Ephesians 5:32

This is a great mystery. — Rather, This mystery is a great one. The words apply to the type, as well as to the Antitype. (1) The indissoluble and paramount sacredness of marriage, as all history shows, is “a mystery” — that is (see Ephesians 1:9), a secret of God’s law, fully revealed in Christ alone. For in heathen, and, to some extent, even in Jewish thought, marriage was a contract far less sacred than the indissoluble tie of blood; and wherever Christian principle is renounced or obscured, that ancient idea recurs in modern times. It may be noted that from the translation here of the word “mystery,” by sacramentum in the Latin versions, the application of the word “sacrament” to marriage arose. (2) But the following words, “But I” (the word “I” being emphatic) “speak concerning Christ and the Church,” show — what indeed the whole passage has already shown — that St. Paul’s chief thought has passed from the type to the Antitype. He has constantly dwelt on points which suit only Christ’s relation to the Church, and to that relation he has, by an irresistible gravitation of thought, been brought back again and again. (3) Yet the two cannot be separate. The type brings out some features of the Antitype which no other comparison makes clear; and history shows that the sacredness of the type in the Church has depended on this great passage — bearing, as it does, emphatic witness against the ascetic tendency to look on marriage as simply a concession to weakness, and as leading to a life necessarily lower than the celibate life.