching story, if we pause and read it closely, of his purchasing a tomb and his burial of her at the end of their lives together.

Of course, then you move on to their son, Isaac, and Rebecca. Isaac and Rebecca are really presented in Genesis as the ideal couple, like the ideal married couple, the ideal of marriage. They’re Israel’s sweethearts. [Laughter] You see this especially when their actual marriage, their wedding, is described briefly in Genesis 24:67. And there’s this element that, of course, we as modern people skim over very quickly.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it looks kind of just normal, like: Well, of course.

Fr. Stephen: Duh! Where it says: “Isaac loved Rebecca.” We’re like: “Well, duh, they’re getting married! I hope so!” But that’s a disconnect with most of world history and even a lot of the world today. People did not fall in love and get married for most of human history. This is a very, very… Well, most of our romantic love stuff is a more—I was going to say it’s a very modern thing; it’s actually more of a Renaissance thing. But that idea, of you meet someone and fall in love—in reality, people were married, still in a lot of the world today, everywhere in the ancient world, it was an arranged marriage. It happened when you came to adulthood, usually about 13, when someone went through puberty, essentially. They were married off by arrangement of their families, often didn’t meet before the wedding day.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I should also add, by the way, on the other side of that, that—at least, I know this was the case in the Greco-Roman world, but I’m not sure about anywhere else—but if you fell in love with someone and you became love-sick—you know, the sense of obsession with them or whatever— which, you know, in our time, this is a thing that’s celebrated, but in that period—

Fr. Stephen: In every pop song.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, right, exactly!

Fr. Stephen: Except for a couple songs.

Fr. Andrew: But in that period, you could hire a doctor to come and cure you of this, because they saw it as deeply debilitating and not something to be pursued. In fact, it would probably be bad for the family, because almost certainly you weren’t love-sick over the person that your parents had arranged for you to marry.

Fr. Stephen: Oh yeah! It’s a weakness of character that you would allow yourself to be carried away in such a way by frivolous emotions. [Laughter] So, yeah. So the fact that he loves his wife would have jumped out—because this was an arranged marriage, too. We have the story of how this marriage came. She’s his first cousin.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they send the servant off to go find her…

Fr. Stephen: Abraham doesn’t want him to marry a Canaanite, and so he sends him back to “their own people,” which is his uncle’s house, and it’s his first cousin he’s never met, but he loves her. And so the love is something that is giving… It’s sort of the soul to the body of their marriage. It also stands out that this, that’s very clearly being held up as the ideal—Isaac is one of the patriarchs who only has one wife ever. There’s no concubines, no polygamy, no nothing. We’re going to come back to that later, but just notice it here.

I should be clear, because I said people didn’t marry for romantic love. This isn’t talking about romantic love either.

Fr. Andrew: No, he’s self-sacrificial towards her.

Fr. Stephen: So they’re… People have studied this, and the concept of “love” is actually periodized, sort of, in human history. As Fr. Andrew was mentioning, love in the ancient world was largely considered a weakness. It was like pity. [Laughter] That you had some weakness or vulnerability towards someone or something, and was not— was completely disassociated from sexuality: no real connection with it, and was more often used— When it was used in some positive sense, it was much more often used to talk about what we would call friendship than what we would call a romantic relationship.

The next phase after that is Christian love, and this is secular folks will talk about Christian love. The idea—what love comes to mean in Christianity, in the New Testament, which is of course— The New Testament is an interpretation of the Old Testament, so I’m not saying this suddenly starts with Christianity, but this is drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures as well. But Christian love, that you should love your enemies, that you should love your neighbor— And Christian love, what differs with that is that Christian love, not only is it to be directed toward everyone, even those who hate you, but involves taking concrete actions; it’s not just a feeling.

You can see this through one little bit of etymology that I’ll steal from Fr. Andrew. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I don’t own it all.

Fr. Stephen: Which is— The Latin word for love is caritas.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, from which we get our modern word “charity.”

Fr. Stephen: Charity. And in fact you’ll see English translations of St. Augustine that will talk about “faith, hope, and charity,” and that’s not because charity has radically changed its meaning; it’s that actually caring for others, doing works of love, is what Christian love meant. It was a concrete thing, and this included within marriage. It wasn’t about having a certain feeling when you look at your wife or your husband.

Fr. Andrew: It’s interesting, even the modern English word “love,” at least historically, etymologically, it actually doesn’t mean any of this that we’ve just been talking about; it’s actually related to words like “libido”—it doesn’t come from libido, but it means— It refers to desire. That’s what that word— It’s funny we naturally use that word now, but the problem is we project that meaning back onto what’s being talked about in these ancient contexts.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you get the emergence of romantic love in the Renaissance—high medieval, late medieval, and Renaissance periods, where— This is where you start talking about courtly love and this kind of thing, where love is sort of an affection toward an object, a feeling of reverence and awe toward an object, an appreciation of its beauty. And so you get these writings from people who are deeply in love with someone whom they’ve maybe never met and never will: Dante and Beatrice, even though Dante is married to someone else.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What!? What!

Fr. Stephen: These kind of things.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] So these kind of things. And this is where our concept of romantic love starts to emerge. Looking at that girl across your eighth-grade class and thinking she’s just the most wonderful thing you’ve ever seen. That’s this kind of love, which you already see is greatly devalued from Christian love.

Then when we move past that, we get to this Freudian period, where it becomes desire. [Laughter] Desire for someone: I desire to have them, I desire to possess them, I desire something from them.

Fr. Andrew: And then this gets mixed up with the natural, normal feelings of friendship, and then that’s where you get our modern slogan you hear from some people, “Love is love.” It’s like: “Well… What you are experiencing is a combination of desire and probably friendship, but that’s not what love is the in Scripture.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that’s… There’s an old rabbinic story, or at least I was told it’s an old rabbinic story—I don’t know a lot of old rabbis—where a man walks into a diner, and he goes up to the lunch counter and sits down, and there’s a guy sitting next to him, eating a fish on a plate. And he looks at him and he says, “How’s the fish?” And the guy says, “Oh, I love this fish!” And the second guy says, “You love him? You just cooked him, cut him up, and ate him!” [Laughter] And the point there is this is how, in the modern modern times—19th, 20th century, even into the 21st century—all too often, this is actually—it’s not like “Well, if you love him, why don’t you marry him?” It’s that we look at it as what he really loves is not the fish—he wasn’t going to put him in a bowl and take him home and feed him and care for him—what he loved was how the fish made him feel, how the fish tasted, the gratification he got from the fish as he consumed it.

And this is how we’re taught to look at love: love is about consumption; love is about how someone or something makes us feel, in terms of that gratification.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s why the famous philosopher, when he asked, “What is love?” his next thought was, “Baby, don’t hurt me.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. “Don’t hurt me no more.” Yeah, so this is— We have to radically shift. We’re talking about this now, because of course Isaac is where this comes up, Isaac and Rebecca, that Isaac loved Rebecca. But as we go forward into things about spouses loving each other, we have to be very clear, because of how misshapen these ideas of love have been, what we really mean. And ultimately, what we mean and what we will always come back to is that the love part is always something concrete; it’s always something you do, something you choose to do. And it’s something you choose to do regardless of how you feel at that moment.

The reason I’m making this point is that a lot of us have been taught the opposite. We’ve been taught that somehow if you do something but you’re not feeling it, that’s somehow phony or hypocritical or bad.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I would say that when you do something good when you’re not feeling it, that’s actually more virtuous.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes! So this is something I always, in the premarital counseling sessions— This is something I always tell people when they’re getting married. Now, my wife and I, we’re America’s sweethearts, so this doesn’t apply to us.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: We are just continuously completely in love. But for most people, you have these—especially as the wedding approaches, and right after, newlyweds— You have these very intense feelings of love. But eventually it’s a few years later, and your stomach’s making weird noises in bed in the morning and no one’s wearing any make-up and everybody’s hair is sticking out in weird directions and you slept funny and there’s smells. [Laughter] It’s 6:00 a.m. and you have to get up and go to work, and you’re not looking at your spouse and feeling that same “rub the Vaseline on the lens” in the old movie, the fuzzy “Ohh! This person’s the most handsome or beautiful that I’ve ever seen!”

And if that’s what you think love is, then what are you going to conclude after enough days like that? “Well, love’s gone! So I should probably go, too.” And that ain’t it! That’s not love. Love is, when you’re feeling those feelings, you show love and you do things that demonstrate your love for your spouse, and when you’re not feeling it, you do the same things, because faithfulness and love are sort of intimately connected in that way, and the feelings will come and go.

So all that is to say, this is not saying Isaac felt some kind of warm feelings that he wrote bad poetry for her that didn’t rhyme.

Fr. Andrew: Blank verse is a very respectable form of poetry. I’m just saying.

Fr. Stephen: Right, I didn’t say all poetry that doesn’t rhyme is bad. [Laughter] I just said kind of bad poetry…

Fr. Andrew: Launched a thousand ships?

Fr. Stephen: The bad poetry that you write when you’re in love with somebody as a teenager usually doesn’t rhyme, because if it does rhyme it sounds like you’re trying to rap at them, and that’s unattractive.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: So you try to make it poetic by not rhyming, and it’s just a mess. No 13-year-old can write iambic pentameter, especially not one who’s love-struck. Prove me wrong.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I did try, but that was a long time ago, and I did not keep any of those.

Fr. Stephen: You wrote bad poetry that didn’t rhyme! See?

Fr. Andrew: I know! I know.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Exhibit A. So next we get to Jacob, and Jacob has a couple of wives and a couple of concubines.

Fr. Andrew: This is where the twelve tribes of Israel come from, is these four women.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and what we see in that family is all the issues associated with polygamy.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s not great!

Fr. Stephen: You see the rivalry between Leah and Rachel, rivalries between the sons. You see with—I won’t get too graphic about this, but you see with Reuben.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: Incest problems? And all I’ll say is to the modern day, polygamist situations show those same exact issues, over and over again.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this has never been done well.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So we’re going to get more into this in a bit, but to say this here: Often folks will say, “Well, the Bible doesn’t condemn polygamy.” That’s not actually true; like I said, we’ll get back to it. But even if it were, the Scriptures can describe things, and by the way they are described expect you as the reader to understand and see: Oh, this is not a good thing. It didn’t work out well.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, it’s never depicted as working.

Fr. Stephen: And to take a lesson from that, without having to cudgel you over the head and say, “Hey, don’t do this!” And especially when every time it’s presented, there are problems. What was the previous time to this? The whole thing with Hagar. That didn’t go well! So that’s just—

And the opposite assumption often seems to be made, often by our atheist friends, our non-religious friends, is that anything that the Bible describes, it’s endorsing! Like: “Well, the Bible says happens, so the Bible’s saying that’s fine.” It’s like: Wha— Time out. The Bible says idolatry happened.

Fr. Andrew: We literally don’t treat any other book that way.

Fr. Stephen: The Bible says all kinds of horrible things happened, all kinds of horrible sin. We see God punishing sin. We see God— Like the flood, we see God reacting to sin. So if you read that, you wouldn’t walk away—if you give it an honest read—saying, “Oh, this is saying all that sin was cool.” So, yeah, but we’ll come back to the whole polygamy issue here.

And then the last of these patriarchal marriages is not described in any great detail in the text of Genesis itself, but flowers into something in later Jewish and Christian literature, and that’s— We’re told that Joseph in Egypt marries a woman named Asenath or Aseneth, depending on where you look. Hebrew vowels aren’t written. But who was said to have been the daughter of a priest named Potiphar—not the same one—in the city that’s later known as Heliopolis. That’s obviously a Greek name.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’d be kind of deeply weird if he married the daughter of the other Potiphar. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’d be like: Wait, what?

And we’re just sort of told that, and of course he has Manasseh and Ephraim. So this creates this sort of interesting little thing in the text, like: Wait a minute, he married the daughter of a pagan priest, who’s not an Israelite? He’s worshiping the Egyptian gods? That seems a little weird.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s this fun text. I can’t remember what the date of it is, but it’s just… It’s shortly before Christ, within a couple of centuries before?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s probably second century BC, maybe late third but probably second.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just titled Joseph and Aseneth. You can find translations of this on the interwebs. It’s not very long; you could read it all I think in less than an hour probably. And it’s basically a romance story, but it’s really more, in some ways, the story of how Aseneth— Like, she sees Joseph, and he is hot stuff. [Laughter] I mean, that’s what the text essentially says! “Lo, the man was fair to look upon.” [Laughter] Let’s see, it’s the dynamic equivalents; that’s how I’m translating it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there we go.

Fr. Andrew: Dynamic equivalents, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: The amplified version.

Fr. Andrew: And “I must have him.” But she comes to him, and he’s like: “No! You are a pagan,” and she goes away very sad, but eventually discovers: “Wait! I can become part of Israel, and then we can be together!” And so she does! It’s the tale of her leaving idolatry and becoming part of Israel and worshiping Yahweh the God of Israel, and they get married.

So this comes from the Hellenistic Jewish world, so it serves all kinds of interesting purposes in that world. It’s the story of a pagan becoming part of Israel and all that kind of stuff, but it’s a very different character [from] the scriptural texts, because it is: she falls in love with him.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a… Yeah, we won’t digress now and talk about how ancient romances are and are not related to the later concept of romantic love. [Laughter] But it’s sort of— The literature is sort of an attempt to… The problem it’s aimed at is this: Joseph the Patriarch marries a pagan. But the recasting of that as romance, of essentially her conversion story, which is a supernatural conversion story, which is referenced by Christ in one of his post-resurrection appearances—go back to a previous episode to find out more about that—that casting it as a romance is of theological importance.

We can’t know how much of its early popularity among Christians was because of what? Because it became, even though it was written as a Jewish text, this text became wildly popular in early Christianity, and is found all over the place at Christian monasteries. Presumably the monasteries didn’t have it for the romantic value.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What!?

Fr. Stephen: And more for the theological value. But when you think about the early Church and you think about Gentiles coming to faith in Christ, you think about some of the imagery we’re going to talk about later tonight, with Christ as the Bridegroom, you can see how that narrative of this woman who’s coming out of paganism and becoming part of the household of God, how that would express a kind of Pauline theology to Gentile Christians in sort of a very powerful narrative way, beyond just, you know, “Oh, Joseph is described as good-looking, and she’s described as good-looking,” and she’s from a small town and has to go back there and meets a divorced guy with a dog. Anyway. [Laughter] That’s not actually in the story; that’s every Hallmark movie. You can go watch those: there’s a whole channel of them, 24/7. [Laughter]

So those are these patriarchal stories, and as we said at the beginning of that, those marriages are sort of highlighted in the Orthodox wedding service. As we go forward in Scripture, there is more about marriage. Obviously, different genres of biblical literature are going to talk about this in different ways. One of the themes that you find, especially in wisdom literature but also in the prophets, is the theme of finding love, finding joy, with the wife of your youth. So Proverbs 5:18 says very bluntly, “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth.” [Laughter] Which is pretty straight-forward. And the idea of “the wife of your youth” is this is that person whom you got hitched to at age 13, possibly not having ever met her. Your family arranged it. Who knows what she looked like and whether that was appealing to you? Who knows what her voice sounded like? Who knows if she honked when she laughed? We don’t know. But you were married to her, and now she is your life.

Many men in that kind of situation, in that kind of society, as you might imagine, once they were older, once they had found some measure of success in life, once they had more resources, would be tempted to go and divorce that wife whom they maybe hadn’t wanted to marry in the first place, because they figured they could do better: go marry someone younger, someone whom they found more attractive, someone who whatever. And, you know, that occasionally happens today, too, but that’s even without our arranged marriages. [Laughter]

And so the idea of finding joy, finding love with the wife of your youth is again a mode of faithfulness, that faithfulness is not just— At one level we’ve talked a lot on the show especially in recent episodes about faithfulness in terms of keeping the commandments of God and obedience, but faithfulness also has to do with the roles that we have, the places that we occupy, in our communities, in our families, in our vocations. We have these places we occupy, these roles that we play in them, and those roles and those places we occupy have certain expectations and responsibilities and duties, and a right way for them to be carried out in terms of bearing the image of God in the world.

And a big part of faithfulness is not just not-lying, not-stealing, not-murdering anybody—all those are bad—but a big part of it is faithfully living out those roles, even though many of those roles—more now than ever before, but still now, many of those roles are not of our choosing. We don’t get to choose who our parents are going to be, but by virtue of them being our parents, we have certain responsibilities to them that we have to exercise faithfully.

Fr. Andrew: I think this is one of the things that’s really hard—at least within our culture—for people to accept, because there’s so much cultural emphasis on the idea of “You can grow up to be whatever you want to be, whatever it might be.” I didn’t choose you… It’s really remarkable how ingrained that idea is of sort of limitlessness, and yet that’s really not a healthy way to be.

Fr. Stephen: And a refusal of responsibility unless we chose it.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: I can only be responsible for something if I voluntarily choose to be. And that’s just not so. I mean, in ancient cultures, you got to choose basically none of it. [Laughter] You didn’t get to choose your spouse, whether you’d be able to have kids or not, what you do for a living—you were apprenticed off to somebody or you just grew up farming, like 18 generations of your parents or grandparents had.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, nobody ever said, “So why don’t you have a conversation with your guidance counselor about what you’d like to major in, and then we’ll think about some job placement for you.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] You ate what food you could get, and you hoped you could get enough of it to live. You didn’t get to choose whether you were going to get sick. I mean, you didn’t choose any of it! Now we have so much more choice, and possibly having all of those choices has made us feel like all the places we don’t choose are shackles. But they were never shackles; they were opportunities to display faithfulness.

So in this theme about “the wife of your youth,” the Prophet Malachi, which, depending on which version of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament you’re looking at might be the last book or it might not—Malachi says a little more in that context and says some interesting things that we’re going to come back to a couple times tonight.

Fr. Andrew: So God is taking them to task. It starts off with this—

Fr. Stephen: Malachi’s a prophet, so that goes without saying! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, exactly! That’s true. That’s pretty much how it goes. He doesn’t just show up and say, “Good job, everybody! Good job.”

Fr. Stephen: “Way to go!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So Malachi 2, starting with verse 13, going through 15:

And this second thing you do, you cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning, because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand, but you say, “Why does he not?” Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did he not make them one with the spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the Israelites are sort of getting angry with God, as was their wont, starting in the wilderness with Moses. “Let’s kill Moses and go back to Egypt. We had it better there.” But this is happening again, and they’re getting angry because they’re going and making the sacrifices that are commanded, and at least going through those motions, but God is not hearing their prayers and giving them the blessings and the abundance and the victory and all of the things that they think that God owes them in return. They think it’s God’s duty to provide those things to them, and they’re saying, “Why isn’t God faithful to his covenant?” And God here says to them, “Well, how about the wife of your youth? That was a covenant. You had a duty there. Were you faithful to that? How can you then come to God and demand that he be faithful, when you’re faithless?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and recall, way—a few books behind, where God said, “If you do these things, then you will be blessed.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, not “if you do the sacrifices correctly, you will be blessed.”

Fr. Andrew: Not pagans. This is not magic.

Fr. Stephen: And so as I mentioned, we’re going to come back to another aspect of that in Malachi a little later. Getting into the New Testament, a couple places where marriage is discussed, sort of famously, in the pastoral epistles—1 and 2 Timothy and Titus—St. Paul lays out the sort of requirements for who’s a good candidate to be a bishop or a presbyter or a deacon. And one of the elements of that that’s repeated, and if you translate it very literally from the Greek, they have to be a “one-woman man.” [Laughter] It’s often translated to English as “husband of one wife.” This is not primarily about polygamy. Polygamy was not being widely practiced amongst St. Paul’s Gentile converts to Christianity. This is mostly about divorce and remarriage.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, one-woman man ever, not one woman at a time.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, this is consecutively, not just simultaneously.

Fr. Andrew: Neither digamy nor bigamy.

Fr. Stephen: This is more connected to what we were just talking about, about the wife of your youth, and that’s why this is a mark of character for one of these men who’s being considered for a Church office, is that he has done this: he has been faithful to that wife of his youth. And if a person isn’t faithful in executing those duties—because it also talks about how he conducts his household with his children—if he hasn’t been faithful in those roles—for whatever reason; it doesn’t matter why, if he hasn’t been able to—then we’re not going to give him this additional role within the Church community, to which he probably will also not be able to be faithful if he hasn’t been able to be faithful in these other ways. So that’s why it’s a mark here.

This also communicates to us that it is the norm for Church leaders to be married. This is communicated a bunch of other places in a bunch of other ways. Even St. Paul, who isn’t, talks about how he would have the right to take a wife and children with him on his journeys, the way St. Peter and the other apostles did. So St. Peter had a wife and children; he had a mother-in-law whom Jesus healed. So this was the norm, and it’s what you would expect, because Christianity at this point is basically a Judaism. In Judaism, the norm was for people to be married, and that remained a strong sort of norm.

The reason I’m emphasizing this so much is that I think this is particularly common in the modern West. I think this is an interpretive thing in the modern West, although it’s kind of all around in the West, but this idea—and you can find some prooftexts in the New Testament; you’re hard-pressed in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament you can find some prooftexts to try to argue that celibacy is somehow superior to marriage in some way. Those are prooftexts that are taken out of context; it’s not true. But at the very least, even if you want to give those texts some weight as prooftexts on that side, there’s a whole lot of weight on the other side of marriage being the norm, including for apostles, including for prophets in the Old Testament, that this is broadly the norm. And so we would understand that there are people with particular callings—St. John the Forerunner had a very particular calling. St. Paul had a particular calling, and that’s St. Paul’s argument about why he doesn’t have a wife and children. He says, “I have this particular calling, and to exercise and be faithful to this particular calling from God, it’s better that I not have a wife and children that I bring with me.” So it’s about a particular calling.

This is important all around when looking at the saints in the Church. When we look at St. Symeon Stylites, that story is not supposed to say to you, “Hey, if you were really holy, you’d go live on a pillar!” [Laughter] That’s not what that’s saying. He had a very peculiar, in all senses of the word, calling from God that he was faithful to. If you’re listening to this, you’re listening to it on the internet, so I can say assuredly, you do not have that calling to be a pillar saint.

Fr. Andrew: You have Wi-Fi up there?

Fr. Stephen: Or you’re being wildly unfaithful to it, at least, if you do! [Laughter] But I’m pretty sure you don’t. Anybody listening to this does not have that particular calling. You have a calling from God to do something, but for 99% of the world—probably more than that—that calling involves family life. Not everyone has to get married, not you should feel bad about yourself if you’re not, but the sort of “married world,” the world of family life, the world of the extended household is what the vast majority of people in the world today and in the history of the world have been called to by God. And then there are exceptional cases, where God calls someone to something else.

So then we mentioned earlier the place where Christ talks about marriage in a significant way in St. Matthew’s gospel and goes back to Genesis. So we can take a look at that. It’s in response to an issue about divorce.

Fr. Andrew: This is Matthew 19:3-12. I’m just going to read it quickly, because you probably are familiar with this passage.

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by saying, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”

He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?”

He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given, for there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So a few comments on that. [Laughter] Notice, when Christ describes marriage, and it sort of doesn’t matter… The truths that he conveys in his answer are not dependent on the question that led him to say them. What do I mean by that? It’s not as if what he says when he quotes Genesis and what he says about marriage and God’s original intent in marriage—it’s not that that only applies to questions about divorce, so if you ask a question about anything but divorce, well, this verse is irrelevant!—as some would have it, as silly as I just made that sound. But in addressing this question about divorce, Christ describes again the original intent of marriage, which is that the two become one flesh. And if God has made them one flesh—so God is here the agent who joins them together, the joining together in one flesh is a divine action, what we would call grace—man cannot separate; let not man separate. So this is a human divorce—according to Christ’s answer here, is a human literally trying to defeat the purpose of God, trying to pull apart what God has joined together.

So that’s condemning divorce in the strongest terms, and also describing marriage as— Because he starts with “made them male and female,” so that’s what marriage is, at least the marriage that’s being talked about here. The marriage that the Bible talks about, that’s what it is. And only one of each. The two become one flesh, and that’s what Christ says the original intent of marriage is.

So then their question is: Why did Moses say you could give her a thing of divorce and send her away? Now, that’s not actually what Moses said. We won’t go into it right now, but if you go and look it up—

Fr. Andrew: Sneaky, sneaky!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. What Moses says was: If you’re going to throw your wife out, you have to give her a certificate of divorce. That’s not the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a limitation on free-wheeling, throwing women out.

Fr. Stephen: He’s telling men they can’t just abandon their wives and children. If you’re going to leave your family, you have to give her a certificate of divorce. That was not saying, “It’s fine; don’t worry about it. Abandoning your wife and kids? Cool.” [Laughter] The Torah never said that at all. So they’ve turned it into this sort of “out.”

And so Christ basically says, “Moses knew what you people are like.” [Laughter] He said, “Because of your hardness of heart. He knew some of you were going to abandon your wives and kids, and so he said if you’re going to do that, you have to at least do this. At least give them a paper so they could move on with their life and not be stuck in this limbo, wondering where you went.” So he says, “Look, you’re committing adultery. Why? Because God has joined the two of you together.” And it’s not just “humans shouldn’t pull that apart”; it’s “humans can’t pull that apart.” That’s why it’s adultery.

So then the other part of this that often gets misinterpreted is when the disciples then say, “Oh, if this is the case, it’s better not to marry,” and people will often interpret Jesus’ answer to them as saying, “Yeah, you’re right.” [Laughter] “Yeah, you guys should all become eunuchs for the kingdom of God. Everyone should be celibate”—which is not at all what he’s saying. That’s not at all what he’s saying. Because what the disciples are literally asking is: “Wait a minute. If I can’t divorce my wife, if I can’t abandon my wife and children, I don’t want to get married.” [Laughter] That’s the question they’re asking or the statement they’re making! Christ is not endorsing that! [Laughter] So Christ’s answer amounts to, essentially: if that’s how you feel, then, yes, you should stay celibate! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if that’s your attitude, then please don’t stick yourself on a woman.

Fr. Stephen: Because you are better off not getting married than getting married and committing adultery, or getting married and abandoning your wife and children—yes, it is better for you not to be married in that case.

That said, last note here in the first half, that’s getting back to, as I said we would, polygamy. So as I mentioned earlier, there is a place where polygamy is condemned. It’s especially not clear in English translations because of the way they translate it. And you have to do a little bit of comparative Hebrew idiom to get what’s going on. But in Leviticus 18:18, it talks about— There’s a commandment that says you’re not to marry a woman—take a woman as a wife, as a rival to her sister.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which people take to say you’re not allowed to marry sisters.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t do what Jacob did, basically. [Laughter] “Don’t marry two sisters. Like, polygamy’s okay as long as they’re not related, or at least not that closely related.” But if you take that phrase of sort of marrying sister to sister, and you look at other similar Hebrew idioms, where there’s like “brother to brother” or “man to man,” the way that idiom is used in the Hebrew Bible, you find a whole bunch of examples where, for example, the army will be arrayed “man to man.” And the idea of arraying them man to man, or gathering them man to man, means you’re gathering up a whole bunch of them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a series.

Fr. Stephen: Like a whole group. Yeah, “man to man” is like sequence or series. And so the idea here at the core, really, if you understand the Hebrew idiom, is: Don’t keep getting married. You marry one woman; don’t marry a series of women, consecutively or simultaneously.

And of course, we’ve already pointed out every example of polygamy in the Old Testament goes badly. That is only intensified when we’re talking about the kings. Deuteronomy 17:14-20, in the commandments regarding the kings, explicitly says the king is not to “multiply wives to himself.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which you shouldn’t read as: “Well, the king’s not allowed to be a polygamist but everyone else is.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. One time when I pointed this out, I had someone say, “Oh, no, no, no. They were allowed to add wives, just not multiply them.”

Fr. Andrew: Wha!?

Fr. Stephen: “They were allowed to have a few, just not a ton.” And I was like: “What?” But anyway… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: You can’t get that from the original languages, we’ll put it that way! [Laughter] That distinction between “add” and “multiply.”

Fr. Andrew: Well, there is this other religion which allows you to have up to four…

Fr. Stephen: There is. There is, provided you treat them all the same, which, you know… We really need a good rabbinical commentary on the Quran, because I think the first thing a rabbi would do with that would be: “You will never treat them all the same, and therefore you can only have one.” [Laughter] Like, would turn that right back around—but we don’t have that. I wonder if actually there is such a thing from the medieval period or something.

Fr. Andrew: Write in! Let us know!

Fr. Stephen: That would be fascinating. This email you can send me.

Fr. Andrew: What!

Fr. Stephen: If you’re a listener, if you know of a rabbinical commentary on the Quran, from any era, you can email me about it and I will read that email, because I would be super curious about that.

Fr. Andrew: All right: Lord of Spirits at Ancient Faith dot com, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, hate mail goes to Fr. Andrew, but that one you can send to me.

But the idea here of the king is very explicitly not to do this, and in addition to the patriarchal stories we talked about, where polygamy goes bad, in addition to King David, King Solomon, where polygamy goes bad, even if you go back to the first example of polygamy in the Scriptures, in the book of Genesis, it’s Lamech, who stands at the culmination of Cain’s line at the end of Genesis 4, who sings the song to his two wives about how he’s, like, way better than God.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, the first polygamist…

Fr. Stephen: That’s the first— He took to himself two wives. We’re not to think that that part was okay and everything else he did was bad that’s described there. And there’s a deliberate contrast being made in those genealogies, which we don’t maybe notice because we’re not huge into genealogies, but the culmination of Cain’s line is Lamech with his two wives. The culmination of Seth’s line is Noah with his one wife, and his sons who each had one wife, which is specified: “a wife.”

So this is a very deliberate— The rise of polygamy is presented in the book of Genesis as a sign of falling away from the original intent that Christ points to in Genesis. Christianity has never practiced polygamy. There were isolated Jewish sects that practiced it up until the ninth and tenth century, but mainstream Judaism left it behind a long, long time ago, long before that. So, yeah, there’s not a good case for polygamy out of the Bible, and pointing to examples of polygamy is not a good way to justify your favorite form of sexual immorality.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Indeed!

Fr. Stephen: On that note!

Fr. Andrew: All right, so, we’re going to go ahead and take our first break. We’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Thanks, Voice of Steve! It’s the second half of The Lord of Spirits podcast, and we’re talking about marriage, the sacrament of marriage, the mystery of marriage. This is not a call-in show where you can get marital counseling.

Fr. Stephen: I’ll try. I’ll give it a shot.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s just not really a good idea to— It’s just not a good idea.

Fr. Stephen: You know I’m trying to steal the Louhs’ bit?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, that is right. We have a show like that, sort of, yeah. But, yes, call in! 855-AFRADIO. We’re discussing marriage, especially in the Bible, and we just talked about how saying you can have polygamy based on stuff the Bible says is just not a thing. Literally, there is no point where polygamy comes up and God says, “And this worked out really well!” [Laughter] It’s just not.

Fr. Stephen: Or “you should do this.”

Fr. Andrew: And there’s actual commandments against it.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so half two: this time it’s personal. [Laughter] So we’re moving from first half tonight [which] was about marriage; second half here, we’re going to talk about weddings.

Fr. Andrew: There you go, so, yes, the actual moment of making this thing come to me.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the sort of sacramental thing. We’re going to start by going back to our friend the Prophet Malachi and one particular verse out of that section we read before. This is Malachi 2:15.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is cool, by the way. When we were doing our briefing a couple days ago, I commented to Father that I’ve read the whole Bible over my lifetime, a few times, whatever. I just didn’t remember this verse! I think by the time you get to Malachi, you’ve got a bit of Old Testament fatigue. [Laughter] But this is cool, so listen to this, everybody. Malachi 2:15.

Did he not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth.

Fr. Stephen: All right. So this is— And the contents of this are assumed in what we already saw Christ say. We talked about God joining them together. So it’s God actively making them one. The two becoming one flesh is not just a euphemistic description of sexuality.

Fr. Andrew: No, it’s God joining them together as one.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s a divine action. But this adds this element of a portion of the Spirit being breathed into the union by God. So the two become one flesh, and that one flesh is made alive by the Spirit of God.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, you know, see the Spirit episode, among other things. But, yeah, this is cool, the idea that the Holy Spirit comes into— A portion of the Spirit is brought into the union of the husband and the wife.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and makes the marriage alive. This is deliberately paralleled to Adam’s creation. Adam is formed from the dust of the earth, and then the Spirit is breathed into him, and he becomes alive.

So the wedding, the marriage, the sacrament, when God does this, when God joins two people together and they receive the Spirit to make that marriage alive, that is an event—it’s a moment—but the reality of it, the life of that marriage then extends through the rest of their lives. This is always something— Again, I’m laying out all my premarital counseling tool-bag tricks here—but a lot of times when people are getting married, they will spend days and days and days and hours and hours and hours stressfully working on all the details of the wedding. And as someone who had a wedding, it’s all kind of a blur. [Laughter] And it’s over really fast. And then you’re married for the rest of your lives, hopefully. And the amount of time we spend preparing to spend decades together, Lord willing, is a lot less than the amount of time we spend preparing for one afternoon and making sure the invitations are on the right color parchment paper, tasting cakes. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I do like to taste cakes, so… [Laughter] Wedding planning, it’s interesting to think about what people hire wedding planners and so forth…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, you’d be better off hiring a financial planner to help you lay out your finances going into the future. That would be much more helpful than having that day be “perfect” that you’ll barely remember because you were so fatigued and relieved at the same time. Old man yells at clouds, live on Ancient Faith Radio tonight. [Laughter]

The question then is— If you want to prooftext, then, if you’re looking for a prooftext, if you want to prooftext that marriage is a sacrament, not a sacrament falsely so-called—sorry, John Calvin—that prooftext is Malachi 2:15 that we read, that in the marriage God makes them one, gives a portion of the Spirit in their union. That’s not a human activity, that’s not a civil function, that’s not a contract—that’s a sacrament. And this is part of why marriage is the way it is in the Orthodox Church.

There’s some folks listening, I know, who aren’t Orthodox, and even Orthodox people who’ve never been to an Orthodox wedding, because maybe they came into the Orthodox Church and just haven’t had the opportunity to see one. But one of the big things that you notice at an Orthodox wedding is that we don’t do vows. The people both get asked, right before the service starts, if they’re there of their own free will, and then after that they don’t say a thing. They don’t do— They’re not doing something.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the wedding happens to them.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, they are married. It’s a passive. And they are married to each other. So it’s God’s action. In the same way that in baptism we have water, in chrismation we have myrrhon, oil, in the Eucharist we have bread and wine, in the sacrament of marriage we have a man and a woman.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re the ones being changed into another mode, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and that’s what Malachi is pretty clearly expressing in a very quick way, in one verse. So if we understand, then, it to be this sacrament— like, we know who in the Old Testament was doing the sacrifices, and we’ve talked about that; we know who was doing this. So who was performing weddings? And what even was a wedding in the ancient world and in the Israelite and Jewish world?

Fr. Andrew: And weirdly you could not—I’m just going to say this at the outset— You could not hire your own Elvis to do your wedding.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yes, they would’ve asked you, “Who?” But, yeah, you couldn’t get ordained online either. In most cases, in the earliest phase—so we’re talking about the patriarchal period; we’re talking about it was the father of the extended family, patriarch, head of the household. And we talked about that, because that was the person who was invested with the priesthood; that was the person who was doing the sacrifices at the time for the family. That was the— They were the ones who were effectively the officiant of marriages within the household. Later that moved to the presbyters, the elders of the clans and tribes in Israel, who were sort of the fathers of those extended units.

And that’s why marriage law was handled, as everything else was—I think we’ve talked about this on the show before— You see these references in the Old Testament about people going to the city gates and to see those who sit at the city gates. Those were the elders of that city. They would sit at the gates of the city and they would be there and they would perform these kind of functions of religious law, which included marriage law. So if you think about the book of Ruth, when Boaz is going to act as kinsman-redeemer for Ruth, he goes to those elders to say, “Here’s who I am; here’s who Ruth is. I’m the relative. I’m going to marry her.” He goes to the city gates to do that, because that’s where these elders are. So they sort of become the ones in charge of these things.

While we’re here, we need to make a note on bride prices. Totally— Here’s another totally non-controversial element of the Bible to comment on! So in the Old Testament—you see this in many places, that there was a bride price—and this continued into the New Testament period; this continued in a lot of cultures for a long time—where the groom-to-be and/or his parents and family, extended family, would give gifts—sometimes money, sometimes sheep, cattle, goats, flocks and herds, however the economy functioned at the particular time, commodities—would give those to the bride’s family in return for the bride being released from that family and brought into his family through marriage.

Sometimes in the really cool cases, rather than just giving gifts, you would perform some great heroic deed, like going and killing and circumcising a few hundred Philistines.

Fr. Andrew: Right, or obtaining a Silmaril from the crown of Morgoth. Just putting that out there.

Fr. Stephen: You know, these one-podcast people, you’re feeding them. You’re throwing them raw meat, man!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know! But, I mean, Jacob kind of does this. He has to spend seven years and then seven more years working.

Fr. Stephen: Working, yeah, because he doesn’t have any money, so he trades labor, basically. Yeah. So this is often short-handed by people. Modern people will look at this and say, “Oh, look. This guy’s selling his daughter. He’s buying a wife. He’s… And so this woman is just being treated like a commodity to be bought and sold. She’s not being treated like a human; she’s being treated like a slave.” All of this is sort of modern and silly, and your retrojecting things. Most of all, you’re retrojecting modern economics into the ancient world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re not capitalists.

Fr. Stephen: They weren’t capitalists; there’s no such thing as commodities. People aren’t buying and selling commodities in ancient Israel. [Laughter] The idea here is that when you’re dealing with this, the actual kind of economics of the time, which is almost entirely agrarian when we’re talking about ancient Israel and Judah, that your household, the members of your household—be they your children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, everybody in the big extended family—all of those people are all essentially units of labor, meaning they’re all working; they’re all doing different tasks.

So the 13-year-old girl whom you’re about to marry off is not sitting around her room, reading Tiger Beat, listening to boy bands, and you’re going to go and trade her for some goats. [Laughter] It’s: she’s out there tending animals, helping her mother, mending clothing, helping feed the workers. She’s part of the household and has this role that she’s playing that keeps the household functioning. And when you’re doing subsistence farming, functioning means alive.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you lose somebody—that’s bad for the family.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and so losing this daughter, having this daughter leave this household and go to this other household… The bride price is essentially paying restitution. I am doing something negative to this person by taking his daughter away from him. This is going to negatively affect his household, and so I’m going to pay restitution to him, to make it right for what I’m doing.

There was an example of this in my own life.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] Are you going to tell or are you just going to mention that?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. When my wife and I were engaged, I went to go and get her, and we were going to drive back to at the time Pennsylvania. I went to get her in California, get her from the home of her father and her mother. She was my father-in-law’s only daughter, and I was taking her away from him. She had a dog, a small Boston terrier named Bean, and this dog had become the apple of my father-in-law’s eye. He loved this dog more than anything. She was my wife’s dog—my at-the-time-fiancée’s dog. I could not take this man’s daughter and his dog. [Laughter] I could not do this to him. No country song would suffice to express the pain I would have inflicted. And so we left the dog.

Fr. Andrew: I bet you’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that in the years that have followed. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But so this is the idea. The idea is that taking this person out of their household, you’re kind of doing an injury.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so you need to make up for that.

Fr. Stephen: And so there’s restitution that has to be provided.

Fr. Andrew: And the very famous Proverbs 31 bit, praising a good woman, largely praises her for her industriousness.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, for her quality as a unit of labor.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: It’s talking about how as she’s sewing and making these things and selling them in the marketplace, and da-da-da-da-dah…

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so this is not going to be an etymology thing; this is more lexicography, because this is really just about definitions.

Fr. Stephen: You can do another song, but nothing rhymes with “lexicography.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true! Now I’m thinking about… No, never mind! Yeah, so bride price—that’s what we were just talking about—this is distinct from a couple of English words that everyone’s probably familiar with, well, the first one more familiar which is “dowry,” and there’s another English word, “dower.” So a dowry is a price that’s paid to the groom, along with the wife, basically. “Here she is, and here’s some money, or here’s land, or whatever goods.” So it functions within political marriages as almost like: “Well, there’s a whole package of things I’m going to be sending you, including this woman.” And then a dower is not exactly the opposite. A dower is a gift that the groom gives to his wife that she gets control over—property, money, whatever—mainly so that, if he should die, that she’s not left with nothing. These things are not the same thing as the bride price that we’re talking about, and they’re, relatively speaking, sort of later developments, not always, but that’s a different sort of thing than this restitution concept that we were just talking about.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. We’re not going to keep going and get to “dowager” and all of that.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that would be fun! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It would be fun for you, sir.

Fr. Andrew: That would be a different podcast, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Fun for you. So we need to kind of address—because we’re talking about— Remember, we’re talking about weddings now; we’re talking about marriage as a sacrament. One thing that’s brought up, sometimes as an objection, sometimes by good-natured folks, even folks in the Church, who I think haven’t fully thought it through, is— You’ll hear people say, “Well, you know, weddings weren’t really done in churches until later centuries, and it seems like they were just kind of still doing Roman civil weddings or something.” They’ll say something like that. [Laughter] You’re laughing because you remember the briefing when we talked about this.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know.

Fr. Stephen: So right off the jump, there’s some obvious problems with this, because in the ancient world what’s a civil wedding? What’s a secular wedding? Because what’s a secular anything in the ancient world?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, civil society is not secular. It’s just not a thing. Everything involves gods.

Fr. Stephen: Gods all over the place. There’s not just sort of like: We have this… We have that, or like to think we have that, where we have these sort of neutral, secular, material, mathematical things over here, and then the supernatural things over there; if we believe they exist at all, they’re over there somewhere, separate. [Laughter] But not only did everyone accept that they were all there, they were all together all the time in the ancient world. So that’s not a distinction you can even make in order to make that argument.

So, then, why weren’t weddings done in churches? And what were they like and what were they doing? We’ll start with an example of a Jewish wedding in the first century. We’ve got one in the Bible in St. John’s gospel: the wedding at Cana. We see there that there are multiple days of feasting. There’s a wedding-feast that’s thrown. Guests are invited. And this again—this is not a “secular feast,” whatever that would mean. [Laughter] This is a religious feast. Some of the food there is probably from sacrificial animals. This celebration of marriage— because, again, we’ve seen from Malachi, we’ve seen from the way Christ read Genesis, that they understand that in the marriage God is doing something, and that’s what’s being celebrated in the feast.

But, to put a fine point on it, within that feast, the sort of key moment of the marriage is when the bride and the groom would go into the bridal chamber and consummate the marriage.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Without that, it’s not a marriage.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s the moment when they’re married. And then after that—and we’re going to be semi-euphemistic about this again, but after that the bridegroom would typically emerge from the bridal chamber and display, usually on a cloth, the evidence of the bride’s virginity up to that point. And again, somewhat euphemistically, if you listen closely to some of the liturgical hymns in Holy Week and Pascha, you’ll hear references to Christ emerging from the bridal chamber and two emblems of his victory that are connected to this sort of imagery.

This is why you wouldn’t have a wedding in the Temple or in a synagogue, because it was not appropriate to consummate the marriage there.

Fr. Andrew: Right. And, you know, we may recall, of course, St. Paul in 1 Corinthians aiming big criticism at people who involve themselves in pagan religious rituals because a significant element of them is sexual, in the temple. So this is a pagan thing to do. You don’t do sex in Christian and Jewish religious contexts, not in that building.

Fr. Stephen: If you’re reading 1 Corinthians in the original language so it’s not the bowdlerized English, he’s telling them they can’t do that in the church in Corinth either, because there were very clearly some who were wanting to. Now, there’s nothing icky about sexuality. There’s nothing icky about that. There’s just appropriate and inappropriate places for things. St. Paul says the marriage-bed is holy and undefiled—but it’s not the altar in the Temple either.

So that’s sort of what’s going on in a Jewish wedding. Now, if we’re going to talk about Roman weddings…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this thing that supposedly Christians were doing for centuries until they decided to just…

Fr. Stephen: So if you’re going to say that they weren’t having some “Christian wedding” until, what, the fourth century—what do people say? Fourth century? Fifth century?

Fr. Andrew: I think that’s usually— I mean, I’m not a liturgical history scholar.

Fr. Stephen: Somewhere in there? Where they say, “Oh, this is when there start being Christian weddings.” —you’re kind of implying that this was going on, even among Christians, until the fourth and fifth centuries, sixth century, whenever you want to say. And I think we’re going to see, as we talk about what a Roman wedding looked like—and repeat of parental advisory here—why that dog don’t hunt.

So the normal procedure for a Roman wedding is, first, the betrothal agreement is made with the bride’s father.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, still G-rated.

Fr. Stephen: ...to establish, yes. So that agreement is made, bride price paid. All that agreement is made. Now, most weddings were done, unless there was some major reason, in the month of June, because the month of June—people still get married in June in the modern day!—June is the month dedicated to Juno, who is the Roman goddess associated with Hera, who is the goddess of marriage, among her other things.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so if you aim your wedding at June, the reason why there’s this tradition is it’s literally a pagan Roman tradition.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. We may have just stopped a hundred Baptist weddings this June, just by pointing that out. [Laughter] Other gods and goddesses involved in this…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man. This is where it gets weird, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Ceres will make a little appearance. Of course, Venus, whom you might expect.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, okay. Venus. Venus, if you will.

Fr. Stephen: And then the god Hymen, who was the god of weddings.

Fr. Andrew: Never heard of— A god named Hymen, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: ...who is the god of weddings and who was specifically associated with the consummation of the wedding. By the way, this is your reminder—we have to throw this out once in a while—that the Julian calendar is pagan. We’ll continue. [Laughter] Now some more gods come into the picture, because every Roman household—we’re talking about the big extended family household, headed by the paterfamilias—had lares, who are not, like, Larry Sanders or Larry David. Spelled a little differently.

Fr. Andrew: And Darryls. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And their other brother, Darryl. No. The lares are a term for the household gods.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so these little local deities that you keep in your house that are—

Fr. Stephen: And this would be an accumulation, so it would be from the family’s history; where the family was originally from, the gods of that place; the gods of the place where they currently live; gods particularly associated with events in the family’s past and with particular family members. So it would all be collected together, and there would be images of them at the hearth, which was generally in the central to the Roman home, and that’s where people would gather, and that’s where worship would take place within the Roman household of those idols.

These household gods, though, as we’ve mentioned on the show before about pagan gods, were kind of possessive? So it wasn’t just like: “Oh, these are the gods we worship.”

Fr. Andrew: There’s a reciprocal relationship.

Fr. Stephen: Like: “This is the denomination we belong to.” [Laughter] This was: “These are our gods and we are their people.” This is sort of a pagan further thought down the line of the bride price. You’re not only depriving the human father of his daughter, but you’re taking a person away from these gods.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so you’re going to have to figure out what to do to make it okay.

Fr. Stephen: And this person is then going to belong to the gods of this other pagan household.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so you’ve got to do something to kind of make the gods, the bride’s family’s gods okay with the transfer.

Fr. Stephen: And make no mistake, they firmly believed that these gods, whom we would say are demons, would kill the person potentially, or inflict sterility on them, or any number of other horrible things, because these gods weren’t your pals. So there were two elements to this. Leading up to the time of the wedding, they’d offer a series of sacrifices to those gods, to kind of butter them up, make sure they’re in a good mood going into it. And then, when the time came for the wedding, at night, the bridegroom would come to the house and fake-kidnap the wife. The bride would kick and scream and yell about how she didn’t want to go, the idea being that this would trick the household gods into thinking she’s not leaving of her own free will.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Don’t blame her. She’s being stolen.”

Fr. Stephen: “She’s not leaving you guys on purpose. She’s getting drug away, kicking and screaming.”

Fr. Andrew: Amazing.

Fr. Stephen: So they wouldn’t get mad. So now there would be a procession from the bride’s house back to the groom’s house.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is kind of like a—I don’t know, it’s a space between.

Fr. Stephen: And so this was considered a dangerous time for the bride, because she is now not under the protection and ownership of those gods, and she is not yet part of the groom’s household and those gods, so she’s in this no-god’s-land.

Fr. Andrew: So she is literally what ancient people would call an atheist.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, she has no gods right now, which means she’s totally open to spiritual attack during this. Those in the procession would carry these horns that were filled with oil and used as torches that were dedicated to the god Ceres, which were believed to protect her on the trip, and they would sing a series of hymns to the god Hymen, called the hymenaia, during this journey. When they got to the groom’s house, there was a ceremony with oil being rubbed on the threshold which was sort of to signify her now becoming part of the groom’s household and coming under the protection of those pagan gods. And then there was a bed or a couch called a lectus on which the marriage would be consummated. That’s how pagan Romans got married.

Fr. Andrew: So when people say that Christians were just doing Roman marriages… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. Christians weren’t doing that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no.

Fr. Stephen: I guarantee you they were not.

Fr. Andrew: So many steps along the way, completely not okay for Christians!

Fr. Stephen: Not actual Christians. What were they doing? So the question isn’t really: “Oh, they were just doing Roman weddings until all of a sudden the Church decided it was a sacrament in a later century.” This is basically an argument from silence. We’re pretty sure they weren’t doing this—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we don’t know exactly what they were doing…

Fr. Stephen: —but we don’t know exactly what they were doing until that later point. Now, again, the central moment here, where the wedding—is when it’s consummated, which you’re not going to do in a church. But we know, for example—not just a question of— I mean, obviously when Christians are a minority in the Roman empire, a lot of them probably weren’t even Roman citizens. Jewish Christians would’ve been doing Jewish weddings, for example, and there was probably some form of something that was being done. But we know that, for example— You don’t even have to wait for Theodosius to become emperor. St. Constantine. And if it gives you heebie-jeebies to be calling him St. Constantine, wait until we get to the episode about the coronation of an emperor in the sacraments series: you’re going to be really excited!

Fr. Andrew: Woohoo! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So when St. Constantine converted, one of the biggest evidences of the reality of his conversion to Christianity is the fact that he ended all of the pagan sacrifices being done by the military and being done in public by himself or by his agents. And he replaced all of those sacrifices with Christian priests celebrating the Eucharist—before going into battle, in civil functions. This is during Constantine’s lifetime.

So it is reasonable to believe that he did not leave Roman marriage untouched. Now, of course, there were still pagans out there who were probably still doing pagan weddings, but Christians… It beggars belief that Christians were having pagan weddings.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And so then, again, we can kind of speculate a little bit about why they eventually do show up in church, why you do start getting church weddings. And clearly the sense, at least from the wedding service that we have, is that the key moment is no longer the consummation; it’s that God is joining these people together.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it appears that, in the earliest evidence that we have, the Eucharist was involved, which would explain it being in a church and fits with this idea of replacing other sacrificial pagan rites with the sacrifice of the Eucharist; getting rid of those and bringing in the Eucharist is the way that it transitioned to a church. In between, I would imagine we would see the same thing that we see in the rest of Christian worship, which is that they were doing an adapted form of the Jewish traditional wedding, with Christian elements, Christian Scripture readings and that kind of thing. But really it’s an argument from silence, but we can go from the patterns that we see in Christian worship elsewhere, in the restructuring of Roman society, to make a pretty solid guess at least roughly of what was going on.

And that’s furthered when you look at, for example, how St. Paul approaches these things. An essential element of what St. Paul is doing in all his epistles is he’s trying to reconstruct Gentile identity. What do I mean by that? Well, Gentile identity from any given nation was deeply steeped— You couldn’t separate paganism out from it. We have a modern secular concept of ethnicity.

Fr. Andrew: And religions.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and religions that are separate things. That didn’t exist in the ancient world. What it meant to be a Greek was not just to have grown up in Hellas or to have your people be from there for many generations; what it meant to be a Greek was also to worship the Greek gods and to participate in the ritual life of Greece that surrounded the gods, the public festivals, all of those things. That’s what it meant to be Greek.

So what does it mean to be a Greek Christian? Now we take that for granted, but for St. Paul that wasn’t something you could take for granted. And so you can understand why, in the early Church, you get the opponents of St. Paul in Galatians who were saying, “Well, okay, you can’t be pagans any more. So why don’t, uh, you be Jews?” [Laughter] “You can’t be a Greek any more. You have to have some culture. You have to be something. So you need to get circumcised, you need to keep Torah, you need to do all these things. You need to be Jewish. You can’t be Greeks any more, because being Greek is being a pagan.” And St. Paul is saying, “No! You’re not to become Jews, because you’re not Jews. You’re going to remain Greeks, but what it means to be Greek is going to change.” So a Greek Christian identity is forged, and that takes a couple centuries. St. Paul starts it, but you read all the problems he’s having, for example, in 1 and 2 Corinthians that we already referred to. This is a difficult process.

Fr. Andrew: And even while the concept and the way of life gets worked out, the terminology largely isn’t kept even, early on. By the time you get to the Cappadocians and so forth, “Greek” in terms of something other than language, “Greek” is used to refer to pagans. If you’re Christian, you’re a “Roman.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. Greeks are the ones still following that way of life.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, the word “Greek” in various ways gets revived again in the 18th, 19th century for other reasons, but, yeah, that identification of “Greek” with “pagan” holds on for a long time, even while they’re kind of developing a Greek Christian life, just calling it something different.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so St. Paul is going to affirm… So he’s got those folks on the one side who want people to become Jewish; on the other side, he’s got the Jewish zealot tradition that wants to overthrow societal structures within Roman life. And St. Paul is going to want to keep those social structures. That’s the part of the Gentile identity that he can keep, sort of, you know: families! Marriage in general! We don’t need to get rid of marriage in general. All of these relationships, all of these structures we can keep, but they need to be re-infused. Paganism needs to be drawn out; they need to be re-infused with Christ. So that’s part of this transformation.

And as a kind of aside, when folks… One of many things I’m a pessimist about is there being an American Orthodox Church any time soon. The big reason is that we still have to do precisely this. Not figure out what it means to be American and Christian, because there’s an American Christianity, and the more American it gets, the less it looks like Christianity, frankly. [Laughter] But figuring out what it means to be American and Orthodox Christian: we can’t just take for granted that that’s just an easy sub.

In fact, the fact that America is deeply steeped in another form of Christianity—a sort of Puritan, Calvinist, Protestant Christianity—sometimes makes it harder for us to make the distinctions that we need to make in order to form an American Orthodox identity. If America was a Muslim country or a Hindu country, when we looked at cultural institutions, it would be a little easier for us to spot, in the Hinduism case, the paganism, in the Muslim case, the Islamic parts, but when it’s another form of Christianity, the distinctions get more subtle and more tricky, and that identity can be a little harder to form.

How does this apply to weddings? Well, any priests listening know how this applies to weddings! [Laughter] Because there is a constant tension of “this is the traditional Orthodox wedding service” versus “here is the couple getting married, and here are the American elements that they want to incorporate into that.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “This is what we want for our wedding, Father.” Well…

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s American stuff. It’s the music that people have at American weddings. It’s all these things, and we’re still doing that work of sifting out. I have no doubt that if there’s an America 200 years from now—not sure, but if there is, and Orthodoxy is still here on these shores and thriving, that there’ll be little things in the Orthodox wedding service that are a little different from an Orthodox wedding service in other countries that will have incorporated certain bits and pieces of baptized American cultural things. But actually doing that now on the ground gets very difficult in hashing those things out.

So a couple of major ideas— I’ve talked several times on the show about how practices generate ideas, not vice-versa. The changes in practice regarding Christian marriage that happen for Gentile Christians, this massive shift from the pagan concepts surrounding marriage and weddings to the Christian concepts surrounding marriage and weddings: two major cultural shifts that come out of this. I’m not saying they’re the only two, but these are two big ones.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and these are things I think in some ways we take for granted on some levels now.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but that are new from this dynamic of Gentiles becoming Christians. The first one is male virginity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, in the ancient world… It was just not a thing!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, no concept. So it’s built into the Roman wedding service that the bride is expected to be a virgin, and in most ancient cultures, her being found to not be one, biologically, meant it was an invalid marriage, and she might face dire consequences. But the Romans, for example, expected that men were not. Not just, there was no expectation that a man would not have already been sexually active, but it was expected— He would have been considered a weirdo, not ready to be married yet, if he hadn’t… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s interesting how that has crept back into our culture.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so the idea of male virginity as any kind of value is completely new, but we can understand how that would come about, because if a bride has to be a virgin, and if a male, a husband, is expected not to be, that means you’re going to have a class of—sorry to say it, but we’re talking about ancient Rome—women and young boys who are being used for sexual gratification by men.

Fr. Andrew: Right. They’re just… yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Because they’re not finding that sexual gratification with the woman they’re going to marry, because she has to be a virgin, so there have to be these other people whom men are using sexually. And so Christianity, obviously, opposes that whole system of men seeking sexual gratification.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the whole thing!

Fr. Stephen: And so comes and seeks to eliminate that class of people, not by doing something horrible to them, but by making it so that they don’t have to do that. And therefore, the expectation is, since they’re not going to be engaging in that activity, that the husband is also going to be—have maintained their virginity. So that’s a major shift. That’s a kind of epochal shift.

The other epochal shift that people completely take for granted today…

Fr. Andrew: Especially, yeah, this one in particular.

Fr. Stephen: ...is the idea of consent.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, especially that women can say no.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that women have a right of consent to sexual activity. So in Roman culture—and I won’t get into this in terms of the language, but I’ll just say this is reflected in classical Latin—sexuality… A man gratifying himself sexually was considered kind of like blowing your nose.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just sort of a bodily function.

Fr. Stephen: Or going to the bathroom. You went and found a receptacle. And it didn’t really matter.

Fr. Andrew: It wasn’t this deep spiritual meaning or…

Fr. Stephen: And willing, unwilling… The concept of rape at that time was basically— only involved other people’s wives and daughters.

Fr. Andrew: It was kind of a property crime, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: Whereas Christianity, because of the very beginnings of monasticism, comes and says, “Women have the right to dedicate themselves to God and remain virgins, and not get married.” It was “not get married” at first. And if you read the early martyrologies of women saints in the early Church, a huge proportion of them end up getting killed because they refused to marry the pagan their father was trying to marry them off to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like one after another. Almost all the early female martyrs are this way.

Fr. Stephen: Often by their own father. So Christianity says, “This woman has the right to refuse to get married.” And then that grows into, obviously, the idea of sexual consent.

Fr. Andrew: And St. Paul mentions this. I can’t remember which one of his epistles off the top of my head now, but he talks about married people consenting with one another to set aside marital relations for the purpose of prayer.

Fr. Stephen: For a time for prayer, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, that said, we’re going to take our second and final break, and we’ll be right back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Andrew: Man, that was a very dramatic commercial. I don’t think I had heard that one before. It was cool. It’s good, by the way, that graphic novel. My kids love it: Sands of Salvation. We got a pre-release copy and they’re super into it.

Well, welcome back, everybody. It’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits podcast. We’re talking about the holy mystery of marriage in this particular episode. We just finished up—in the second half we talked about weddings in particular, and we got to hear all about Roman weddings, among other things, which was pretty weird and exciting, but that’s how we do.

Fr. Stephen: Words you never thought you’d hear on Ancient Faith Radio Live.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, but we did give a parental advisory at the beginning, so…

Fr. Stephen: We warned you.

Fr. Andrew: We did, yep.

Fr. Stephen: You knew the job was dangerous when you took it. [Laughter] So you mentioned the mystery of matrimony, and so here in the third half we’re talking about the mystery. When we’re talking about the mystery, this sort of does two things. On one hand, this is the spiritual reality that undergirds everything we’ve talked about tonight; on the other hand, this also represents the fulfillment of everything that begins with the creation of Adam and Eve and is tied to what we mentioned back at the very beginning, of the special relationship that marriage has with the original purpose for which humanity was created.

It uses the word “mystery,” but a sort of key verse from St. Paul, when he’s talking about marriage in Ephesians 5, he kind of says this very plainly. He says in Ephesians 5:32, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.” This is the part where he does just kind of smacks you in the head with it. [Laughter] “Here’s what I’m getting at!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is part of the passages that’s read—one of the passages that’s read—at the wedding service in the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Most people miss this part because before this you get the verse where he says that “wives should obey their husbands,” and then everyone shifts nervously in their seats—

Fr. Andrew: Right, and they don’t hear anything else after that.

Fr. Stephen: It gets really awkward, and then…

Fr. Andrew: And then it says, “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church.” I mean, this has always led me— I have this little fantasy about—it’s got to be the right couple—but going out to preach the wedding sermon and just making it a two-word wedding sermon. Just turn to the bride and say, “Submit!” And you turn to the groom and say, “Die!” Always wanted to do that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And you could probably get away with it just because nobody’s listening to what you say in the wedding sermon anyway. [Laughter] They’re all staring at the couple, you know what I mean? “Ohhh!” A little tears. “I remember when they were in diapers!”

Fr. Andrew: I should try it!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But, yeah, the irony there, of course, is that when St. Paul said it, the “wives obey your husbands” part was non-controversial and they didn’t have any choice. He was talking to them about how they should do it, not telling them to do it; they were forced to do it. He was just telling them how. Whereas the original hearers would have heard, “Love your wife so much you’re willing to die for her”—again, we talked about “love,” we talked about “the wife of your youth”—that would have been the crazy part.

Fr. Andrew: Crazy, radical, revolutionary… “Submit to each other? Wait a minute! What!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But what St. Paul is doing here when he talks about how marriage is the mystery of Christ and the Church is he’s drawing— He’s sort of tapping a vein. He’s drawing on a tradition that runs through the Old Testament and then into the gospels. Of course, the gospels were written after St. Paul wrote that, but, obviously, Christ said the things beforehand. So he’s drawing on this and kind of bringing it together, so we’re going to kind of… Most of the rest of this third half is going to be us walking through that.

There are— In the Old Testament, there are obvious examples of this. Probably the most well-known obvious one is actually the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon, which obviously is this fairly sensual and fairly graphic, depending on how bowdlerized your English version is, story about husband and wife. You get these debates, because you’ll read commentary that this is God and Israel, this is Christ and the Church, especially in more ancient commentaries. Then of course more modern commentaries are like: “No! This is about sex!” Because everything is, if you’re a modern person. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And politics.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The answer to that, though, is really “¿Por qué no los dos?”

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s about all those things.

Fr. Stephen: Because, as St. Paul says, marriage is the mystery of Christ and the Church. There’s some imagery like this even earlier on. The Lord your God—Yahweh your God is a jealous God, that you’re not going to have any other gods. That jealousy there, that’s husband imagery.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and here’s my chance to do another bit of lexicography. [Laughter] “Jealousy”—this is one of my little rants, actually. “Jealousy” is the feeling that you have when you think you’re going to lose something that belongs to you. It’s appropriate for husbands and wives to be jealous of one another in that sense. Obviously, if it becomes an obsession then you have a problem. Envy is what happens when you want something that is not yours. So that’s the difference between the two. I don’t know why, but for whatever [reason], “jealousy” has come to mean both things, here in late modern whatever English we’re speaking. So there you go, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: I wouldn’t say that jealousy is appropriate. It’s the appropriate word to use.

Fr. Andrew: Well, yes, right. It’s not appropriate in the sense that you should… Like when God says he’s a jealous God, it’s not saying that God is sitting there freaking out that he’s going to lose something that belongs to him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s a metaphor—to a jealous husband.

Fr. Andrew: That you belong to him. That’s really what’s being said about it. Not anybody else.

Fr. Stephen: I’m just saying. As Jacques Lacan pointed out—

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: Being jealous is pathological, even if your wife is actually cheating on you.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow. Is this where you’re saying something nice about Jacques Lacan? Man.

Fr. Stephen: Well, the reason that it’s pathological is that your jealousy is not based on the fact that she is cheating on you, because she might not be. It’s just somewhere inside yourself.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: That was your Lacanian moment for probably this decade, most of our listeners, so you don’t—

Fr. Andrew: Okay, thank God.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But so this imagery of the marriage between God and Israel becomes particularly pronounced, although not in a very positive way, in the prophets.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah. Right.

Fr. Stephen: And there are some really graphic passages in the prophets that use this imagery. I couldn’t talk Fr. Andrew into reading any of them.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Let’s just say that Ezekiel 16… [Laughter] …uses the word “whore” or “whoring” or “whorings” 17 times—seventeen times!—to refer to Israel’s behavior with regards to God.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And that’s the general cast of these, is that it’s Israel, the unfaithful spouse, and God is the faithful husband. And so you get, like in Jeremiah 2:2, Yahweh says, “I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness in a land not sown,” sort of like how things started, and then, chapter three, you get how things are going, and it’s not good. [Laughter] And Ezekiel 16, as Fr. Andrew mentioned, the whole book of Hosea—the Prophet Hosea is commanded to go and marry a prostitute, to sort of enact in front of the people this idea.

Fr. Andrew: You’ve got to feel for Hosea. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Why is this imagery particularly appropriate, of God as spouse to his people? It’s particularly appropriate because it’s an image of theosis. This is the most intimate human union, and in this human union the two become one flesh, the spirit makes that alive, enlivens and permeates that. It is not identical to theosis, but this is one of the best possible images of theosis.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think it’s worth pointing out— So when St. Paul says in Ephesians 5, “This is a great mystery, but I speak of Christ and the Church,” he’s not saying that Christ and the Church is like human marriage; he’s saying that human marriage is like Christ and the Church: it goes the other way, that Christ and the Church is the original.

Fr. Stephen: Theosis is the original. Because that’s what humanity was created for, was theosis. And so this shows us, then, that with marriage being this connection to that mystery, this is giving us human marriage as a means of theosis. But so, because of this overarching idea, very often—and sometimes I think we underestimate how often and how much—the work of Christ… Like there is no— Here’s what we need to do. This is how I will sell books at Lifeway!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh no!

Fr. Stephen: The marital theory of atonement.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, there you go.

Fr. Stephen: There’s gold in them thar hills! Anyway… Do it under a pen name… Anyway…

Fr. Andrew: We’ll know it’s you now! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But the work of Christ in salvation is described in terms of a wedding, in terms of a marriage—in terms of a courtship, in terms of a consummation, in terms of the feast. This is one of the fundamental ways in which it is described. There is a little bit of Second Temple Jewish literature related to this, which may kind of be in your Bible, depending on who you are, because it’s in 4 Ezra. 4 Ezra is in an appendix in the Slavonic Bible. We won’t go into it now, but, you know, I’ll say, “Well, it’s part of the Slavonic Old Testament canon,” and sometimes people will say, “Well, it’s in an appendix!” And then I’ll say, “What exactly does that mean?” And they don’t know. [Laughter] But it’s in there if you have the Slavonic Bible. St. Jerome did translate it into Latin as 2 Esdras. It’s not in the Roman Catholic canon, but it’s floating around there in the Vulgate, probably in an appendix…

But in it, Ezra has a series of prophetic visions, and one of these is the vision of the bridegroom. There is hymnography of Pascha in the Orthodox Church that is drawn directly from this, which is I’m pretty sure why it’s in an appendix in the Slavonic Bible, because of its connection to that hymnography. So in this vision of the bridegroom, the bridegroom comes to the threshold of the bridal chamber and then dies before he’s able to consummate the marriage. So then there’s this great mourning and wailing how horrible this is, but then the bridegroom is discovered alive, and the consummation happens and there’s all this rejoicing.

Now, there’s a lot of debate about when 4 Ezra was written exactly. Most folks would peg it as a Jewish—a non-Christian Jewish text from the late first century AD, and so, because of that, you have critical scholars who don’t want to see… who either aren’t treating it as Scripture, because it’s not in their Old Testament canon or because they’re ruling out any kind of Christian-seeming interpretation, will argue that this is about the Temple, that the bridegroom dying on the threshold is the Temple being destroyed in Jerusalem and that the sort of resurrection of the bridegroom is expressing some confidence that in the future the Temple will be rebuilt, and they’ll argue that Ezra is sort of comparing that to, in Ezra’s own day—Ezra is one of the returning Judahites from exile, rebuilding, well, building the second Temple, rebuilding the Temple after it was destroyed by the Babylonians.

But we don’t have to say they’re wrong to take a kind of obvious Christian interpretation of this, because, of course, Christ said, about himself—St. John emphasizes about himself—“Destroy this temple, and I will rebuild it in three days.” So, again, if the question is: Is this about the death and resurrection of Christ, or is this about the destruction and rebuilding of the Temple?—

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: —you could say, “¿Por qué no los dos?”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Just some places then where this bridegroom imagery shows up— I mean, there’s bunches of it, but just some significant ones. In Christ’s statement that’s recorded in Matthew 9:15, Mark 2:19-20, and Luke 5:34-35, he talks about how the friends of the bridegroom do not fast while the bridegroom is present, but then when the bridegroom is gone, then they fast. Matthew 25:1-10 has the parable of the ten virgins, who are waiting for the bridegroom.

Fr. Andrew: Also prominent in Holy Week.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. John 3:29 refers to St. John—in talking about St. John the Forerunner, Christ calls him the friend of the bridegroom, who rejoices at the bridegroom’s voice. So we have all of that through Christ’s ministry, this presentation of Christ as the bridegroom preparing for the wedding.

Then, very significantly, and I know I’ve commented on this before on the show and even recently, when you get into the story of Christ’s death, his crucifixion, in St. John’s gospel in particular, he starts pulling in all of this vocabulary and imagery from Genesis.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is the Adam and his not-rib. [Laughter] Adam’s side thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, in John 19:31-37, this is where… This is Great and Holy Friday, Christ has been crucified. The next day is the sabbath. That sabbath is a high day. It’s the Passover, and so they can’t leave him hanging on the cross overnight. And so, as they’re getting close to sunset, the call goes: Hey, go and break their legs so they die, and once they’re dead we can take them down before sunset. They come to Christ, and he is already dead. So the soldier pierces his side with a spear, and blood and water flow from it. When it says his side is pierced, his side is open, the Greek word there for “side” is plevron, which is the same word used for Adam’s side in the Septuagint. Remember, we’re told that Adam goes into a death-like sleep; Christ has died, his side is opened. Out of his side comes blood and water, which—pick your Church Father: any Church Father will point out to you that water is related to baptism and blood is related to the Eucharist, which constitute the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the Church then is likened to Woman, to Eve, coming from Adam’s side.

Fr. Stephen: His bride emerges from his side. And then when we get to the end of the New Testament and Revelation 19:6-9, we find that the consummation of all things is the great wedding-feast of the Lamb, the great wedding-feast of Christ. So this isn’t just an image that gets picked up a few times; this is—hey, far more than the Day of Atonement. I wrote my dissertation on the Day of Atonement, but this imagery is used more concerning Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and return in the New Testament than the Day of Atonement is. By a lot. Passover beats this, but this beats Day of Atonement by a lot.

So when we’re talking about this as a mystery, when we’re talking about mysteries in general, the idea of mystery is connected to the idea of participation. You don’t look at a mystery. I know we’re used to mystery—Glass Onion or something, like whodunnit, you’re trying to solve the puzzle and come to an answer, but that’s not the way mystery is used here; that’s not the way mystery was used religiously in the ancient world—where mystery is sort of like “oh, this is a weird, cryptic puzzle that I have to decode.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it’s an initiation; it’s a participation in something. It’s touching divinity.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is yet another reason— We gave you the prooftext in the second half, but this is the core reason why—and this really starts in Genesis and ends in Revelation— The core reason why marriage is a sacrament is that marriage is a participation in this larger reality of Christ’s marriage with the Church, this cosmic reality of Christ’s work, and therefore is a means and a path of theosis, of becoming like God.

Fr. Andrew: So, to wrap up, I kind of joked a little bit earlier that this is not a marital counseling session, and it’s not, but, you know, naturally one might say: Then what’s the point of any of this? What’s the application? I think that… I mean, I’ve been married myself now for almost 20 years; a little bit later this year it’ll be 20 years for me and my wife. And I think she would definitely tell you that I’m not an expert at marriage, so I’m not going to say that I am. And I’m also not a trained marriage counselor or anything like that, but I have talked to a lot of people about marriage, certainly in my work as a priest, and I’ve thought about marriage, and I’ve been married for a while.

And one of the things that I’ve noticed is that it’s really easy to get kind of lost in the weeds, to get lost in whatever the particular problem of the moment is, and often to make that problem grow so big in our regard that it can destroy the marriage or damage it. So the question is, at least partly, is: How do you prevent that, or how do you get out of that? I think that the things that we’ve talked about are one of the ways of dealing with that. What do I mean by that? Well, if we have a vision for where we’re going and what the whole purpose of all of it is, then you gain perspective. You gain perspective that whatever it is that you’re fighting about is less important than the marriage, and that the marriage is not an end to itself. This is a really important point.

This is where we’ve kind of arrived at, at the end of this episode, but I just want to emphasize: Marriage is not an end to itself. The marriage is a means for salvation, a means of theosis, a means of becoming one with God. And we’ve talked about what theosis entails, many times, but just to reiterate: The way that you participate in God, the way that you enter into the mysteries of the Church, is by doing the works of God. You do the things that he does, and so you’re participating in his life and you become more and more like him. Well, marriage is the place that most of us do that—not all of us, but the vast majority of us are called to do it in that way. It doesn’t mean that those who aren’t called, it’s some kind of lesser call or broken if you’re not—if this is not your call. No, but we’re talking about marriage in this particular case, so this is what we’re talking about.

We are given our spouses so that we may serve them as Christ served the Church, so that we can love them as Christ loved the Church. And in doing that, then, we are participating in the life of God. That’s what it is, and you can do that no matter how you feel. Having been married for almost 20 years, I can tell you that not every single day do I wake up and feel head over heels about my wife, and I’m sure she does not about me. But we can still do the things for each other that are serving each other and sacrificing for one another.

I was really struck, as I said, by that verse from Malachi 2—I think it’s verse 15, yeah, Malachi 2:15—about a portion of the Spirit coming into the union of the husband and the wife. I alluded earlier to our episode on spirits. If you didn’t listen to that one, very briefly: What is a spirit? A spirit is a sort of ordering force. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but an influencing, sort of pulling of the reins, as it were, an actual being that’s doing that, and so affecting… A spirit can affect… We each have our own spirits that control our bodies, that live within our bodies and move them, and there’s an animating spirit of groups of people. And so what’s being said here in Malachi 2:15 is that the animating spirit of a wedding, of a marriage that is done by God, is the Holy Spirit himself. And so that’s one of the reasons why we point to this being truly a sacrament, because that’s one of the things that sacraments are. It’s just the Holy Spirit animating people for a particular purpose, for a particular vocation.

Part of the cure, or I should say the cure—there’s a lot of different ways that we get there, but the cure for a diseased marriage and the nourishment for a marriage that is just beginning and for a marriage that is continuing is to seek out the Holy Spirit, to earnestly be faithful in the Christian life. So if spouses are doing that, then the Holy Spirit is animating their marriage. That’s what’s going on. And that’s a powerful thing that I think takes some of the… It sort of deflates whatever it is that’s darkening our marriages, when we’re animated by demonic forces. If we realize that and reorient ourselves and recommit ourselves to living the life of faithfulness in Christ, then we become animated in our marriages by the Holy Spirit.

And knowing that that’s what makes the marriage what it is takes some of the pressure off of “I have to make this perfect” or off of the idea “we have this fatal flaw; we’re just not meant for each other” or whatever it might be. If both people are seeking to be faithful to the leading of the Holy Spirit by doing the things that we know we’re supposed to be doing as Christians, following the commandments, then the Holy Spirit is animating our marriages—even if only one person is doing that. We know from what Scripture says that that actually sanctifies the other person, that there is an effect on them as well, that one person in a marriage who lives a godly life is affecting the marriage, because that’s how it works.

And so, with this very full vision of what marriage is and what it’s for and how God brings it into being and maintains it and deepens it and so forth, I hope that we can be inspired in our own marriages, or inspired towards marriage if we’re not yet married, or at least inspired to pray for those who are married, whether we are married or not, or whether we’re called to be married or not, so that we can become this image of Christ and his Church, as St. Paul says in Ephesians 5, so that our marriages become evangelistic, so that our marriages become salvific, not just for the two people in it and not just for their children, although certainly for all of them, but for all those who connect to them.

One of the things that’s prayed in the marriage service in the Orthodox Church is that the couple would shine like stars. If you’ve listened to this podcast, you know exactly what that means. If you haven’t listened to any of our episodes where we’ve talked about that, that means that they shine with an angelic light, that they are shining with the light of God that shines through them, to the whole world. To the whole world. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So, building off of what Fr. Andrew said about The Cure, Disintegration is the best album ever. [Laughter] Also, I’ve taken a pretty good shot at getting myself canceled a couple of times with this; maybe third time’ll be the charm. Here I go criticizing the nuclear family again.

When, in doing this episode about the sacrament of marriage—and I didn’t bring this up during the episode, because, of course, we’re talking about what we’re talking about—but when I did this episode, I was thinking a lot about all of the people who would listen to it who might hear it differently than we wanted. What do I mean by that? There’s a lot of people out there, and we’ve got a lot of listeners, who aren’t married, and that’s not necessarily by direct choice—people who want to be married but haven’t found someone where it works out; people who’ve been widowed who experienced being one flesh with someone and now feel torn apart, having lost that person; any number of other people who’ve been through divorces; people who’ve been through other situations.

And they often can be— in Orthodox discussions of marriage get kind of left in this liminal space between marriage and monasticism, because, you know, they’re not at the moment in a marriage, but neither are they monastics, and not only them but couples who haven’t been able to have children can feel marginalized in Orthodox Christian communities because sometimes assumptions are made about them. And in all of these things, we’ve lost sight of what family really is and the relationship between marriage and family, because what we’ve had sold to us as a family and marriage is the nuclear family: husband, wife, kids. This, we’re told, is the building block of all society, so if you don’t fit into that, you’re destroying society somehow, or you’re a problem for society.

The problem, as I’ve said before on the show, is that that idea of a family is just too small. One of the major tensions on marriages in this country now is the fact that people have been told that this one other human is supposed to fulfill all of their needs. This one other person is supposed to be able to satisfy them in all ways. And guess what? There is no human who can do that for any other human. It’s never happened. And if that’s what you’re looking for in marriage, your marriage is going to fall apart and your life is going to fall apart.

Not only that, but then you get on one side, as I mentioned, anybody who isn’t able to fit into that mold, not by choice, is sort of left feeling like: “Well, I don’t have that one other person, so now I will always be alone and isolated and empty.” So it’s a destructive pattern to even have in our minds.

The reality is that family is really structured around the idea—or it was in the ancient world and for most of human history, and still in a lot of places today—around a big extended family, a big household. A household. And in that household, there were any number of people. They’re all related to each other. They’re all family, but they all have different roles, and they all have things that they’re doing as part of that household, that make that household run and make that family work, and help fulfill each other’s needs and support each other, protect each other, defend each other.

What marriage was was a person being brought into a household, a person coming into a household, being made part of a family. This is something going back to Joseph and Aseneth. This is something that has happened to everyone who becomes a Christian, everyone who comes into the Church, is in a sense having a wedding with Christ. They are being brought into the Church. As St. Paul says over and over again, we are brought into the household of God. We use the term “brothers and sisters” very loosely, but it was meant very seriously by the first Christians. When you read the book of Acts, when it refers to Christians and the Christian community, they’re just called the brethren, the siblings, the brothers and sisters in this place, the family in this place.

And that was extreme in the Roman world, because in the Roman world you had deep obligations, duties, responsibilities to your family members based on your role in the family. And they understood that Christians, when they called someone “brother,” when they called someone “sister,” when they said they were family, that they were extending those obligations to all of these people, accepting these obligations on themselves for all of these people who were not related to them. For all of these people from all over, with all different personalities, all different interests: they were now calling them family. That meant they’d be willing to fight to protect them. It meant they were going to meet their needs. They were going to care for them. They were going to support them.

And so I made a reference to this, at least obliquely, earlier in the episode, but what we’re talking about when we talk about the world of the Church in terms of parishes— Monasteries are a different thing; we’ll do an episode soon. You guys may think, “Hey, we’re six episodes into this sacraments series. They’re almost done”—we’re not almost done. [Laughter] We’re going to keep going for a while. We’re going to talk about monasticism, and that’s a different thing, but when we talk about the world of your parish churches, we’re talking about the world of marriage, because we’re talking about the household of God that is in the world.

So even if you’re not a married person, you’re still part of this household. The children of the church may not be your biological children, but you’re their aunts and uncles. You’re the grandparents. And it’s only when we really realize what it means that we’ve all been brought into the household of God and that each of our parishes is a family that we’ll really understand what the Church as a community is supposed to be. That includes the fact that every family has the crazy cousins, has the uncle with weird boomer political opinions that he won’t shut up about, has the rebellious teenagers. Our church community will, too. But in a family, we still love those people. We may laugh a little at some of their quirks, but we love each other.

And so there’s a way of understanding marriage and the world of marriage and the world of family and the household of God that doesn’t exclude anyone; it’s the exact opposite. It includes them. It gives people who don’t have a family, a family; people who don’t have friends, friends; people who are alienated from society, a society to be a part of. And with that comes roles and responsibilities to which they’re called to be faithful. And in being faithful to them, that’s how we all work out our salvation together. So those are my thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t give us a call live, we’d still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; send Fr. Stephen that rabbinic commentary on the Quran; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you, good night, and God bless you all.