Jesus and Paul on the Meaning and Purpose of Human Sexuality

Abstract

Jesus and Paul on the Meaning and Purpose of Human Sexuality Paul Gondreau We live in a weirdly schizophrenic culture when it comes to sex and marriage. Recently, I witnessed a wedding celebration of a second-generation Chinese American man and a first-generation German American woman. They opted for a dual-styled wedding ceremony, the one "Western" and the other traditional Chinese. The Western-styled ceremony, held in a hotel-like ballroom, was first. Utterly secular with no mention of God and no appeal whatsoever to religious imagery, this ceremony blurred boundaries by offering moments of inappropriate humor (the groom, for instance, entered to the theme song of 2001 Space Odyssey playing on the speaker system) and by having a martial arts instructor act as the officiator. In a word, the Western ceremony bore little resemblance to anything approaching what one could term "traditional." Indeed, it openly flouted tradition. Instead of bridesmaids and groomsmen, for instance, there were "bridespeople" and "groomspeople," as both wedding parties were composed of men and women alike. And why not? I asked myself. Declaring the male and female roles in a marriage to be interchangeable, and therefore meaningless, with biological sex having no essential bearing on the role of bride and bridegroom, our secular culture as a result has blown up all the rich and ancient nuptial symbolism that is expressive of the sexual complementarity of the spouses. Traditionally, of course, a wedding would mark the celebration of a man and a woman who stood before God and society to vow a life of love and fidelity to each other, a newly conjoined life with profound bearing on their lives, on all who know them, and on society as a whole, not least [End Page 461] of which because of the offspring their union was naturally designed to produce. The role of the wedding parties, whereby male groomsmen would flank the male bridegroom, while female bridesmaids would stand alongside the female bride, serves to magnify and enrich the symbolic significance of the complementary joining of man and woman. Today, however, such symbolic significance must be deemed retrograde, a binary straitjacket that unfairly excludes alternative forms of sexual union and sexual identity. Bridesmaids must thus give way to bridespeople, and groomsmen to groomspeople. In the particular instance of this wedding, one of the "groomspeople" was a woman, dressed in a tuxedo, who was herself in a lesbian "marriage." It would not have been a shock, at least to me, if Rod Sterling had suddenly appeared as the officiator, announcing that we had entered the nuptial Twilight Zone, or, short of that, the world of nuptial nominalism. The Chinese ceremony, on the other hand, offered an abrupt about-face. This latter was a lesson in how to observe tradition down to the finest ceremonial detail and with due regard for the most symbolic and venerable of rituals. The centerpiece was the tea ceremony, which consists of the bride and bridegroom, dressed in traditional Chinese attire, serving tea to the elders in their family. They serve the tea on their knees, except to the elders who are younger than the parents of the bride and/or bridegroom, in which case they serve the tea standing up. According to Chinese custom, the couple is not considered married until this tea ceremony is completed. I found myself moved at how powerfully this tea ceremony ritual testifies to the hierarchical structure of the family, and to the fact that marriage, because ordered to the continuation of the family line, marks the direct concern of generations past and generations present and future. As Western secular society adopts evermore a view of marriage as exclusively for the mutual benefit of the spouses, Chinese custom testifies to the larger truth: marriage marks a union that is much larger than the spouses themselves, since it is also for the benefit of children, of progeny. Ordered not simply to the private good of the partners, marriage is ordered ultimately to the good of human society itself. So much so that Chinese culture sees not the exchange of vows as the moment in which the nuptial union is realized, but a touching ceremonial gesture of...