The answer
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 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
Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty
Notes
1758 St. Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Books XVII–XXII 19.14 (FOTC 24:222).