A three tier wedding cake is a rare sight these days. But I recall looking at a photo, a black and white photo, of my father and mother on their wedding day, cutting the wedding cake; and it was a white three tier wedding cake. Recently I asked my mother why three tier? She said that the bottom tier was for the guests attending on the wedding day; the second tier was for those who had sent wedding gifts; and the third tier was for baptism, the day of the baptism of their first child! Who knew!

There is of course the apocalyptic part of the Wedding ceremony! It is called the unveiling which is what the word ‘Apocalypse’ means. Indeed, the tradition of unveiling of the bride by the bridegroom is a tradition that is both Biblical and Mystical.

The unveiling points us to the Biblical truth that we find that the origins and truth of Matrimony is unveiled [revealed] at both the beginning of the Bible and at the end of the Bible - the Book of Genesis and the Book of Apocalypse. The unveiling points to the truth that from the beginning, in the Book of Genesis, Matrimony was both a Divine and a Natural institution that predates the Fall of Man. But after the Fall, Original Sin impacted on Matrimony such that it was affected by the post Fall state of the first Man and the first Woman, namely, being robbed of their graces and wounded in their nature. So much so that Matrimony has often been debased by polygamy, adultery, polyamourism and propertarianism such that it needed to be redeemed, repaired and given a new beginning, a new Genesis, which is what happened at the Wedding Feast of Cana!

At the wedding feast of Cana Our Lord Jesus Christ performed his first sign, his first miracle, of changing water into wine! He was unveiling to us that he was starting his Mission with redeeming, repairing and perfecting the wounded state of Matrimony. How? By turning and transforming a tradition of a Jewish wedding, namely, it was the Bridegroom who brought the wine for the wedding. So after the wedding feast of Cana had run out of wine Our Lady goes to her son, Jesus, with this problem and she tells the servants to do whatever her son tells them and Our Lord instructs them to fill the jars with water and bring them to the steward. When the steward tastes the wine he declares it better than the wine they had been consuming. The Steward goes to the bridegroom and scolds him for not observing the tradition that the Bridegroom brings the best wine he can find to the Wedding and serves the best wine first!

So Our Lord uses these two traditions of a Jewish wedding to show, by way of a miracle, that he is the true Bridgroom, the Bridegroom-Messiah of Israel for he is the one who puts new wine into the hearts of the wedding couple and all who come to him. It is the new wine of grace that transforms matrimony into a sacrament for the giving of grace!

Thus, as Our Lord could change water into wine so fallen broken matrimony is changed into a Sacrament. A Sacrament that would be a sign and an instrument of grace, beauty and perfection making couples ultimately fit for heaven in and through the nitty gritty struggles and trials of married life.

Thus, the tradition of the vow of marriage reveals this that both spouses have entered a covenant wherein promises are made to love each other for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health. So it is that a couple’s vows open the way for the Sacrament to transfigure them to be fit and real enough for the Kingdom of Heaven!

As a Sacrament, Holy Matrimony will now point to Christ as the Bridegroom who brings the new wine of grace and it also points to the Church as the Bride of Christ who opens herself to receive the new wine of grace which will thereby open the spouses and their children to the perfection of the Kingdom of Heaven, as we see from the Wedding Feast of Cana in the Gospel of John [2:1-12] and the Marriage supper of the Lamb to his Bride, the Church, in the Book of the Apocalypse [19:6-9].

Here, at the wedding feast at Cana, Our Lord points to how traditions are vital in communicating both the meaning and the grace of the Gospel that he brings. It is here that we see that Our Lord affirms tradition as a vehicle of both revelation and grace. The tradition of the Bridegroom serving the best wine first is used by Our Lord to reveal how he is the Bridegroom Messiah and how Holy Matrimony has been raised to the level of the sacrament. As a Sacrament, Holy Matrimony unites past, present and future: the past [Adam and Eve in Genesis 2:20-24], the present [Miracle at Wedding of Cana John 2:1-12] and the future of God and Man, of Christ and the Church, and the Church on earth with the Church in Heaven [Apoc 19:6-9].

Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church affirms that the deposit of Faith given by Our Lord to his Apostles and through them to the Church is manifested in not one way as with Protestantism with it’s ‘Scripture alone’ error but in two ways. These two ways are Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture - the Oral and the Written tradition of the Revelation of Our Lord Jesus Christ who bestows to his Apostles the Deposit of Faith. As stated clearly by the document on Revelation at the Second Vatican Council called Dei Verbum:

Hence there exists a close connection and communication between Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end. For Sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit, while Sacred Tradition takes the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, and hands it on to their successors in its full purity, so that led by the light of the Spirit of truth, they may in proclaiming it preserve this Word of God faithfully, explain it, and make it more widely known.

Consequently it is not from Sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed. Therefore both Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence.[n. 9]

Indeed, here is also a modern problem for Modern priests who were taught that Revelation is summed up in the triad Scripture, Tradition and Magisterium. It is not! It is to easy to Protestantize this triad to mean that Scripture is prior to Tradition such that if things in tradition ranging from lives of saints, to rites, liturgies, practices and devotions are not in scripture than despite it being in Tradition it is merely a legend and of no significance or value. However, the fact is that Sacred Tradition is both chronologically and logically prior to the written text of Sacred Scripture known as the Bible as it was only with Pope Damasus I in 382 AD at the Council of Rome that the writings in the Canon of the Old Testament and in the Canon of the New Testament were both affirmed and specified to its contents i.e. the books, Gospel accounts and letters. One of the criteria used to put a book or a letter or a Gospel account into the Canon was whether or not they were used in the Liturgy of the Apostolic sees.

So in stead of the triad Scripture, Tradition and Magisterium, Revelation is best summed up in a quartet, namely, Deposit of Faith, Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium. As the Lord bestowed to the Apostles his Word, the Deposit of Faith, which is manifested in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture which is confirmed, determined and protected by the Magisterium who received the Holy Spirit to proclaim the Gospel and to teach all the commands of Our Lord to the nations.

Hopefully, as we have discovered and unveiled the meaning of Scripture through a host of critical techniques to unpack the literal and well as the spiritual meaning of Sacred Scripture over these last 60 years, may we also begin to do the same kind of critical work on Sacred Tradition and discover again its fundamental principles whose loss has so blighted our sense of history, our reverance in the liturgy and our celebrations of the rites, devotions and sacred practices in these last few decades. We stand today at a crossroads, where we to choose either to be a Modernist Catholic or a Traditional Catholic. Fundamentally, we have the choice of two roads:

• the road where we surrender the patrimony of the past to live for the present zeitgeit that rules the contemporaneous world;

• or the road where we hold to the patrimony of the past so as to engage and critique the present which then gives us that direction to the future that is always faithful to Christ, the Apostles and the legacy of the Doctors and Saints of the Church.

Just as it was in the time of Moses and in the time of the First Century in the Didache, so it is today that we face the choice of the road to death or the road to life:

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live [Deut 30:19];

There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two ways [Didache ch 1]