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Consecration - Pascha Cycle - Marriage

Please make sure that you have read the main Consecration page first.

Setting the Scene

Each consecrated life path approved by God for an Orthodox Christian becomes a means of salvation.  Marriage equally with monasticism is a sacrificial life for someone other than oneself.  Hymns used in the Orthodox Marriage service celebrate the martyrs, which might seem a little strange until one considers the characteristics of courageous sacrificial love.  This is clearly what St. Paul means when he refers to marriage in his letter to the Ephesians:-

"Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.  For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Saviour of the body.  Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.  Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.  So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself.  For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church.  For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.  “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”  This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.  Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband."

Ephesians 5:22-33

Now this text is an affront to contemporary relationship understandings in the west for the following reasons:-

1. It teaches the headship of the husband in marriage and construes this in terms of Christ's headship in the Church.  Nothing could be calculated to enrage a feminist more than this sacralisation of male and female roles but is an Orthodox Christian understanding of the dynamic of marital relations.  However, the text then proceeds to speak of the husband sacrificing himself in love for his wife as Christ sacrificed himself for the Church.  This is the martyrdom of love celebrated in the Orthodox marriage service.

2. St. Paul characterises Christian married love as regarding the other as one would cherish and regard oneself.  This seems uncontroversial yet we should remember that a non-Christian understanding of marriage frequently supposes that marriage is merely a contractual arrangement for the fulfilment of mutual needs.  Feed the historic gender wars into this equation and you have a disastrous selfish conception of marriage that is highly destructive of any relationship.  In Orthodox Christianity my fulfilment IS the fulfilment of my spouse.  It is kenosis, a self emptying ascesis, a relational martyrdom, entirely devoid of self concern.

3. Finally, St. Paul, by linking marriage with the relationship between Christ and his Church, teaches a sacramental and not a contractual understanding of married love.  In the same way that Christ and the Church are under no legal constraint with regard to each other neither are husband and wife.  In the Orthodox Church this is reflected in the fact that there are no legal formalities attached to the service itself; indeed there are no vows rather the wedding is a sacramental union of love celebrated by the Church.  This union even transcends death, not in the sense that the couple remain married in heaven but in the sense that nothing of the Kingdom on earth is lost to the Kingdom in heaven in its essential character, that is love between persons in God.

For further understanding of Orthodox Christian marriage, consult this article.

Practical

In the Orthodox wedding service the marriage itself is conferred by the exchange of crowns.  Explore the meaning of crowns in these scriptural texts:-

Psalm 21:1-7

Psalm 103[102 LXX] verses 1-5

Revelation 4:1-11

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