Ephesians 5:32

This is, &c. More precisely, This mystery is great. For the word "mystery" see above, Ephesians 1:9; Ephesians 3:3-4; Ephesians 3:9; and below Ephesians 6:19. The word tends to mean something of the sphere of spiritual truth not discoverable by observation or inference, but revealed. The thing answering to such a description in this context is, surely, "the mystical union and fellowship betwixt Christ and His Church." It can scarcely be the marriage union of mortal man and wife. That, as this whole passage bears witness, is a thing most sacred, Divine in institution, and, in the popularsense of the word, "mysterious." But it scarcely answers the idea of a revealed spiritualtruth.

We paraphrase the verse, then; "This revealed mystery, the Union of Bridegroom and Bride, is great; but I say so in reference to the Bridal of Redemption, to which our thought has been drawn."

The Vulgate Latin, which forms in its present shape the authoritative Romanist version, translates here, "sacramentumhoc magnum est, ego autem dico in Christo et in ecclesiâ"; from which the Roman theology deduces that "marriage is a great sacramentin Christ and in His Church" (see Alford here, and the Catechism of the Council of Trent, parsii. qu.xv. xvii). The "Old Latin" read "in ecclesiam," "with reference to the Church."

but I The pronoun is emphatic, possibly as if to say, "I, as distinguished from the narrator of the marriage in Eden."

On this whole passage Monod's remarks are noteworthy. He declines to see, with Harless, a mere accommodation of the words of Genesis. For him, those words, narrating true facts, are also a Divinely planned type. "When St Paul quotes, by the Holy Spirit, a declaration of the Holy Spirit, it is the Holy Spirit's thought and not his own that he gives us … The relation which he indicates between the two unions … is based in the depths of the Divine thought, and on the harmony established between things visible and invisible … The marriage instituted in Eden was really, in the plan of God, a type of the union of Christ with His Church."

For a reference by the Lord Himself to the passage in Genesis, though with another purpose, see Matthew 19:4-5; Mark 10:6-9. For Him, as for His Apostle, the passage was not a legend but an oracle.