Our Venerable Mother Macrina, Sister of Saint Basil the Great (379); Our Venerable Father Dios (c. 431)
1 Corinthians 6:20-7:12; Matthew 14:1-13
Read 1 Corinthians 6:20-7:12
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
In today’s epistle reading St. Paul teaches the Corinthian community on issues of sexual morality. This community of believers—many of whom come from Greek pagan background—struggle to cleanse a deeply ingrained sexual immorality taught by the world, which they lived in before coming to Christ. Now that they belong to Christ they are expected to embrace the way of life given by God. St. Paul explains that human sexuality is something of a gift from God to a husband and wife to be practiced in an exclusive way to benefit them both—sexual desire is meant to find its release in a healthy way within the marriage bond for the greater unity of the couple and openness to life. Each spouse has a right to the conjugal act, which should not be denied except by mutual agreement for the sake of greater devotion to God in prayer and fasting—ie sexual abstinence during a fasting season. Interesting that St. Paul advocates for a discipline of sexual fasting—abstinence—within marriage. Fasting is a setting aside of that which is good for a period of time in order to give ourselves over to that which is the source of all goodness.
Notice that St. Paul is greatly concerned with Christians falling into sexual immorality. He explains this earlier in the epistle: “Shun sexual immorality. Every other sin which a man commits is outside the body; but the immoral man sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” (1 Cor 6:18-20). Lust and sexual immorality grieve the Holy Spirit and push Him away from us. Being distant from the Holy Spirit means that I am no longer living in Divine grace. Without the Holy Spirit I am impotent in the Spiritual life. This is part of the reason why the collective faith of the Church in the west is so weak and powerless—we have succumb to sexual immorality of all sorts and even argue for its normalisation. We can’t have it both ways: either we embrace the world and die, or we die to the world and live in Christ.