Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

From the beginning of time, a wedding was held to celebrate life and happiness. After creating the world and everything in it, God conducted the first marriage uniting the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden. Several centuries later, when Jesus Christ came to earth, He once again honored the importance of marriage when He performed His first miracle during a wedding feast at Cana. And the last chapter in the Bible records that eternity in the Kingdom of God will begin with yet another wedding, called the Wedding Supper of the Lamb.

Yes, throughout history, love - and weddings - has made the world go around! But the wedding ceremony as it has evolved through the centuries has become so much more intricate than the simple affair that it was in the olden times.

In Jewish communities during Bible times until the time of the Roman Empire, weddings were generally simple affairs. For lower income families, the bride’s father would simply deliver her to the groom, and the two agreed that they were wed, and would keep the vow of marriage by mutual consent. Wedding celebrations of well-to-do families consisted of a procession from the house of the bride to the bridegroom’s home. Both parties were beautifully dressed and ornamented; with the bride wearing a long veil which she took off only in the nuptial chamber. After the procession, the marriage contract was read at the home of the groom, and blessings were pronounced by parents and friends. Then the marriage couple went to their private room, offered prayers, and sexually consummated their relationship. A week-long feast follows at the bridegroom’s house. So joyous for the entire community was a wedding and the inauguration of a new family that a newly married groom was free from conscription into the army for one year, ‘to be happy with his wife whom he has taken’ (Deut. 24:5).

Prior to the time of Constantine around 4th century AD, wedding ceremonies were performed in the homes. Those homes sometimes may have been the same homes in which the Christians of that city or town gathered for worship, since all "churches" during the first three centuries of Christianity were house churches. It wasn’t until later centuries when church edifices were built. Also, it was not required for religious leaders to give validity to marriages until 1545 when the Council of Trent recognized matrimony as one of the seven sacraments with a decree that a Roman Catholic marriage would be recognized only if the marriage ceremony was officiated by a priest with two witnesses. The religious wedding ceremony then began to be held in church buildings. It was also around this time that the traditional wedding vows were first published in the Book of Common Prayer. Couples said, "I do" when asked if they promised to "love and cherish" each other "till death do us part."

By the 1600s, the role of recording marriages and setting the rule for marriage passed from religious churches to state governments in many European countries. Thus began the system in countries where for a marriage to be recognized, dual requirements of state registration and church consecration were needed.

From simple affairs with just a few relatives and friends attending the wedding, the ceremony has evolved into big, festive celebrations that have required the services of a lot of people and which takes as much as a year in planning and preparation.