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The body is a primordial sacrament, a visible sign of God’s invisible mystery.
body alone is capable of making visible the invisible. It was created to be a sign of God’s love in the visible world.
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).
The fruit of love—of which the body is a sign—is not death, but life.
The Hebrew word used here, jaddah, doesn’t mean “head knowledge” alone; it also refers to concrete experience.
the experience in which husband and wife unite so closely as to become one flesh is called “knowledge.”
Knowledge refers to the deepest essence of married life.
“I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord” (2:20 NKJV).
“Then you will know that I am the Lord.” (49:23 NKJV) And again in Ezekiel: “And I will establish my covenant with you. Then you shall know that I am the Lord” (16:62 NKJV).
He tells us that the union between husband and wife is a picture of Christ’s love fo...
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“Adam named his wife Eve,” Genesis 3:20 says, “because she would become the mother of all the living.”
And motherhood brings to light the particular power of the female body.
Eve was revealed to Adam as a mother—one in whom new human life is conceived and nurtured. When Eve became a mother, the mystery of Adam’s masculinity was also revealed—the lifegiving, fatherly meaning of his body.
In procreation, a husband and wife come to know themselves through a third person, sprung from them both. This is a revelation.
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” God told Jeremiah (Jer. 1:5 NKJV).
Even though sin has entered the world, each and every new human being still bears the image of God.
This is what gives procreation such immense dignity.
The generation of new life is the fulfillment of the nuptial meaning of their bodies.
Understanding the gift-giving and life-giving meaning of the body, husbands and wives delight in each other and affirm the goodness of life.
For Christians, the center of our faith is the Incarnation. When God became flesh—willingly took on a human body—the body entered the halls of theology through the front door.
Christian marriage is far more than a contract or a social arrangement. It is a vocation, a path to holiness and salvation. And a solid, biblical understanding of the body, male and female, is crucial to this vocation.
He desires us to have holy thoughts and intentions, too.
“Do not commit adultery”—this law is “written upon the heart” of every human person (Rm. 2:15). For
Biblically, the heart is the center of a person—the source of our thoughts, our emotions, and our will.
It is not enough for us to keep our bodies from sin; our hearts must also be transformed.
We are moral beings, capable of choosing between right and wrong, and responsible for our decisions.
Inwardly, adultery is committed “in the heart” when a wife or husband desires to unite with another.
Often, lust committed “in the heart” starts with the eyes.
Christ calls us beyond merely following a set of rules, to complete transformation by grace.
The Apostle John writes of “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” These things are not “of the Father,” he says, but “of the world” (1 Jn. 2:16).
“The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever” (1 Jn. 2:15–16).
three forms of lust were not part of God’s original creation. They are fruits of the
spring from our broken covenant with God.
Creation is God’s gift, born from love. Sin arose when man rejected this love, and treated creation as something other than a gift. He cast God out of his heart. What is left is the hollow world John speaks of, with all its empty lusts.
He has lost the sense that the image of God is expressed in his body. He has lost the peace and joy that come with awareness of the true value of his body. He has lost the original vision of creation: “And God saw that it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).
Shame is not directly linked to the body. Neither is lust. Shame and lust arise from the heart; they are results of sin, not nakedness in and of itself. Like all forms of evil, lust is not a positive thing in itself; it is a lack. Lust is not food, but hunger; not fullness, but emptiness.
The shame felt by Adam and Eve before their Creator could be called “cosmic shame.”
waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Rom. 7:21–24)
Self-control is essential to the moral integrity of human beings.
Lust attacks the person at his core by throwing body and spirit out of balance.
In the state of original innocence, the masculine and feminine bodies were the basis of the communion of persons. In the state of sinfulness, sexuality seems to be an obstacle to unity—a cause for fear and mistrust.
Shame is a symptom of our separation from the selfless love which is “of the Father” (1 Jn. 2:15).
Lust is the disease that keeps us from experiencing the body as a gift.
Shame is a response to lust, and aims to protect us from its consequences.
This union is by choice—a man chooses to leave his parents and unite with his wife. And this union is sacramental—it is a physical sign of invisible grace, as the union of bodies seals the union of persons.
A true communion of persons must be a full, selfless union of body and spirit—two persons giving themselves freely to each other.
The body, masculine and feminine, has a nuptial meaning: it is capable of expressing the selfless love by which a person becomes a gift.
By becoming a gift, the human person fulfills the deepest meaning of his existence.
The heart has become a battlefield between love and lust.
Sometimes, under the cover of strong emotions, lust disguises itself as “love”—still, it remains selfish at the core. Does this mean we should always distrust the heart? No! But we must keep watch over it.
