Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

So the talk is this illustrious title, The Cross is a Marriage Feast,

a nuptial reading of the pascal mystery.

I thought it was very apt you asked for this talk because we are in the second week of Lent

and not even four weeks from now we're going to enter into Holy Week, which is that week

in which we celebrate this messianic wedding which Christ came to celebrate with us on the cross.

Most people do not associate the cross with a

marriage and yet this is exactly what it is. It's on the cross that the divine

human marriage that all of humanity has been dreaming of as long as we know history

comes to consummation, anticipating that final marriage for which we're

all predestined. Why am I saying that all humanity has been anticipating this for millennia?

If you go back and study the cultures of the ancient near East, Mesopotamia, Sumer, Egypt,

all of these ancient cultures had this dream that the gods would get married to human beings,

that there would be a divine human marriage between heaven and earth.

And this is beautiful because it shows that even though original sin has marred our understanding of God

and most cultures before revelation reaches them have a distorted

image of God. There are these seeds of truth and one of the greatest and important seeds

of truth is this desire, this knowledge in the heart of man that life can really only come

to its fullness when heaven and earth marry,

...