We continue with the second Luminous Mystery of the Rosary.
The ancient Egyptians were on to something: They longed for eternal life. Not a bad thing to long for. But they longed for it in the wrong way. Instead of realizing eternal life could only come to us from the Eternal One, they conceived of it as being more or less a permanent continuation of earthly existence. Instead of resurrection, they settled on mummification and the creation of an entire society whose greatest creative energies were devoted to the production of grave goods. It’s a strange fact that the great Egyptian art we are familiar with was painted for no one to see, because it was painted or chiseled on tomb walls.
In its own way, our culture makes similar mistakes. We want eternal life, too—so we get Botox injections. We want eternal love, so we obsess over sex and try to pretend it’s the same thing as love. But impersonal sex resembles eternal love about as much as a mummified corpse resembles the Risen and Glorified Christ. Indeed, even marriage—though great, good, and holy—is not the goal. It’s the sign pointing to the goal. For all our earthly experience of marriage, like all of Egypt’s earthly experience of goodness, is not an end in itself, but a sign pointing us to the real goodness of God. The true bridegroom at the wedding at Cana was not the guy getting married. It was Jesus, the bridegroom whose cosmic marriage to the Church is the pattern for all marriage.
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