Our People

Homily for the Nuptial Mass of Benjamin Lucas and Joanne Zwaans

St Benedict’s Church Broadway
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
8/12/2007

I recently asked my Private Secretary if he had drafted the homily for today’s wedding. He told me he had, and it began by telling the bride how lucky she was to have found a spouse who was so handsome, intelligent, holy and, of course, humble. I explained to Ben that he had clearly mixed up the weddings!

So much for Ben’s character reference – what about Jo? A friend of mine, after discovering the budding romance between these two, asked Ben early on about Jo. Ben replied that she was so intelligent and well-educated that she was expanding his mind and his knowledge of the faith; and that she was so holy and prayerful that she was helping him to develop his spiritual life too. My friend – who will remain nameless – said, “She’s very pretty, too, isn’t she?” Ben blushed the colour of Jo’s hair, and so we have her character reference as well as his.

Joanne and Benjamin are made for each other, not only because they are humanly so alike and yet different in complimentary ways, but because they are convinced that it is through and with each other that they will find happiness and holiness. Their God-given vocation is to be each other’s spouses for the rest of their lives. That will, I trust, be a source of great joy for them – if occasionally also of some aggravation, since in every vocation Christ offers us a cross to join him on his way to our redemption. Just who, for instance, will now have the task of keeping Ben’s business shirts immaculately ironed is yet to be resolved.

Yet this marriage is not only for Ben and Jo and their salvation. It is also for us, and not just for us present who love them dearly, but for our whole Church, our whole community, our whole human race. What is it that the world most needs right now? In 1965 the answer was offered in song by Hal David and Burt Bacharach: What the World Needs Now is Love and perhaps that is the perennial answer, or a version of the real answer, which is God, for Deus caritas est. Sadly, by 1965 people were already losing track of what love means and forty years later it has suffered such devaluation as to be a very soft currency indeed. When many people hear the word love today they think of desire or sex or schmaltz. I suspect that the last thing that would come to their minds would be Paul’s great insights in our Second Reading (Rom 2: 1-11) about offering your bodies to God as a living sacrifice, about modeling yourself on Christ rather than the world, about expecting trials and persecutions along the way, about facing up to evil within and around you... So what the world needs now, I would suggest, is ostensive definitions of love. People need a place, a person, in this case two persons, whose lives tell not just a love-story but a Gospel of Love. And the reason is simple: our world has forgotten what real marriage is, and that means it has really forgotten how to love.

Some years ago I taught a course on “Marriage and the Family in the Christian Tradition” for social work students in the Australian Catholic University. I began the course by asking the students to define marriage. Marriage is, of course, the life-long union of a man and woman as husband and wife, to the exclusion of all others, with a view to building a family and, for believers, to building up God’s family. I did not expect to get quite those words immediately, first time around. Yet I was shocked by just how clueless these good-willed, bright young students were as to where to begin…

Victims of what Pope Benedict has called ‘the tyranny of relativism’, they were reluctant not just about indissolubility but even about reserving marriage to a man and a woman. Some thought two living adults of any sex or sexuality who loved each other, or at least said they did, would be enough. Some were reluctant to restrict it to two people; others were not so sure both partners had to be people or adults or even alive. When I asked whether one could marry one’s pet gold fish or an imaginary friend, I discovered that reductio ad absurdam, at least amongst this generation, at least when it comes to love, no longer works: there is almost no version of marriage and family so silly that pop culture and politics will not embrace it or at least allow it. And there is an even deeper problem: the very terms of the definition of marriage are no longer common ground. What do we mean by man, woman and child, husband, wife and family, permanent, love, honour and obey, God, vocation and salvation? None of these words has a single common meaning any more. Had I simply presented my definition of marriage to my young students, it might well have mystified them.

So what the world needs now is love, is people who can show us how to love – what I poshly called ostensive definitions of marriage and family. We need to be able to point to marriages, real marriages, good marriages, marriages between real men and women, who are really trying to live as husband, wife, mother and father, for life, for each other, for humanity, for God. We need to see them in action, to experience them, to be encouraged by the sight of them to realize not just what a marriage is in theory, but that it is possible and worth trying. We need to be inspired by marriage once again.

We need you, Ben and Jo, to teach us again what marriage and family means, what love means. Fortunately, unlike the victims of post-modern society, you don’t have to invent these institutions for yourselves. You have been blessed, in your own parents’ marriages and your own families, with excellent examples of spouses and parents, children and siblings. If you pray on your wedding night, as Tobias and Sarah did on theirs, to “the God of our fathers” it will be because your parents and ancestors have taught you about God and about marriage. If on your wedding night, like Tobias and Sarah, you reflect that God created man and woman especially for such nights, it is because your blood family and your family of faith, the Church, have revealed to you the nuptial meaning of your bodies, your very natures. And if in this Nuptial Mass you are willing to show us what the world needs now, it will be that Christic love told in our Gospel: the love that loves to the end, that no-greater-love that is the total gift of the self to the other, for the other, even unto death.

You make this gift to each other on a feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as was the day of your engagement. This week in his General Audience Pope Benedict XVI greeted newlyweds and drew their attention to today’s Feast of the Immaculate Conception, inviting the newly married to “look to Mary to help them discover more and more the love of Christ.” I know you both have a great devotion to our blessed Mother and have sought her intercession and assistance as you have discerned your vocation. Today you ask her continued assistance and will consecrate your commitment to her maternal protection. To some it might seem a quirky Catholic thing, to celebrate the conception of a girl about 15 or 20 years before Christ. Yet in doing so we celebrate the prelude to the Incarnation. It is the liturgical entre to the main course which is Christmas dinner. Today flesh is prepared from which God will, in due course, Himself take flesh.

Mary’s parents, Anna and Joachim, had no inkling of what a momentous thing their marriage was, and what a universe-changing thing their little Mary would be. Yet if the Word was to take flesh, if the Son of God was also to be Son of Man or, more precisely, of woman, then he must have a mother and so today we celebrate his mother’s beginnings in the marriage and love-making of his grandparents. Now Jo and Ben in turn are to build up the family of God, that great genealogy that stretches back to Adam and Eve, through Mary and her parents to Christ, and through Him and His bride, the Church, down the ages to this day, in the communion of saints. Now through the Sacrament of Matrimony Jo and Ben are recalled to that communion of saints to which they were first called at the moment of their own conception and in their Baptism.

To be saints is no easy thing, even for the best of people, from the best of families. I have known Joanne for some years and often heard her despairing of ever finding the man of her dreams. Her friends counselled her to lower the bar to a more realistic level. Where, they asked, was she ever going to find a Prince Charming with the mind and virtue of Karol Wojty³a and the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger? While she might have compromised a bit on the latter requirement, going for quality over quantity, Jo was stubbornly determined to hold out for the kindness, wisdom and holiness, and she demanded as much not just from mankind but from God. She now thinks it was worth the wait! Not that her first impression of Ben was of the man of her dreams. She took some wooing. But knowing these two as I do, I can say with great confidence that you have both struck gold: both have found a spouse of faith and virtue, of large heart and excellent soul. But since people do not come with labelling that reveals all their ingredients, let alone with health advisories to tell us whether they will be good for us, you were both to give prayer and discernment as long as necessary in order to get this right. That they asked us to join them in that prayer was very beautiful. And I know that they will keep praying that what begins this day will come to its completion in the wedding feast of heaven.

Joanne and Benjamin, this morning you say to all of us here, and to all our world, something very important, something our world desperately needs to hear: that unconditional, faithful life commitments are possible; that with faith and hope and love, there is a future worth building our lives together for; that marriage and family are amongst the first and best and most enduring gifts of God to humanity; and that by the grace of that same God of your fathers, you can love all the way to the grave and beyond!

So here we are, your family, friends and God, hanging on your words. We stand around you praying for you and promising our support for you on the road ahead. We pray that whatever comes, there will re-echo in your hearts Christ’s words to you in our Gospel: “You did not choose me” – or each other – “no, I chose you; and I commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last; and then the Father will give you anything you ask him in my name.” I invite you now to come forward to make your vows before that Father and this assembly...