Living on the Edge (1 Cor. 7:32-35)

The second reading in today’s Mass (1 Cor. 7:32-35) is interesting to reflect on from a mature perspective. Surrounding this passage, St. Paul is pastorally working with the community in Corinth regarding issues of marriage. Note his first statement, “...I should like you to be free from anxieties.” The anxiety St. Paul is referring to is the anxiety to be prepared for Christ’s return. Remember that the early Church sincerely believed that Jesus would return in their lifetime. So, they were anxious about how best to be prepared for his glory. Two thousand years later, our anxiety is a little different isn’t it? Who doesn’t secretly think that Jesus isn’t going to return in our life time? We cannot sustain an artificial anxiety, pretending to ourselves that Jesus could return today. Believe me, I tried it for years, eventually time wins the argument. Don’t forget we pray at every mass, right after the Our Father, that God would remove our anxiety. That’s not anxiety over paying the bills, that’s anxiety over our final judgment—the same anxiety St. Paul is dealing with at Corinth here in this passage.

But St. Paul hint’s at how we are to live in his next sentence. “An unmarried [person] is anxious about things of the Lord, how s/he may please the Lord.” Note that the task for the single Christian is to “please the Lord” - there’s no place for self-centeredness. In the single life, one is chaste for God. Chastity is not a burdensome discipline that robs us of one of life’s great pleasures. Chastity takes our natural drives and redirects them into other forms of creativity and when directed towards God, increases praise. Many a person in history and today have put aside strictly sexual acts to express a deeper powerful creativity through broader acts of art, science, and charity that is just as fulfilling, if not more, than explicit sexual acts. (But our culture of addiction doesn’t want you to believe that because they’re making money off of the addition.) But, true freedom for the single person is to let go of the addiction to find the right sole mate and look to pleasing the Lord in their life.

The Church has always lifted up the high value of marriage and recognized that marriage between a baptized believing man and a woman is a Sacrament—in other words, a way in which God’s grace and the love of Christ is manifested in the world. At first, St. Paul seems to be down playing marriage but what he’s trying to do, in context with the entire chapter, is to help the Christian first understand that their lives are about pleasing the Lord first and foremost. From that central perspective, the task of the Christian spouse is to see how s/he could please their spouse. Again, there is no room for self-centeredness. Marriage is a vocation, a sacrament of godly service to honor Christ by manifesting God’s love specifically in the world through this human bond. The married person’s fulfillment is found inbeing Christ for their partner and allowing their partner to be Christ to them. And, God willing, in the procreation of children. Marriage expresses God’s permanent, personal, and productive love in the world by transforming this natural filial relationship into an expression of God’s unilateral covenantal love to us.

St. Paul hint’s at what the root of anxiety is at the end of his paragraph. Anxiety comes to us when we’re distracted from our central purpose of pleasing the Lord, regardless of our marital status. If we feel restrained, unhappy in our life then our focus is on ourselves and not in outward loving expression to God. We’re called not to live in fearful anxiety for Christ’s return but rather we are happiest when we are living on our spiritual and physical edge—pushing ourselves to fully and creatively express our devotion to God with the gift of our very lives. It is living on our personal edge for God that prepares us for his second coming—not out of fear but out of becoming fully human through devotion to God.