Behold The Bridegroom...

I had a small thought about Holy Week that I could not resist sharing. By some blessed coincidence, I have been thinking a lot about marriage at the same time as I have been thinking about Holy Week, this year.  A number of things - like doing premarital counselling with a couple, etc., - have happened to come up around the same time that I have had to write a Good Friday sermon and been praying through the events of this week.  The Cathedral provides a quasi monastic setting at this time of year, with daily morning and evening prayer and daily Eucharist, so it is easy to enter into the flow of holy week very deeply.  

There is not any obvious external connection (to me) between the horrors of Gethsemane and Golgotha and the joyful celebration of marriage.  Still, because both were on my mind I realized, perhaps for the first time, something I am sure is obvious to many people. Christ so often speaks of himself as the bridegroom, and we his people, are the bride.  Revelation of course, strikingly and beautifully describes the return of Christ as a wedding feast  "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (Rev 21:1-2 ESV)

It occurred to me that as Christ walks the way of the cross he is going to meet his bride, and the way of the cross is also a wedding procession.  Just as God's glory appears in the shame of cross, the joy of the wedding feast of the Lamb appears in the sorrow of Good Friday.  As Our Lady stands at the foot of the cross with St. John the Beloved disciple, Jesus brings them together as mother and son, establishing the new family of God through the cross.  

To my pleasant surprise, it turns out I am not the only one to think about this connection.  It is the primary theme of the Holy Week hymns in the Eastern Church.  

Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching; and again, unworthy is the servant whom He shall find heedless.  Beware, therefore, O my soul, do not be weighed down with sleep, lest you be given up to death and lest you be shut out of the Kingdom.  But rouse yourself crying: Holy, holy, holy, art Thou, O our God.  Through the Theotokos, have mercy on us.

The Cross is what Love looks like, and it is in the cross, the new covenant in Christ's blood, that God fulfills his promise to Israel "I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy" (Hos 2:19) This is the hidden joy of holy week, the joy that constantly underlies all the sorrow and horror.  It is the time for the Church, for us, to make ourselves ready for Jesus Christ, who comes as the bridegroom.   

The Icon of Christ "The Bridegroom"