28 January 2024 I Corinthians 7:32-35
[The Daily Lectionary and the Sunday Lectionary are slightly different. The gospel reading for this day, which is a Sunday, appeared in the Daily Lectionary on January 9, and you may read a devotion on it here on that date. This devotion addresses the Epistle Reading for today.]
St. Paul can’t seem to make up his mind about marriage.
On the one hand, in I Corinthians 7 he discourages marriage. “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (7:8-9). Marriage is better than an increasing body count. That is certainly true, but it is not a terribly uplifting view of marriage, or married people. A little later he advises singleness because, “I should like you to be free of anxieties” (7:32). Spouses just make you crazy. Once again, not a very charitable view of marriage or married people.
On the other hand, by the time he wrote Ephesians 5 he was more optimistic about marriage. “’For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church” (5:31-32). The love of husband and wife is a microcosm of the love Christ has for the church. Jesus wants for us and with us an intimacy like that of a married couple, whose love is so deep that you can’t tell where the husband ends and the wife begins.
So which is it? Some think that the Corinthians needed the sterner message of the benefits of singleness and sexual continence because Corinth was the Vegas of the Mediterranean world. Some think that Paul changed his mind by the time he wrote Ephesians 5 because he had met a Christian couple, Priscilla and Aquila, who were tentmakers like he was and are mentioned six times in the New Testament, and they showed him the possibilities for deep faithfulness in a Christian marriage.
But we don’t really know. St. Paul doesn’t tell us why he seems not to be able to make up his mind about marriage.
But here is one thing we do know. When St. Paul went to Corinth, it was going to be all about Jesus, only Jesus, top to bottom, stem to stern, Jesus. Before going to Corinth he had been in Athens, and there he tried to make Jesus fit with their philosophical presuppositions. It amounted to a trimming, a reducing of Jesus, and they laughed him out of town. He was not able to persuade many converts there (Acts 17:16-34). So when he came to Corinth he said, “I decided to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified” (I Corinthians 2:2).
Just Jesus.
For some people, singleness and celibacy is the lens that clarifies the love of Jesus, its purity and power. For other people, the lens is marriage, love of the other for the sake of the other, a self-giving so tender and powerful that it creates life, and an intimacy of such dramatic closeness that for 1500 years prior to Jesus the Jews recognized marriage as the best way to understand the love and will of God. But celibacy and marriage are just lenses – the object is to see Jesus.
Churches in our time that are fading have been trying for some time to trim Jesus so he fits with certain cultural presuppositions. Churches that are collapsing have relied on abstractions, hyper-intellectualized accounts of religion that few understand. As Bishop Robert Barron has said, “No one will give her life for the ‘feeling of absolute dependency’ or for ‘the sustenance of ultimate concern.’” But she might be able to give herself to a crucified and risen Jesus, if she has the right lens to see him. People are starting to ask for that now.
Maybe celibacy, maybe marriage – the object is to see Jesus. Just Jesus.
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