Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
TREASURES FROM OUR TRADITION
	Sometimes human relationships go awry, but Christ’s choice for us is irrevocable. In marriage celebrations, the Church always recalls God’s faithfulness to help prepare married couples for enduring the inevitable rough spots. The Byzantine liturgy does this by adorning the couple with crowns that remind them of the martyr’s crown. The couple therefore takes on a vocation of witnessing to the sacredness of life in all of its suffering and joy, and of keeping their eyes fixed on the banquet of heaven.
	In Eastern theology, people have a liturgical vocation to give God praise, and marriage fits within that plan. It is not so much saying prayers that counts, but becoming prayer. Interestingly, in this liturgy the couple never utters a word other than joining in the community’s chants; there are no marriage vows as such. There is therefore not a hint of our Western Christian sense that marriage is a legal contract. Rather, it is all about living out one’s baptismal vocation, embracing the cross, pouring oneself out in love, and opening to the grace of the Holy Spirit.
—James Field