Presentation

Marriage as a Discipline of Sanctification
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Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.
Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

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Gay and lesbian people who commit themselves to a community—to those who have come out, to a church, or to one another in a domestic community—do so to seek greater goods, to embark upon a discipline, to donate themselves to a greater social meaning. But under conditions of sin, a community from which one can’t easily escape—especially marriage and monasticism—is not likely to be straightforwardly improving. The community from which one can’t easily escape makes moral risk. It tends to expose the worst in people. The hope is that community exposes the worst in people, so that it can be healed. So multiple Christian traditions portray Christ as a physician exposing and probing the wounds. Unlike modern medicine, however, the physician shares the patient’s vulnerability; in ancient practice, the physician undresses to examine the patient; in this poem, the instruments of the examination and cure are those by which Christ himself suffered, as he explains to his mother at the foot of the cross:

“Be patient a little longer, Mother, and you will see

how, like a physician, I undress and reach the place where they lie and I treat their wounds,

cutting with the lance their calluses and their scabs.

And I take [the] vinegar, I apply it as astringent to the wound,

when with the probe of the nails I have investigated the cut, I shall plug it with the cloak.

And, with my cross as a splint,

I shall make use of it, Mother, so that you may chant with understanding,

‘By suffering he has abolished suffering,’

                        my Son and my God.’”38

For the risk to be worth it and to have the best chance of success, the community must have plenty of time and be made up of the right sort of people. The right sort of people will succeed in exposing and healing each other’s flaws over time.

For gay and lesbian people, someone of the opposite sex is unlikely to represent the right sort of otherness for marriage, because only someone of the apposite, not opposite sex will get in deep enough to expose their vulnerabilities and inspire the trust that healing requires. The question is, what sort of created diversity will lead one to holiness? The answer will vary with creation itself. But certainly same-sex couples find in someone of the same sex the right spur to vulnerability and self-exposure. With someone of the same sex they can undertake the long and difficult commitment over time and place to find themselves in the perceptions of another. A homosexual orientation, theologically understood, is this: “gay men and lesbians are persons who encounter the other (and thus discover themselves) in relation to persons of the same sex.”39

That is no “merely psychological” difference, but also embodied difference, if only because sexual response is nothing if not bodily. (Difference cannot be reduced to male-female complementarity, because then lack of a wife would leave Jesus a deficient human being.) Some people, therefore, are called to same-sex partnerships for their own sanctification.

On this account, conservatives do not wish to deprive same-sex couples of satisfaction so much as to deprive them of sanctification. But that is self-contradictory, because so far as I know no conservative has ever seriously argued that same-sex couples need sanctification any less than cross-sex couples.40 It is more than contradictory, it is evil to attempt to deprive people of the means of their own sanctification.

I have already answered one objection—what about Genesis, what are the limits of created diversity. Let me now go on to answer two more, by recovering the positive, constructive sense of each. (1) What about biblical strictures such as those in Romans 1? (2) And what about the moral risk in changing the tradition? In each case, I do not try to narrow the resources of the Christian tradition by attempting to silence difficult passages and arguments: I try to enlarge those resources by rescuing text and tradition from usages that constrain their theological meaning. Aquinas quoted Augustine that it is wrong, in interpretation of the bible, so to constrain (cogere) the text to one meaning as to expose the faith to ridicule.41

1. We need a word for the body that is both an instrument of salvation and exceeds itself, neither ceasing to be body nor limited to this life. One such word is the humanity of God, the instrument by which God saves, from which the body is ineliminable and yet comes to mean more than itself, because the Word incarnate does divine things humanly and human things divinely. The Apostle Paul suggests another such word in his epistle to the Romans. Romans 11 is the most important instance. Fascinated with the embodied difference of Jews and Gentiles, circumcised and uncircumcised, Paul describes God’s salvation of Gentiles as physical and yet more than physical: it comes para phusin, in excess of the physical. In such words as “parallel” and “paragraph,” the word indicates accompaniment. In such modern combinations as “paramedic” and “paralegal,” it indicates assistance. In such words as “paragon” and “paradigm,” it indicates an excellent case. In such words as “parable” and “parabolic” it indicates an excess of meaning. So it is that Paul uses the word in Romans 11:24. God does something excessive, almost promiscuous, in grafting the Gentiles into the Jewish olive. God does something that exceeds the “natural” love of the God of Israel for God’s people: God loves also, in excess, other peoples, the nations. This use has a soteriological sense. It could not have escaped Paul’s intention, of course, to recall, in that soteriological use, his earlier, more famous use of the phrase in Romans 1, also to describe an excessive sexuality, the excessive sexuality of Gentiles. Paul revels in the irony that God takes on a Gentile characteristic, excessive sexuality, to save precisely the Gentiles.42

Later Greek writers did not miss that implication. In the liturgical poetry of Romanos the Melodist, that phrase is situated in its soteriological sense in another sexually suspicious or auspicious place, the womb of Mary:

Mary’s eyes            beholding Eve

            and looking down on Adam,            were impelled to tears;

but she stays them            and hastens

            to conquer nature     she who para phusin   gave birth to Christ her son.

Yet her entrails were stirred            in suffering with her parents

            --a compassionate mother            accorded with the Merciful one

So she tells them [Adam and Eve]            --Cease your lamentations,

            and I will be your ambassador            to him born from me.43

So too in another instance:

At your conceiving without seed, O Mother of God,

Joseph was struck with wonder as he contemplated what was hyper phusin,

and he brought to mind the rain on the fleece,

the bush unburned by fire,

Aaron’s rod which blossomed.

And your betrothed and guardian bore witness and cried to the priests,

            “A Virgin gives birth, and after childbirth remains still a virgin.”44

We do violence to Paul’s meaning when we reduce it to contrariety and to sex. Paul’s meaning is first of all about God’s excess in saving the Gentiles—saving us, the great majority of Christians who are not Jews—and only then irony, in describing God’s love for us as characteristic of our Gentile Christianity.45 In Romans 1, sexuality in excess of nature was a Gentile characterization.

In God’s economy of salvation according to Romans 11, in the womb of Mary according to Romanos the Melodist, and in the resurrection body according to I Cor. 15 (vv. 44-45), what is para phusin is not what we are saved from; it is what we are saved by or for. In the Fall, the mind overreached itself, desiring to be like God; the body continued, at least for a little while, to tell the first couple the truth, that they were creatures. But desiring to be gods, they scorned the body instead of befriending it, so that the fall of the mind took the body with it. The salvation wrought in the incarnation reverses that fall, “counting divinity not a thing to be grasped,” but re-befriends the body, glorifying it as the means of our salvation and the crown of our resurrection. That is too great a truth to lose to the sexuality debates.46

2. Conservatives have also often claimed to fear a moral risk in sanctioning same-sex marriages. I want to point out that we also undergo a moral risk in refusing to celebrate them. Consider Jesus’s parable about those who refuse to celebrate a wedding. Granted, the parable implies a messianic application. But human weddings recall, analogize, and bear witness to the love of the messianic wedding feast. At a wedding, the parties with the congregation recall, too, the triune love by which the Father loves the Son, and the Spirit celebrates and bears witness to the love of two, the congregation caught up in the Spirit’s proper office of bearing witness to love. The Spirit—and the congregation after it--does more than bear witness to love, but serves as guarantor of it. The Spirit of faithfulness reunites the Father and the Son in the Resurrection (Rom. 8:11). Analogously, the congregation helps the wedding couple keep faith in times of difficulty. Sp wedding feasts represent and anticipate the Trinitarian life. If you want to know what the Trinity is like, go to a wedding. Refusal to bear witness to and keep faith with love refuses to participate in the work of the Spirit. Refusal to celebrate weddings incurs a moral risk indeed:

And again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a marriage feast to his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the marriage feast; but they would not come. . . Then he said to his servants, . . . ‘Go therefore to the thoroughfares, and invite to the marriage feast as many as you find.’ And those servants went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good: so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

            “But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment; and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.’”47

Refusal to celebrate weddings may also be morally dangerous.48

We might like to end there. But if Amy Pauw is right, we dare not. That is classic them-exegesis. She challenges us to prefer us-exegesis. For that we turn back to the Syriac tradition.

In the Syriac tradition, the wedding garment is also a robe of glory: the robe that Adam and Eve gave up when they left the Garden, and the robe that they would wear again at the wedding of the Lamb.49 It is also the robe that Christ brought down from heaven at the incarnation and took off when he disrobed to be baptized in the Jordan.50 He left it in the water, according to Syriac tradition, for us to find there, for all the baptized, for all who weep and gnash their teeth. The resurrection rebounds from the incarnation not only from earth: that’s not low enough; the resurrection rebounds from hell. Christ rises from hell as from the baptismal water not alone, but bringing Adam and Eve out by the hand. So the one without a wedding garment is Christ; and the one without a wedding garment is us; and the one without a wedding garment is the one for whom Christ left the robe of glory in the water, the one who emerges from baptism clothed for the wedding of the Lamb.51

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38. On the Lament of the Mother of God 13, in St. Romanos the Melodist, Kontakia on the Life of Christ,p. 148. I owe the insight that Christ is both physician and patient to Stephania Gianulis. (return)

39. David Matzko McCarthy, “The Relationship of Bodies: A Nuptial Hermeneutics of Same-sex Unions,” in Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., ed., Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), pp. 200-216; here, 212-13. (return)

40. But see Stanley Hauerwas, "Why Gays (as a Group) Are Morally Superior to Christians (as a Group)," in John Berkman and Michael Cartwright, eds., The Hauerwas Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 519-21. (return)

41. Thomas Aquinas, De potentia 4.1. For application to this issue, see Sexuality and the Christian Body, pp. 127-39. (return)

42. For para phusin in Romans 1, see Dale B. Martin, “Heterosexism and the Interpretation of Romans 1:18-32,” Biblical Interpretation 3 (1995): 322-55.` (return)

43. Romanos the Melodist, Hymn XI (Nativity II), strophe 4, in José Grodidiers de Matons, ed., Romanos le Mélode, Hymns II, Sources Chrétiennes 110 (Paris: Cerf, 1965), trans. by Margaret Alexiou, After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 422-23. (return)

44. Romanos the Melodist, Hymn XII (Nativity III), proemium 1-7, in Grosdidiers, pp. 118-19, translated as “On the Mother of God,” in On the Life of Christ: Kontakia, trans. Ephrem Lash (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), p. 17. For a discussion of these and another passage in Romanos, see Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., After the Spirit, pp. 97-103. (return)

45. For a discussion of the Vulgate translation of para phusin as contra naturam, and Thomas Aquinas’s (more correct) understanding of it as nevertheless about luxus or excess rather than reversal, see Sexuality and the Christian Body, pp. 101-102, 137-38, where “paraphysicality” becomes not a negative description of homosexual acts but a positive description of the work of the Spirit. For the role of the phrase in Aquinas’s commentary In Romanos, see “The Storied Context of the Vice Against Nature,” chapter 4 in Sexuality and the Christian Body, pp. 91-126. (return)

46. For this account of the Fall, see Sebastian Moore, “The Crisis of an Ethic Without Desire,” in Jesus the Liberator of Desire (New York: Crossroad, 1989), esp. pp. 100-104; now reprinted in Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), pp. 157-69. For a classical source, see Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis 3.26. For commentary on Moore, see After the Spirit, pp. 167-70. (return)

47. Matthew 22:1-3, 9-13. (return)

48. The wideness of Christ’s nuptial embrace also has much to do with his singleness (applying a modern category), but that is a paper for another day. See McCarthy, “Nuptial Hermeneutics,” p. 214, n. 12, and Dale B. Martin, “Sex and the Single Savior,” Svensk exegetisk arsbok 67 (2002): 47-60. (return)

49. For texts, see Rogers, “Baptism,” in After the Spirit (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 137-71, esp. pp. 137-39. For the robe in the garden, see Sebastian P. Brock, Spirituality in the Syriac Tradition (Kerala, India: St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 1989), p. 64, citing Jacob of Serugh, Homiliae selectae Mar-Jacobi Sarugensis, 5 vols., ed. Paul Bedjan (Paris and Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1908-10)  vol. 3, p. 593. Cf. also Brock, "Baptismal Themes in the Writings of Joseph of Serugh," in Symposium Syriacum 1976, ed. Arthur Vööbus (Rome: Pontificium Institutm Orientalium Studiorum, 1978), pp. 325-47. (return)

50. Francis Acharya, ed., Prayer with the Harp of the Spirit: The Prayer of the Asian Churches, 4 vols. (Vagamon, India: Kurisumala Ashram, 1982-86), vol. III, p. 496, in Brock, Spirituality, p. 64. (return)

51. Then the baptized may "recline with confidence at the royal feast, as [they] eat this spiritual banquet, and so [they] will not have to hear those gloomy words, 'Friend, how did you enter here without a wedding garment?'" Severus, Homily 43 on John 1:16, Patrologia Orientalia 84-86, translated in Sebastian P. Brock, The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition, The Syrian Churches Series, vol. 9, 2d ed. (Poona, India: Anita Printers, 1998) p. 87. Severus does not identify Christ as also and preeminently the one without the wedding garment: for that you would have to combine him with Karl Barth on Christ as the rejected one elected; see Church Dogmatics II/2, §33. (return)