The
Interrelation of Eucharist and Marriage:
The
Mission of the Parish in Forming Communicants and Spouses in Holiness[1]
Eucharist and holy matrimony are foundational
practices of the Orthodox Church, obviously celebrated with great frequency. Unfortunately, many communicants and spouses
do not perceive their deep interrelation and profound spiritual significance. In a time when popular practices and
attitudes concerning marriage and sexuality reflect contemporary cultural
trends far more than Orthodox teaching, a crucial calling of the parish is to draw
on the resources provided by these sacraments to enable husband and wife to make
their common life a sign of the salvation of the world.
The challenges in doing so are
great. It is widely accepted today in
western culture that marriage and sexuality concern nothing more than the
consent of autonomous individuals to order their intimate and familial affairs
as they see fit. The same may be said of
religious affiliation, which serves the preferences of individuals for meeting
their perceived needs in a spiritual setting that increasingly resembles a
commercial marketplace. Trends in both areas underwrite an individualistic view
of life for which God becomes irrelevant or an idol crafted in one’s own image.[2]
This paper makes
three primary claims about the interrelation of Eucharist and marriage in
response to these cultural dynamics.[3] First, Orthodoxy
understands Eucharist and marriage to enact covenantal communions that change
the very identity of those who share in them. Together with these new
identities come obligations to fulfill the calling that participation brings. Second,
Eucharist and marriage involve physical actions that transcend the merely
physical in their significance. They
thus contradict the Gnostic tendency to separate “body” and “person” so common
in both past and present cultural sensibilities, especially with reference to
sexuality. Third, both sacraments share a common motif of sacrifice, as husband
and wife wear the crowns of martyrdom in holy matrimony as they offer
themselves and one another to the Lord with whom they commune in the Eucharist.
The interrelation of these holy mysteries
concerns the fulfillment of the human person
and, ultimately, of the creation itself in Christ.
The first theme
of covenantal communion, which is shared by Eucharist and marriage, is present
from the beginning of the biblical narrative with reference to the relationship
between man and woman. The Genesis
reference to marriage as a “one flesh” union concerns not merely the momentary
joining of bodies, but the full personal union of two people, created as male
and female in the image and likeness of God.
Jesus Christ interpreted this passage in Matthew 19:6 with reference to
the permanence appropriate to marriage:
“So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What God has joined together, let no one separate.”
References in the Old Testament to
Yahweh as the husband of Israel, and of His faithfulness to her despite her
infidelity, are surely more consistent with a view of marriage as an abiding
covenant than as a merely legal contract easily dissolved when a party does not
meet its requirements. (Hos. 2:19ff.)
Since Christ
compared the heavenly kingdom to a wedding feast with some frequency, and
performed His first sign in John’s gospel at a marriage banquet, commonalities
between Eucharist and marriage should not be surprising. The covenantal nature
of marriage is not arbitrary, but reflects the intimate union of man and woman
as “one flesh.” For example, in his
response to the sexual libertines of Corinth, St. Paul argues that even casual
sexual encounters with prostitutes accomplish this one flesh union. Sexual intimacy is so profound that he
compares its gravity to joining oneself with Christ. He asks rhetorically “Shall I therefore take
the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!
Do you not know that he who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one
body with her? For as it is written ‘The
two shall become one flesh.’ But he who
is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him.” (1 Cor. 6: 15-17) For St. Paul, profound matters of identity
are at stake in all acts of sexual intimacy, for they concern our participation
in covenantal relations with the Lord and with another human being.
Likewise, St. Paul stressed to the
Corinthians that the Eucharist enacts a deep personal union both with Christ and
one another in His Body, the Church.
“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the
blood of Christ? The bread which we
break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ. Because there is one bread, we who are many
are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” (10:16-18) Eucharistic communion
with the Lord is so real that participating in it unworthily, “without
discerning the body,” brings judgment and even death. (11: 28-30)
Even as we can profane the martial nature of intercourse by relations
with prostitutes or other forms of promiscuity, we can profane the Eucharist by
not being rightly in communion with the Lord and other members of the His Body,
the Church. Such actions fall short of
the covenantal nature of both sacraments.
Those who perform them disorient themselves from the fulfillment of the salvific
purposes God seeks to accomplish through these holy mysteries.
Since St. Paul presents both
marriage and the Eucharist as such profound acts of union, it is not surprising
that he uses the marital imagery of “one flesh” in Ephesians 5: 31-32 as a sign
of the relationship between Christ and the Church. Likewise in 2 Corinthians 11:2, he states
that he “I betrothed you to Christ to present you as a pure bride to her one
husband.” Various church fathers make
similar connections between marriage, Eucharist, and the Church. For example, after describing how the “one
flesh” union of marriage includes husband, wife, and child, St. John Chrysostom
notes that “Our relationship to Christ is the same; we become one flesh with
Him through communion…”[4] St.
Nicholas Cabasilas also affirmed also that, through the Eucharist and the other
holy mysteries, “Christ comes into us and dwells in us, He is united to us and
grows into one with us” such that we “become one flesh with Him.”[5] Such references indicate that the marital
union of husband and wife is so profound that it is a fitting image for both the
sacramental and ecclesial dimensions of the Christian life. As Vigen Guroian notes,
The Orthodox
Church describes sexual intercourse as synousia,
a term which means consubstantiality.
Husband and wife are joined together as one in holy matrimony. They
are an ecclesial entity, one flesh, one body incorporate of two persons who in
freedom and sexual love and through their relationship to Christ image the
triune life of the Godhead and express the mystery of salvation in Christ’s relationship
to the Church.[6]
For man and woman to “express the
mystery of salvation in Christ’s relationship to the Church” is to fulfill
their primordial calling as those created in the image and likeness of
God. Their communion with one another is
to become a sign of their communion with the Lord in the Eucharist and the
Church. They are no longer isolated
individuals, but members of a “one flesh” union that joins them profoundly to
the spouse, the Lord, and His Body.
A
second theme connecting Eucharist and marriage is that they both involve
physical actions which have a significance that extends beyond the merely physical. As St. Paul instructed the Corinthians, even
momentary physical joining with a prostitute results in a unity parallel in
significance to one’s unity with Christ. The physical gestures of intercourse
obviously have a decisive shaping role in the lives of people in so many ways, both
for good and for bad. Simply to describe
such actions with biological precision does not convey their full significance—spiritually,
morally, psychologically, or socially. Indeed, such disparate acts as adultery,
rape, incest, and faithful conjugal union are not distinguished merely by descriptions
of bodily actions.
Likewise, an account of the physical
movements involved in the Eucharist does not plumb the depths of their
meaning. As Fr. Alexander Schmemann
taught, an absolute division of symbol and reality in sacramental theology is
contrary to the experience of the Church, for the sacraments manifest, realize,
and reveal what they symbolize. It is
through participation in them that human beings participate in the life of God
in a way that is both real and mystical.[7] Paul Evdokimov made the similar point that the
Holy Mysteries “do not merely give, but contain,
grace and are channels; they are at
the same time the instruments of salvation and salvation itself, as is the Church.”[8] While the Eucharist involves the same physical
capacities for eating and drinking as are used at any meal, its significance is
nothing short of “one flesh” union with Christ in the heavenly banquet.
In a parallel fashion, it is
impossible to separate with complete clarity the physical joining of husband
and wife in intercourse from any other dimension of their shared life. Their physical union is inextricably entwined
with the various dimensions of their relationship, including parenthood and the
multilayered aspects of their identity as a couple and members of a family. The physical symbol of their union manifests the
reality of their marriage as persons at a deep level. Likewise, the eating and drinking of the
Eucharist is an epiphany of true participation in the life of the Lord and His
heavenly kingdom. This close identification is reflected in Christ’s teaching,
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and
drink His blood, you have no life in you.”
(John 6:53) In both marriage and Eucharist, physical
gestures function as epiphanies of grace and full participation in the life of
another. To regard them as anything less
than manifestations of covenantal communion is to degrade their significance.
These claims reflect the
Incarnational theology of Orthodoxy, as Jesus Christ is both fully divine and
fully human. Divinity, then, is not a
stranger to physicality, but joined with it in the Person of Christ. The God-Man performed many physical signs and
gestures that conveyed the fullness of God’s kingdom for those enduring bodily
struggles such as hunger, sickness, and even death. In this light, salvation is not an escape
from physicality, but its fulfillment, restoration, and ultimate transformation
in the heavenly reign.
As St. Paul
taught, the Lord’s bodily resurrection is the “first fruits” of hope for the
blessing of the entire creation, including its material aspects, in the
eschatological Kingdom. (1 Cor. 15:20) In arguing that “the body is not for fornication,
but for the Lord,” he appeals to Christ’s resurrection as the basis of our hope
to also be raised up by God. In contrast
to the Gnostic inclinations of his libertine opponents, St. Paul reminds the
Corinthians that their bodies are both members of Christ and temples of the
Holy Spirit. (1 Cor. 6:15, 19). Since God intends whole human beings—body,
soul, and spirit-- to participate in heavenly glory, how one lives in the
physicality of the body plays a decisive role in one’s faithfulness to the
incarnate Son of God, now risen and ascended bodily into heaven.
In this context,
the body is neither intrinsically evil nor spiritually irrelevant. And given Christ’s use of the wedding feast
as an image of the heavenly banquet, as well as the marital imagery of
Revelation (e.g., 19:7-9, 21:2) for the consummation of all things, it is
certainly not merely coincidental that the fulfillment of the relationship
between man and woman has figured so prominently in the eschatological hope of
Christianity from its origins. From the “one flesh” language of Genesis to the
marriage banquet of the Lamb in Revelation, God brings those created male and
female in His image and likeness more fully into communion with Him and one
another. Their “one flesh” union finds its fulfillment in the heavenly banquet
in which husband and wife participate already as they wear the crowns of the
Kingdom. They stand together in the
unfolding narrative of the fulfillment of God’s gracious intensions for human
beings to become participants in the loving communion of the Holy Trinity.
God’s salvation is the fulfillment,
not the annihilation, of His good creation, including the physical dimensions
of our existence. Especially with reference to marriage, Chrysostom taught that
the desires of husband and wife for one another are not simply evil, but a
dimension of human nature “still basically good after the Fall.”[9] Because “Marriage is honorable and the bed
undefiled,” Chrysostom chided husbands for excusing themselves from services
after intimate union with their wives.
His affirmed that God has created man and woman as “ontologically ideal
counterpart[s].”[10]
Indeed, “husband and wife are one body in the same way as Christ and the Father
are one.” [11]
Marriage provides a “safe haven” for the fulfillment of desire and the most
intimate union of man and woman “to be a living image, or icon, of the marriage
of Christ the Bridegroom with His Bride, the Church.”[12] Here the “one flesh” union of husband and
wife finds its natural and eschatological culmination.
Physical hunger
and thirst, together with the social and communal dimensions of table
fellowship, also find their completion in the heavenly banquet in which
communicants participate mystically in the Eucharist. Even as marriage plays a key role in the
biblical drama, so do meals. The Passover seder
is the Jews’ ongoing participation in the salvation of the Hebrew people from
slavery and death in Egypt at the time of the Exodus. In the context of
Passover, Christ reveals that He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of
the world. To eat His flesh and drink
His blood is to participate in a new covenant of deliverance from death itself. The
requirement of nourishment for physical existence becomes the basis for
profound spiritual imagery which underwrites the importance of bodily actions
for matters beyond what they typically signify in this world. In the context of historic Christian faith,
marital union and table fellowship both become channels of participation in
God’s reign.
The third theme of commonality for the Eucharist and
marriage is that of sacrifice.
The connection is obvious with reference to the Eucharist in which
communicants receive the Body and Blood of the true Passover Lamb. Participation in the spiritual sacrifice of
the Eucharist calls and enables communicants to join themselves to the one
offering of the Son as they lift up every dimension of their lives to the Holy
Trinity for blessing and fulfillment.
Perhaps less explicit
are the sacrificial themes of marriage, though they are also profound. For example, St. Paul teaches that spouses
should “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” and that husbands
should love their wives “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for
her.” (Eph. 5:21ff) In becoming “one flesh,” both spouses
sacrifice the identity of autonomous individuals and enter into a joint
ascetical struggle of dying to their self-centeredness out of love for the
other. In this sense, Chrysostom notes
that “it is possible for us to surpass all others in virtue by becoming good
husbands and wives.”[13]
The challenges of offering their common life
to the Lord-- in all its interpersonal, economic, and physical aspects—presents
a myriad of a opportunities for spiritual growth to the man and the woman, both
as unique persons and as a couple. Faithful marriage places their erotic love in
a context directed toward the Kingdom, to the fulfillment of all human desire in
union with the Holy Trinity. From the
marriage service itself, in which husband and wife wear martyrs’ crowns of the
Kingdom, their union is directed toward theosis,
the fulfillment of their primordial calling together in the image and likeness
of God. As Guroian comments,
God has intended
from all eternity that she [the Church] and Christ should be united as Bride
and Groom so that the world might be saved from sin and death. Christian marriage is a sign and foretaste of
a world reconciled in Christ to God.
That is no mere analogy, but belongs to the deepest symbolism that God
has built into the fabric of his creation.
God created and constituted man and woman as complementary beings who in
union constitute a single humanity, a single Adam-Eve existence. In marriage, man-and-woman-together is a
sacramental sign of the union of Christ and the Church.[14]
Christian marriage
is an ongoing participation in the Eucharist, in the heavenly wedding banquet
that manifests God’s salvation. The
humble physical elements of bread and wine find fulfillment as the Body and
Blood of Christ in the Eucharist and become our participation in the life of
heaven. Likewise, the intimate personal union
of man and woman becomes in holy matrimony their entrance to the heavenly
realm, their participation by grace in the life of the Holy Trinity as distinct
persons sharing a common life and love.
For human beings to do that requires profound asceticism as they become
more fully communicants and participants in Christ’s sacrifice for the life of
the world.
Their ascetical
offering helps to restore man and woman to their natural state in God’s image
and likeness. St. John of Damascus taught that “Repentance is the returning
from the unnatural to the natural state, from the devil to God, through
discipline and repentance.”[15] The return to the natural state is a process
of the healing of the soul from slavery to the passions, which requires in
marriage a sacrificial offering of both spouses in accordance with God’s salvific
purposes. There certainly is a difference
between desire in accord with humanity’s God-given nature and the passions that
disorient and distort those desires. For example, Chrysostom observed that “The
body has a natural desire, not however for fornication, or for adultery, but
simply for sexual intercourse. The body
has a natural desire not for gluttony, but simply for nourishment, and not for
drunkenness, but simply for drink.”[16] The
sacrificial offering of marriage directs those innate desires to their proper end
of bringing man and woman more fully in union with one another and with the
Lord.
St. Gregory
Palamas describes insightfully the ascetical struggle of sacrifice:
Will not the
passionate part of the soul, as a result of this [ascetical] violence, be also
brought to act according to the commandments?
Such forcing, by dint of habituation, makes easy our acceptance of God’s
commandments, and transforms our changeable disposition into a fixed
state. This condition brings about a
steady hatred towards evil states and dispositions of the soul; and hatred of
evil duly produces the impassibility which in turn engenders love for the
unique Good. Thus one must offer to God the passionate part of the soul, alive
and active, that it may be a living sacrifice.[17]
Such asceticism
is neither an escape from nor a repudiation of the body, but instead the
participation of the body—as well as the whole person-- in holiness. As Palamas noted, “so, too, in the case of
those who have elevated their minds to God and exalted their souls with divine
longing, their flesh also is being transformed and elevated, participating
together with the soul in the divine communion, and becoming itself a dwelling
and possession of God; for it is no longer the seat of enmity towards God, and
no longer possesses desires contrary to the Spirit.”[18] While
this statement arises from a monastic context, it is certainly applicable to
those who live in the world, including married couples. Marital asceticism does
traditionally concern restraint in matters of intimacy, but it is surely not
limited to them. Through the many struggles of their shared life, husband and
wife possess an almost limitless number of opportunities to deny themselves out
of love for one another, their children, and family members. For example, Chrysostom advised married
couples to
Pray together at
home and go to Church; when you come back home, let each ask the other the
meaning of the readings and prayers. If
you are overtaken by poverty, remember Peter and Paul, who were more honored
than kings or rich men, though they spent their lives in hunger and
thirst. Remind one another that nothing
in life is to be feared, except offending God.
If your marriage is like this, your perfection will rival the holiest of
monks.[19]
Fr. Stanley
Harakas observes that marriage and family provide the context “in which most
Orthodox Christians…grow toward theosis.” Given the great challenges presented to
holiness by difficulties encountered in family life, he notes that a
relationship which images the loving union of the Holy Trinity is possible only
when the spouses intentionally offer themselves to God as the “third partner”
in the marriage. In such a context, husband and wife may “contribute to making
the home—for parents and children alike—a workshop for growth toward theosis.”[20]
The common
Orthodox ascetical practice of periodic abstinence from marital relations must
be seen in proper context, for it does not imply that sexual union is sinful or
should be repudiated by all married couples.
Fr. John Chryssavgis notes that the petitions of the wedding service
itself present chastity as “the integrity of the human person” open to the
couple, not simply as physical virginity.
In prayers that recall fertile married couples from the Old Testament
and pray for similar blessings for the bride and groom, the service “shows no
reservation towards sexuality, no trace of despicability, or even suspicion.”[21]
From its first centuries, the Church has rejected Gnostic and Manichean
condemnations of the goodness of the physical body, as well as of sexual union
in marriage. St. Gregory the Theologian affirmed
marriage with great rhetorical force:
Are you not yet
wedded to flesh? Fear not this
consecration; you are pure even after marriage.
I will take the risk of that. I
will join you in wedlock. I will dress
the bride. We do not dishonor marriage
because we give a higher honor to virginity.
I will imitate Christ, the pure Groomsman and Bridegroom, as He both
wrought a miracle at a wedding and honored wedlock by His presence. Only let marriage be pure and unmingled with
filthy lusts. This only I ask: receive safety from the Gift and give to the
Gift the oblation of chastity in its due season, when the fixed time of prayer
comes around.[22]
Marital
fasting is a tool for directing the desires of husband and wife to God and for
the healing of unhealthy passions. When
couples agree to abstain from relations in order to devote themselves to more
focused prayer for a period of time, they direct their desire for communion
ultimately to the heavenly banquet of which their marital union is a sign. They recognize that even the most blessed
marriage on earth does not manifest fully the “one flesh” union with one
another and with God to which they are called.
As H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., notes, the marital fast enables spouses
to “seek enjoyment without being distracted by a self-indulgence that turns
one’s heart from God…The goal is to delight in God’s creation without being
mastered by this delight, to find in this enjoyment rightly taken an
opportunity through which to pass beyond this enjoyment to His Kingdom…”[23] The
point is not legalism, but eschatological hope for greater participation in the
life of God by the man and woman who wear the crowns of the Kingdom. Evdokimov notes on these matters that “the
Church offers only elements for a basis of judgment. She exerts no constraint; her task is to free
man [and woman] from all forms of enslavement in order to make him [and her]…
free citizen[s] of the Kingdom.”[24]
A parallel with the Eucharist is helpful
here. Fasting from food does not imply
that the fruits of the earth are evil. The
problem is that corrupt human beings typically have unnatural attachments to
food, drink, and other sources of pleasure.
Fasting provides an opportunity to reorient one’s desires for
fulfillment from the stomach to the Lord and to keep the blessing of physical
nourishment in its proper place. Moreover, the innate human desires for food
and drink are not evil in themselves. But
they certainly are corrupted and play a paradigmatic role in the disintegration
of humanity from the beginning of the biblical narrative. In the Eucharist, however, the very purposes
of physical nourishment are fulfilled and restored as bread and wine become our
participation in the life and fellowship of heaven.
In order to
feast rightly at the heavenly banquet, we must fast at times from lesser ones. Self-restraint
with reference to physical appetites is necessary for the celebration of the
Eucharist. The servers must certainly refrain
from consuming the gifts before the service begins. The self-restraint of fasting from other food
and drink in preparation for the Eucharistic feast does not imply that the
desire to satisfy daily hunger and thirst are somehow sinful, but instead reorients
our appetites toward communion with God and one another. As with marriage, some level of sacrifice is
necessary in order to participate in the fullness of the blessings already
foreshadowed in the world as we know it.
While Eucharist and marriage do not call those who participate in them
to abstain completely from the bodily pleasures of nourishment or intimacy,
they do call for spouses and communicants to join their lives more fully to the
one offering of the Son, which requires ascetical struggle in various
forms. In both holy mysteries, humble
human gifts become our true personal participation in the heavenly
banquet.
The greatest
challenges in integrating Eucharist and marriage are not theoretical, as the texts
of the services and the writings of ancient and contemporary teachers describe
them clearly. In our ever changing
world, however, it is difficult to form men, women, and youth in ways that
enable them to embrace the deep connections of these holy mysteries. Perhaps a first step in that direction is to
resist the division between “religion” and “real life” so commonly assumed in
modern western culture. The conventional wisdom, adopted at least in practice
by many Orthodox, is that the distinctive teachings of the faith amount to
little more than sectarian idiosyncrasies that must be relegated to the private
sphere, where they become matters of mere personal preference that have little
to do with fulfilling the nature of the human person.[25] If Orthodox Christians are to make a credible
witness to the new life of the Kingdom, they must be formed through their
parishes and families to embrace a distinctive vocation. They must do so, not as a matter of arbitrary
sectarian preference or escape from reality, but as a persuasive sign that the path
they pursue is truly the salvation of the world. Parishioners must show in
their own lives that Eucharist and marriage serve the healing of human
brokenness, not simply religious ceremonies or antiquated customs.
In order for the
laity to live out this vocation with integrity, clergy, catechists, and other
teachers must instruct them on the deep interrelatedness of Eucharist and marriage. Since these holy mysteries are frequently
celebrated and quite familiar to parishioners, there is no shortage of
opportunities to challenge the laity to grow in their understanding of how they
impact daily life. It is also necessary
to identify and reject popular ideas and practices that corrupt the beliefs and
behavior of so many parishioners on questions of marriage, sexuality, and
family. If the Church does not address
these matters explicitly and effectively, it should not be surprising when the
dominant ethos of our times influences parishioners profoundly and negatively.
Of equal importance is the need to present the
ascetical dimensions of the Eucharist life and of marriage in ways that are not
reduced to legalism or rote traditionalism.
Since the matters at stake very much concern bodily appetites,
parishioners will find strength in fighting their passions and reorienting
their natural desires in holy ways through appropriate forms of self-denial with
food and other sources of pleasure.
The Eucharistic
theology of Schmemann is helpful at this point, for he teaches that
the world to
come in which we participate in the Divine Liturgy is our same world, already perfected in Christ, but not yet in us. And since God has created the world as food
for us and given us food as means of communion with Him, of life in Him, the
new food of the new life which we receive from God in His Kingdom is Christ Himself. He is our bread—because from the very
beginning all our hunger was a hunger for Him and all our bread was a symbol of
Him, a symbol that had to become reality….and all food, therefore, must lead us
to Him.[26]
Christ did not
obliterate hunger, food, or the body. Instead, He fulfilled them, making them more
real as channels of participation in the blessedness of the Kingdom. It is
incumbent upon those who receive the Eucharist to display a life in this world which
bears witness to Christ’s divinization of the human being. Our participation in
the Eucharistic offering is not limited to the service of the Divine Liturgy,
but must permeate every dimension of our life in the world, including what
secular society thinks of as the “real life” matters at stake in sex, marriage,
and family. Otherwise, we have failed to embrace the truth that “Christ has offered all that exists…We are included
in the Eucharist of Christ and Christ is our Eucharist.”[27] Hence,
Schmemann claims that the calling of the priesthood is “to reveal to each
vocation its priestly essence, to make the whole life of all men the liturgy of
the Kingdom, to reveal the Church as the royal priesthood of the redeemed
world.”[28]
Schmemann
teaches that the same is true of holy matrimony, for the entrance of bride and
groom into the Church “does not merely symbolize, but indeed is the entrance of marriage into the
Church, which is the entrance of world into ‘the world to come’, the procession
of the people of God—in Christ—into the Kingdom.” The glory of humankind as the
king of creation in Genesis finds fulfillment in each new family blessed as “a
kingdom, a little church, and therefore a sacrament of and way to the Kingdom.”[29] The spouses’ crowns of martyrdom reject the
idolization of the family—and of romance, sex, social respectability, personal
happiness and of other worldly values—and serve as signs of the ultimate
reality in which their marriage enables them to participate.[30] The
common vocation of human beings is also that of married people: “to follow
Christ in the fullness of His priesthood:
in His love for man and the world, His love for their ultimate
fulfillment in the abundant life of the Kingdom.”[31]
In a world with
very different understandings of what marriage is about, Orthodoxy calls
husbands and wives to live eucharistically. The Church today must discern how
to form communicants and spouses who recognize and embrace the deep
interrelation of Eucharist and marriage as signs of the salvation of the
world. To do so is not only for the
extraordinarily pious or merely a charming idiosyncrasy of a particular religious
or ethnic heritage. It is, instead, an
imperative that arises from our very nature as human beings in the image and
likeness of God, who invites man and woman to dine at the heavenly banquet and
to wear the martyrs’ crowns of those who find new life in His Kingdom.
[1] This paper was presented at the
International Symposium on “The Mission of the Parish and the Monastery in a
Continuously Changing World,” Faculty of Orthodox Theology, Babes-Bolyai
University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, November 3, 2015.
[2] Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality (Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
1984), 224, observes that “People do not gather in the churches to constitute
the body of the Church, to manifest and realize the true life of the communion
of persons; they come to satisfy their individual religious needs and pray as
individuals, in parallel with the rest of the congregation, more alone perhaps
than on the sports-ground or at the cinema.”
[3] This paper draws on earlier
treatments of these themes in Philip LeMasters, Toward a Eucharistic Vision of Church, Family, Marriage, and Sex (Minneapolis,
MN: Light & Life Publishing Co.,
2004), 52ff. For discussions of the
relationship between Eucharist and marriage, see also John Meyendorff, Marriage:
An Orthodox Perspective (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 20-24;
and John Breck, The Sacred Gift of
Life: Orthodox Christianity and
Bioethics (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 93.
[4] St. John Chrysostom, “Homily
20,” On Marriage and Family Life,
Catherine P Roth and David Anderson, trans., (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997,) 51.
[5] St. Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 60-61.
[6] Vigen Guroian, Incarnate Love (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 87-88.
[7] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998),
135ff., 140-141.
[8] Paul Evdokimov, The Sacrament of Love (Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995),
124.
[9] David C. Ford, Women and Men in the Early Church: The Full Views of St. John Chrysostom
(South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1996), 47.
[10] Ford, Women and Men in the Early Church, 51-54. See also Lawrence R.
Farley, One Flesh: Salvation Through Marriage in the Orthodox
Church (Chesterton, IN: Ancient
Faith Publishing, 2013), 93ff.
[11] St. John Chrysostom, “Homily
20,” On Marriage and Family Life, 52.
[12] Ford, Women and Men in the Early Church, 67-68.
[13] St. John Chrysostom, “Homily
20,” On Marriage and Family Life, 57.
[14] Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things:
The Moral Imagination in Politics, Literature, and Every Day Life
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), 127.
[15] St. John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Bk. 2,
Ch. XXX in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
Second Series, vol. 9, 43.
[16] St. John Chrysostom, Homily V on Ephesians as quoted in Ford,
Women and Men in the Early Church,
131.
[17] St. Gregory Palamas, The Triads (Mahwah, NY: Paulist Press, 1983),
55, II.ii.20.
[18] St. Gregory Palamas, The Triads, 47-48, I.ii.1.
[19] St. John Chrysostom, “Homily
20,” On Marriage and Family Life,
61-62.
[20] Stanley Harakas, Living the Faith (Minneapolis, MN: Light & Life Publishing Co., 1993),
241-242, 245, 254.
[21] John Chryssavgis, Love, Sexuality, and the Sacrament of
Marriage (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross
Orthodox Press, 2005), 25-26.
[22] St. Gregory the Theologian,
“Oration 40,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, 2nd series, Vol. 7, 365, as cited in Ford, Women and Men in the Early Church,
32-33. This discussion of marital
asceticism draws on an earlier treatment of these themes in LeMasters, The Goodness of God’s Creation: How to Live as an Orthodox Christian
(Salisbury, MA: Regina Orthodox Press,
2008), 25ff.
[23] H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., The Foundations of Christian Bioethics
(Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger
Publishers, 2000), 243-244.
[24] Evdokimov, 176.
[25] The practices and trends of the larger society
present temptations too strong to be resisted by simple appeals to preference
or the curious habits of religious groups.
It is one thing to affirm religious liberty in the social sphere out of
respect for the freedom of persons to believe and worship as choose. It is
another, however, to make secularism normative in a way that obscures the
urgency of the Church’s vocation to call human beings to become more fully who
God created them to be in His image likeness.
[26] Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 43.
[27] Schmemann, 36.
[28]Schmemann,
93.
[29]
SChmemann, 89.
[30]
Schmemann, 91.
[31]
Schmemann, 94.
