Our readings this week continue with Mark describing the early impact of Jesus as people started to see his power and authority. This is who we chose to follow. However we also know that the choice to follow doesn’t provide immediate answers to all the questions we face in life. So we also hear Paul doing his “Ask Amy” session for the Corinthians!
The way Paul goes about answering these questions about marriage and sex is interesting (we’ll get to the actual answers in a minute.) He clearly lays out where he is giving his own opinion versus passing on what he understands to be the teaching of Jesus. He also does this with a strong pastoral concern – I’m not trying to make things difficult for you, quite the opposite. But equally he doesn’t duck the questions – he had been asked and would do his best to give an answer, even if Jesus himself hadn’t given guidance on the topic. This degree of humility and self awareness has not always been apparent in later commentary on these issues, which often seems to take more of the tone of “this is what the rules are, get with the program…”
But the answers he gives? Many people find those problematic. And Paul’s original words are overlaid by so many years of later commentary, dispute, confusion, and hurt, that it’s difficult to get much appreciation of what he might have originally been trying to say (or why). So is it best simply to ignore this bit of scripture? Maybe with the excuse that Paul was writing for his times, times have moved on, let’s not worry about what he had to say on this topic.
We noted last week that Paul, like other disciples, could be mistaken. The passage we read today follows in the context where Paul is assuming the Second Coming is imminent. It could be that his advice on relationships might be reasonable in that context but not applicable now and for us.
Certainly the Church does not now teach that marriage is an inferior state. Pope Francis responding to questions from young people on a visit to Assisi in 2013 said: “Family life is the vocation that God inscribed into the nature of man and woman and there is another vocation which is complementary to marriage: the call to celibacy and virginity for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.” He is clearly presenting these two choices as equally valid and desirable. There have been strongly contradictory views in the history of the Church. Saint Jerome (the great linguist and translator of the Bible in the 4th Century) is perhaps the most notorious for his views in regarding marriage as not just inferior but a bad choice. Augustine by contrast argued that marriage was good, but even he thought virginity was better.
Views of marriage and sex in the early Church were very much conditioned by the values of secular Roman society. Jerome quotes Roman philosophers as much as he does scripture in his discussion of the topic. Later, marriage (like so much else) became a matter of dispute in the Reformation, particularly in regard of the link between priesthood and celibacy. Further overlaid by puritanism, in both Protestant and Catholic traditions, compounded with Victorian fears about the role of women in society, it’s not surprising that we might chose to ignore the topic and move on.
If we do that we do however miss two important opportunities. Even if we dismiss Paul’s conclusion we may find value in trying to understand how and why he argued his position. Perhaps more important, if we are going to disagree with him then we should understand why – what is the basis of his error and what does that tell us about an alternative position.
We already noted that Paul gives this advice assuming that the world is changing radically and he needs to respond to that short-term reality, not as a pattern for centuries to come. However this is not the only angle we can take on Paul’s argument. Another is that it is based on his understanding of what he found worked for him – “Indeed, I wish everyone to be as I am” but he does go on to acknowledge “but each has a particular gift from God, one of one kind and one of another”. We might give more weight than he does to the fact that there can be different answers for different people. Paul and many other Church leaders in following centuries seem to have believed that there was one (universal) answer. Others would argue that God’s relationship with his people is more complex than that, and God is more interested in our differences (which he created) than in uniformity. This is a difficult point since it can slide into the sort of relativism that terrified Pope Benedict (for one) in his later years – but recognizing and accepting diversity does not have to mean denying all boundaries or absolute values.
A second place where we could take issue with Paul is in the assumption that there has to be a choice and that one option must be better than the other. This mode of thought continued in Jerome, Augustine, the Reformers, and many others, until modern times. One of the features of the Second Vatican Council is that it broke from this mindset. The Council’s teaching on marriage (Gaudium et spes #47-52) is focused primarily on the challenges that exist for married people in modern life, but it does conclude with the following statement: “following Christ who is the principle of life, … married people can become witnesses of the mystery of love which the Lord revealed to the world by His dying and His rising up to life again.” That certainly doesn’t sound like an inferior option.
Paul argues that if a man or a woman is concerned for his or her spouse this takes away from their concern for God. This sounds a little like the argument that if you love one of your children more, you must therefore love another less. However one of the clearest messages in the Gospel is that love divided is not less, it is in fact more. We don’t have a limited quantity of love that we have to share out. While Paul may have felt that there were choices to be made in love of another person versus love of God, many people in their lives show that this need not be so.
We can take account of Paul’s argument but still reach a different conclusion – as he himself noted, he was not trying to impose a rule, he wanted to be helpful. He was always one to argue forcefully, but still willing to acknowledge his limitations. We can do likewise.