What is the role of Christ and the Church in the Christian family?

A couple can experience Christ’s love, their Bridegroom, through the husband’s love for his wife; and the Church’s obedience to Christ through the wife’s obedience to her husband. Their children, then, experience God’s fatherhood and the Church’s motherhood through the fatherhood of their father and the motherhood of their mother. In a true Christian family, all members taste the fellowship of the saints together in Christ. In other words, a holy marital

1752 St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons 209.3 For the Lenten Season (FOTC 38:97).

1753 Origen, “On Prayer” in Origen: etc ., trans., Rowan A. Greer (NY: Paulist Press, 1979) 2.2: p. 83.

1754 Origen, Homilies on Genesis 3.6, 5.4.

1755 Origen, Commentary on 1 Corinthians 3.33.23–25.

1756 St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Thessalonians 5 (NPNF I/13:346).

1757 St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the First Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians 19.3 (NPNF I/12:106).

life offers all its members as well as others (outside of the family) an image of how the eternal relationships in heaven will be.

St. Augustine says, “His fundamental duty is to look out for his own home, for both by natural and human law he has easier and readier access to their requirements. St. Paul says: ‘But if any does not take care of his own, and especially of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever’ (1 Tim. 5:8). From this care arises that peace of the home …”¹⁷⁵⁸