Sexuality and God's Love for the World

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The Great Analogy

God has made us men and women because He has made us for love, and that capacity for love is manifested even in the structure of our bodies. But in His great providential plan, our masculinity and femininity plays a deeper role even than that. Because God has willed that the love between a man and a woman, and specifically, between husband and wife, should be one of the primary analogies by which we understand the love between God and the world.

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Stages of that Analogy

God showed His love for humanity first in creation. The first human love he gave us was the love between a man and a woman, between Adam and Eve, as though we could best understand His love for and delight in us by looking at Adam’s love for and delight in Eve.

Throughout the Old Testament, God again and again explains His love for His people by comparing it to a man’s love for a woman, or a husband’s love for his wife. It’s a love that prompts God to be extravagantly generous, to perform impressive feats, to rescue His beloved in dramatic ways, and to become passionately jealous and hurt when His beloved abandons Him for other, false lovers.

God’s love for humanity, His willingness to fight and even die for His Bride, becomes physically real when He comes to earth Himself. When He comes as a man.

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Christ the Bridegroom

Jesus doesn’t just come as a King or a Savior. He comes as a Bridegroom. He comes as a Husband. He comes as a Man to win back His Bride.

He does that by being a Hero. By caring for the people, by pursuing His people, and by fighting for His people, and by being true to His people till death. In his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul says that the Church is Christ’s Bride, and Christ was the model husband by laying down His life for His bride.

In other words, Christ on the Cross is God trying to win back His wayward bride. Christ is God become man, giving everything for His bride.

This is the drama between the Creator and the Creation. It’s the love story between us and God. It’s no accident that when God’s perfect love for us took human form, it took the form of a man, Jesus Christ, and that when humanity’s perfect love for God took human form, it took the form of a woman, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Because masculinity and femininity are the original symbol of mutual love. They are the original symbol of God’s love for us, and the love with which we should respond to God.

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Standard for our Sexuality

So the love between a man and a woman is the privileged analogy for God’s love for us, but that also means that God’s love for us is the standard by which we are called to live our masculinity and femininity. To the extent that we engage our sexuality, it must have the same characteristics of God’s love for us.

If God’s love for us is generous, self-sacrificial, and above all, relentless, unconditional, never giving up, then that is how we are called to live our sexuality.

We don’t partner up with someone else just for the night, anymore than God just loves us for one small segment of human history.

We don’t just stay with our spouse only as long as we find it enjoyable and fulfilling, any more than Christ stays on His cross only as long as He finds it enjoyable and fulfilling.

Christ sets a new standard of love, where the new minimum is everything. That’s the new standard of sexual, married love. The new minimum is everything. If you give less than that, if you give less than your life, you’re just not giving enough.

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Robbing the World of the Primordial Analogy

If you’ve ever been a teacher, you know that the best way to teach a concept is by finding a good analogy. Well, the analogy that God has chosen to express His rapturous, unconditional love for us, His analogy for that is the love between man and woman, husband and wife, it’s married love.

But that means that when marriages break down, especially in the Church, we are destroying the power of that analogy. When marriages are embittered, when they are characterized by selfishness, and when the spouses eventually give up on each other, how can we say, “God loves you like this”? How can people believe in unconditional love when all the marriages in their experience are ready to go up in smoke when the conditions become too difficult?

It’s no surprise that faith begins to collapse in a society where marriage, where the love between a man and a woman, is collapsing everywhere.

So pray for marriages. Pray that they can be godly, loving, beautiful. Pray that men and women can love each other in a way that reflects how God loves us. Then we will more easily lead people everywhere to understand the goodness of God, and they will hopefully love Him in return.