The previous two chapters were of a foundational nature: they were about ideas at the root of Christianity. Before we can even begin to discuss an issue as complex as homosexuality, we have to have a clear understanding of the difference between obedience to rules and the maturity of Christ-centered love. If we don’t understand that Paul’s goal was to teach us to grow in faith and wisdom as we “try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord” (Eph. 5:10) rather than to mechanically follow a set of laws, we can’t begin to understand his viewpoint on human sexuality.

When I first began to learn the truths I shared over the past two chapters, I felt joy, tinged with sorrow and shame. Joy because I was finally coming to realize the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love for me, and indeed, for the whole world. But sorrow because of the years I had spent believing in a gospel saddled with legalism, and shame because of all the times I had encouraged others to do the same.

But as I began to live these truths, the shame quickly began to melt away. This is because the shame was sprouting from my legalism; the new way of the Spirit is freeing precisely because it does away with the crippling sin-shame I had spent my whole life teaching myself to feel. This is one of the most wonderful paradoxes of true Christianity: by liberating us from the desire to shame and punish ourselves for our sins and failures, it actually gives us the freedom to grow out of them. Our faith is no longer centered around punishment, but around forgiveness, growth, and love. When we reach heaven’s gates, none of us will be able to claim that we knew perfectly, lived perfectly, or even strived perfectly. And that’s okay; our responsibility is not to be perfect, but to constantly repent and forgive. “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12, NIV).

Now, wielding these truths as our defense, and the Holy Spirit as our guiding light, we stand at the face of a great, unlit cavern. Life is cloaked in obscurity, and its moral challenges teem with complexity – if we consider the task before us with any humility, we can only proceed with fear and trembling. Our words have as much power to inflict harm as they do to heal, and our day-to-day actions effect slow, but lasting transformation in those around us, for good or ill. If we are truly who we say we are – followers of Christ, those forgiven and called to love – we never choose to live in passivity or defer the weight of our responsibility to others. Instead, our obedience is active and Spirit-led; we constantly question whether our actions, beliefs, and habits align with our call to love, and we humbly change course when we learn that we have misstepped and are causing harm.

It is with this perspective that we come to address the question of homosexuality. The question is simple: can a same-sex relationship be honoring to God? The answers, however, are manifold and complex. I have spent countless hours wrestling with countless perspectives on this question, all of them held sincerely and argued fiercely. Many have changed my thinking, and my current perspective draws on the wisdom of a diversity of passionate writers, speakers, and thinkers who agreed and disagreed with each other to varying extents. There is so much that is good, loving, and thoughtful in this conversation.

But I’ve also seen some broad trends in thought on this issue which are more damaging than helpful. One of these I want to deal with now, as it looks almost identical to the legalism we’ve discussed over the last two chapters: an excessive deference to symbolism.

Many proponents of a traditional view of marriage find the question of homosexuality to be simply answered by the symbolism of husband and wife. They point to Adam and Eve in Genesis, or Ephesians 5:22-33, a beautiful passage which describes the distinct symbolic roles a wife and a husband play in marriage. Seeing these roles, many Christians aptly note that there is no way for two married men or two married women to fully participate in that symbolism. But if we take this as our final proof that same-sex marriage is wrong, we are misunderstanding the purpose of symbolism. A broken symbol, like a broken law, is not the end of a conversation; it is the beginning of one. We do not serve our symbols, nor do we worship them. Rather, our symbols serve us – their purpose is never to control us, but to remind us, moment by moment, to center our lives around the full expression of God’s love.

Remembrance

In Chapter 1, we examined Jesus’ words and actions on the Sabbath in Mark 2, with a focus on his willingness to break the law. But let’s return to that passage and look at it from a slightly different angle – the angle of symbolism:

One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. And the Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?” And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:23-28)

This conversation is framed around lawfulness, but the attendant symbolism is just as relevant. The Sabbath is a symbol of God’s rest, and the bread of the Presence, which David and his followers ate unlawfully, was one of many symbols in the Temple representing God’s holiness. Jesus wasn’t ignorant of this symbolic value when he said what he said. But just like our earlier close reading of this passage vis-à-vis the law, it should be pretty clear that Jesus cared more about his disciples’ day-to-day afflictions (hunger, in this case) than upholding the symbol. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” What Jesus is implying here is that we were not created to serve our symbols; our symbols were created to serve us. Needlessly sacrificing ourselves on the altar of a symbol is the very asceticism Paul refers to in Colossians 2:23. In fact, this should all sound very familiar – it’s nearly identical to the legalism that we covered in the previous two chapters.

But that doesn’t mean that symbolism and the law are the same. To the contrary, symbolism and the law serve quite distinct purposes, and we should be careful not to assume that we have “graduated” from symbolism in the same way that we have matured past the law. Though the law has been fulfilled, symbols remain central to our religion. Take the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist as perhaps the foremost example. Though there’s no consensus among the many branches of Christianity on what qualifies as a sacrament, or their role in our salvation, there is at least broad consensus that these two rites are, at least in part, symbols of great importance to our faith.

The continued relevance of symbolism makes perfect sense if we understand what symbols are. In the broadest sense, a Christian symbol is an object of remembrance – something that reminds us of a sacred truth even greater than itself. The bread and wine Jesus passed out to his disciples on the night he was betrayed was symbolic of his body, which was to be broken, and his blood, which was to be shed. Our participation in communion is itself symbolic of that night: as Jesus requested, we continue to “do this in remembrance of [him],” and in doing so, we “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:25-26). Our baptism is symbolic of our salvation – the passage through water brings to mind the concept of a new birth, as well as the blood of Jesus, which “cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

This is not to say that these rituals are only symbolic. Although most Protestants believe that water baptism is not strictly necessary for salvation, and that the body and blood of Christ are not physically present in the Eucharist, many other Christians disagree and see the symbolism of these actions as secondary to their salvific purpose. And even those of us who see these actions as primarily symbolic don’t see them as only symbolic. Baptism doesn’t just remind the believer of their own salvation; it also serves as an occasion of celebration for the local church. And when we take Communion, we are not only doing it to remember Christ’s sacrifice, but also to break bread and deepen our bonds with one another as a community of believers.

I also don’t mean to imply that symbolic value is isolated from practical value. To the contrary, symbolic value is inherently practical, because to remember is to reorient. What we think, what we know, what we believe: these are the bases of what we do and how we live. But unfortunately, we are easily distracted from our values and we are constantly forgetting God’s faithfulness. It is not enough to learn something once if we want to live by it – we must also compel ourselves to remember it. For this reason, it isn’t a stretch to say that our very ability to live out our faith depends in large part upon the symbols we uphold. In a world of distractions, it is our symbols which reorient our lives toward God.

Husband and Wife

Symbols, then, are of remarkable importance to all Christians who want to continually align themselves with God’s love. And it’s not surprising that many hold the symbol of marriage in especially high regard – marriage between the two sexes, male and female, is actually the very first symbol explicitly set up in the Bible. We read in Genesis 1:27 that God created both men and women in his image, then in Genesis 2, we learn about that process in greater detail. After God makes Adam and places him in the Garden of Eden, He declares in Genesis 2:18: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Finding no animal suitable for the job, God puts Adam to sleep, takes one of his ribs, and fashions it into Eve. When Adam awakes, he’s ecstatic and calls her Woman. Then, the passage reads:

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)

There are many aspects of Genesis 1 and 2 that are symbolic, but this is the first time we are told that one thing represents something else. When we marry, we are to remember this story: that it was not good for the man to be alone, so God created him a helper called Eve, who was not merely an animal, but a fellow human – biologically distinct from him, but made of the very same body, and a joint bearer of God’s image. Marriage reminds us that humans, like God, are intrinsically relational. It is not good for us to be alone.

Of course, there are more than two humans now, and there are many more ways than marriage for us to be in relation with one another. That’s especially true for Christians, since we are already “one flesh” in another way: we are the body of Christ. Each of us serves as a “helper” to the rest, and the Church exists in large part so that we can live in loving relationship with one another.

But marriage is a valuable symbol because it is the clearest demonstration of our fundamental need for a perfect love: to love fully and to be fully loved, to know fully and to be fully known. Marriage makes this abstract concept tangible and memorable: “to love fully” becomes a commitment to live together as one, day by day, for the rest of our lives. The ideal of “sacrificial love” becomes the daily forgiveness, daily self-denial, and daily care-taking required by married life. Although we never do it perfectly, and though our marriages always look far from ideal, they remain symbolic: constant reminders that we were created for an even greater love.

Sex, an act in which two people physically embrace each other to the point of total union, is the physical aspect of this symbol of perfect love. And like the marriage vow, it has symbolic value because it grounds abstract love in tangible reality. Sex reminds us of the total vulnerability and total intimacy of perfect love. We are never more physically vulnerable to another than when we are having sex with them, and rarely are we more emotionally vulnerable. In a sexual encounter, we willingly surrender the fig leaves that protect us from both pain and shame and we trust that our sexual partner will not harm us in our most vulnerable state. And if our partner embraces our unguarded self and extends to us the same vulnerability, our bond of love grows ever deeper.

The reason marriage is such a fitting context for sex is both practical and symbolic. Practically, marriage serves to ensure the safety of sex in two primary ways: First, heterosexual sex is the avenue through which new life is created, and it’s unwise to risk conception unless both participants are committed to raising a possible child (though infertility and the advent of birth control have made this situation far more complex than I dare to address in this book). Second, and just as important, the vulnerability of sex makes it a dangerous game to play in the absence of a commitment to total love. This vulnerability is why all forms of sexual abuse are so deeply scarring, and why the concept of “casual sex” seems to me to be misleading. Throughout history, an untold amount of physical and emotional harm has been (and continues to be) caused by the many among us who approach sex with a thoughtless and self-serving attitude. Sex is many things to many people, but it is rarely just “casual.”

Marriage also serves as a great context for the symbolic value of sex, because sex symbolizes perfect love and marriage is a commitment to love fully. Sex that is uncaring or selfish can hardly serve as a symbol of love, so engaging in sex within the context of the marriage commitment is a wonderful way to center and amplify its symbolic value.

Of course, sex within marriage can be unloving as well. Marriage is simply a promise to love, and we’re prone to breaking our promises. Far too many husbands (and some wives) use marriage as an excuse to abuse their spouses in their most vulnerable state, through coercion and sometimes even violence. Unloving sex, in whatever form it takes, is always wrong. Harmful sex within marriage can no more serve as a symbol of love than harmful sex outside of marriage can.

But that doesn’t mean that the marriage commitment is meaningless; to the contrary, the consequences of breaking the commitment show how deeply important the commitment is. Sex that is loving and honoring towards God is synonymous with sex that honors the marriage commitment – to love fully and unconditionally. This is why sex and marriage are so closely linked.

So we see that each of these symbols (marriage and sex) has both symbolic value and practical value. Both remind us of perfect love, and both also help us to love. Alongside the symbolism, marriage provides lifelong companionship and a safe context for sex, among many other mutual benefits, and sex brings great pleasure and a deeper bond of love between both partners, and sometimes even creates new life.

This dual purpose is common for symbols. The Sabbath, for example, provides great practical value to those who observe it by forcing them to rest. Even the bread of the Presence was intended to be eventually eaten by the priests for their own physical nourishment. The symbolic value helps us to remember, and the practical value helps us to love. It is important to recognize this duality, because, as we’ll soon see, both aspects come into play when we consider how to deal with symbols in unusual circumstances.

As Christ Loved The Church

But before we move on to discuss how we should react to the symbolism of marriage, we must finish the work of describing that symbolism. And no description of the symbolic purpose of marriage is complete unless it does justice to the most influential Biblical passage on marriage, Ephesians 5:22-33:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. (Eph. 5:22-33)

We won’t spend a significant time here discussing the particular roles Paul specifies for each gender; for our purposes, it suffices to say that Paul’s idea of marriage includes precisely one male and one female, with different, symbolic roles. This passage is often used along with Genesis 2:18 to argue that all marriages must conform to this standard in order to exemplify God’s ideal design.

But that reading seems to result from a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the passage, and the marriage symbol. Paul is actually making a much grander argument about marriage here, which we often miss because of our tendency to read this passage for its rules rather than its meaning.

In the passage, Paul explains that married couples should strive to emulate the relationship between Christ and the Church. He points out, as I noted above, that just as a married couple is “one flesh,” the Church is “the body of Christ.” But while this may seem like nothing more than a coincidence, Paul argues that it isn’t coincidental at all – it’s by design. That’s what he means in verses 31-32, which are often overlooked, but which are actually the crux of the passage. Here, Paul quotes the first symbol in Genesis and calls it a “profound mystery.” But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to tell us exactly what the mystery means: “I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”

This may not immediately strike you as strange or controversial, but its implications are very interesting. Earlier, I referred to marriage as symbolic of our need for a perfect love, our fundamental desire to know fully and to be fully known. Note, however, that marriage is not itself this perfect love. It’s impossible for two sinful people to love each other perfectly. A symbol reorients us towards something greater than itself; it is not itself the greater thing. But what is the greater thing in the case of marriage? From a simple reading of Genesis 2, it would appear that our marriages are meant to remind us of the first marriage – the original union between Adam and Eve, the first man and the first woman. But Paul claims that what our marriages actually symbolize is something entirely different.

Paul claims that Genesis 2:24 was not looking backward to Adam, but forward to Christ. Thousands of years before the Word became flesh, the author of Genesis set up a mysterious symbol, which Paul now claims was prophetic. It referred from the beginning to what would not be completed until the very end: that we would one day enter into perfect union with Christ, becoming “members of his body.” Paul is claiming that every marriage since Adam and Eve – including Adam and Eve – has been a symbolic reminder not of Adam and Eve, but of Christ and his Church.

This makes a great deal of sense if we begin to take a big-picture view of marriage. From the very beginning, it has never once lived up to the ideal of perfect and total union. When God gave Adam a wife, Adam probably thought he had been given an ideal partner, who would complement and satisfy him completely. But actually, things quickly went from bad to worse. He failed to communicate God’s instruction adequately, she got wrapped up with the wrong crowd and ended up dragging him into humanity’s first sin, and he immediately began to blame her and God for his own mistakes. Basically, they were your average married couple.

That’s a joke, but it’s also not. In our modern Christian culture, we tend to idolize Adam and Eve’s marriage. We often look at their union as the ideal standard of marriage and believe that any deviation from that standard is a deviation from God’s perfect plan. But in Ephesians 5, Paul reveals to us that Adam and Eve were never the true standard of marriage, nor were they God’s idea of a perfect union. Their union was flawed like the rest of our human marriages. The true anchor of marriage has always been Christ and the Church, and that’s the perfect union we should seek to make our marriages resemble. Male-female marriages, including Adam and Eve’s, are a symbol of an ideal and perfect union – no human marriage was ever intended to be that ideal and perfect union itself.

By all accounts, marriage is an incredibly beautiful institution. But this beauty, I think, has made us remarkably prone to forget one of the most repeated and important Biblical truths about marriage: human marriage is not an ideal state for any of us. As Jesus himself notes in Luke 20:34-36, there will be no marriage in heaven, because after the resurrection, we “cannot die.” In other words, marriage was only ever meant to be temporary. Elsewhere, when his disciples complain that marriage sounds really hard, his response is that it’s certainly not for everyone (Matt. 19:10-12). And Paul repeatedly recommends against getting married in 1 Corinthians 7 because those who marry will have their attentions divided between Christ and their spouse (though he allows that it’s better to marry than to “burn with passion”). Neither Paul nor Jesus ever married, and Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 9 that he chose to abstain from marriage for the sake of his ministry.

I am not saying any of this to denigrate marriage. Again, marriage is a wonderful institution with many practical benefits and great symbolic value. It is deeply important that we have symbols to reorient us, and the way that marriage points us to Christ is truly powerful.

But it’s important to emphasize the fact that our marriages will always be fundamentally imperfect, even if we emulate Adam and Eve’s marriage completely, simply because we are imperfect people. What’s more, our marriages were never intended to be perfect – their purpose as symbols is to point us to the truly perfect union. When we claim that any marriage that deviates in detail from Adam and Eve’s marriage is a deviation from God’s perfect plan, we lose sight of the true symbolic purpose of marriage and begin to worship the symbol instead of the greater thing it is meant to represent.

And that is the danger inherent in symbolism. Though our symbols are meant to help us, sometimes we unwittingly turn them into idols, ultimately hindering ourselves from being truly obedient to the will of God.

No Graven Image

If a poll were taken asking which of the Ten Commandments has the least relevance to modern Christians, I’m sure the second commandment would be one of the strongest contenders. We just don’t really know what to do with it. In addition to the uncomfortable part about visiting fathers’ iniquities on their great-grandchildren, it’s just plain confusing:

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exodus 20:4‭-‬6)

It’s easy to read this and get the impression that we aren’t supposed to make any kind of images of anything. Of course, the follow-up instruction to “not bow down to them or serve them” is a helpful clarification. It becomes clear that God is talking about the wood, stone, and gold statues – idols – that early tribes and civilizations built and worshipped. But modern religions have generally traded in their primitive idols in favor of the full-fledged “other gods” that the first commandment prohibits. It just isn’t clear what the second commandment has to do with modern living.

But when we talk about symbols, the second commandment begins to take on an unexpected resonance. A symbol is, in its essence, a graven image. It is a likeness of something “in heaven above,” carved not from wood or gold, but from ritual, from bread and wine, from the troubled water of a baptismal. And even as our symbols serve great purpose in our modern lives, they present perhaps the greatest modern opportunity for idolatry to take root.

I’m afraid that this has happened to a large extent with marriage. If you’ve spent enough time in American Protestant circles, you’ll have probably noticed that there is a lot of hand-wringing about the place of single people in the Church. This is strange, because Jesus and Paul engaged in no such hand-wringing. As I noted above, they were both single men, and as far as they were concerned, singleness was the default state of humanity. So how has it come to be that single people often feel excluded or devalued in Christian settings?

Single Christians constantly get the message, explicitly or implicitly, that marriage is the fulfillment of human destiny, and that there is something wrong with them if they can’t or won’t get married. This is neither natural nor appropriate. To the contrary, it is what happens when we begin to worship a symbol rather than the greater truth that it represents.

The perfect union between Christ and the Church is eternal and designed for all of us to participate in; marriage is only temporary and for the subset of us who choose it despite Paul and Jesus’s warnings. The perfect union of Christ and the Church is between a perfect God and a Church that has been sanctified, “holy and without blemish”; marriage is between two sinful people who can never quite offer each other perfect love. Marriage never looks exactly like Christ and the Church, because it isn’t Christ and the Church. It’s a symbol of Christ and the Church – a constant reminder, through its victories and its failures, of the perfect love that only Christ can give.

And yet, we have begun to worship marriage as if it were itself that perfect love. And when we bow down to a graven image, we begin to lose sight of its greater symbolic purpose. Rather than allowing marriage to reorient us toward our coming union with Christ, we have begun to cite, against the evidence, that marriage between a man and a woman is God’s plan for humanity. We take Paul’s beautiful and insightful revelation in Ephesians 5 and strip from it nearly all of its Christ-centered symbolic purpose, leaving only the words “husbands” and “wives.” Strikingly, some even argue that Paul’s comparison of marriage to Christ and the Church is proof that male-female marriage is the ideal union. Do you see how this is an inversion of Paul’s message? He writes to tell us that we should orient our marriages to reflect Christ’s ideal union as best we can, but instead we read from his words that Christ’s union is an example which proves that male-female marriage is itself an ideal. Do you see how this is exactly the sort of reversal that happens when there is idolatry in our hearts?

The isolation and devaluation that single Christians feel won’t be solved by changing our rhetoric or by rearranging our small groups. We will only be truly inclusive of single people when we recognize and repent from our desire to uphold marriage as an idol.

I don’t mean to sound alarmist. Again, marriage is good, and we’re not wrong to encourage it. But it’s only a symbol of an ideal union, not an ideal union itself. There’s a reason God chose to include the second commandment when some of us might have thought that the first commandment alone would do. Just as we are prone to lying, stealing, adultery, and all kinds of covetousness, we are also prone to worshipping our symbols. This impulse is strong enough that we often get so deeply wrapped up in serving the symbol that we begin to forget the greater thing that it symbolizes.

By way of example, let’s examine another case concerning Jesus and the Sabbath. As we discussed in the first chapter, Jesus seemed quite fond of doing good works on the Sabbath, despite the considerable distress that it caused to the law-abiding Jewish authorities. But what is less commonly noted is that he also often seemed indifferent to the work that others performed on the Sabbath. Here’s one of my favorite examples:

Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaica called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.

Now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.” But he answered them, “The man who healed me, that man said to me, ‘Take up your bed, and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” (John 5:2-17)

Jesus, of all people, knew the practical benefits of a Sabbath rest. He knew also what it symbolized – the rest God takes on the seventh day of Creation. He knew, even, that the Sabbath was enshrined in law as the fourth of the Ten Commandments. But, crucially, he didn’t idolize the Sabbath. He knew that it was only a symbolic representation of God’s true Sabbath rest, which we have yet to enter (Hebrews 4:1-11). And so, despite the Sabbath’s outsized importance, he was remarkably lenient about it when he saw that it would get in the way of the healed man’s fairly basic practical needs.

It’s important to note that Jesus didn’t have to tell this man to take up his bed and walk. Imagine if, after healing the man, Jesus had told him this instead: “Your legs are healed, so feel free to run home and celebrate with your friends and family! But just remember, today’s the Sabbath so you’ll have to leave your bed here. I know it’s probably your only possession, and it’ll probably be stolen if you leave, but hey, rules are rules. If you’re really so concerned about it, you can always just wait here until tomorrow!”

This would have made for an inconvenient day or some delayed gratification for the healed man, but probably nothing worse than that. In fact, many of us routinely say something very similar in an even higher stakes situation – our standard line to people with same-sex attractions: “You’re saved and forgiven of your sins, so feel free to enjoy your freedom and be an active member of our church community! But just remember, marriage is only for opposite-sex partners, so you’ll have to stay celibate. I know you want to experience the beauty of marriage like the rest of us, but hey, rules are rules. If you’re really so concerned about it, you can always just marry someone of the opposite sex!”

Now, I understand that many people have concerns about gay marriage beyond claims about the symbolic purpose of marriage, and I don’t mean to make light of those concerns. We will deal carefully with them in the next chapter. But if your concern is that marriage between a man and a woman is an important symbol that gay marriage desecrates, I encourage you to consider the parallels here, and to pay careful attention to what Jesus did instead.

Because despite the insignificance of the healed man’s plight, Jesus instructed him to disregard the Sabbath restriction. Why? Because he knew that this man had been resting for 38 years! Like most symbols, including marriage, the Sabbath has both symbolic and practical purpose: it helps us to remember God’s seventh-day rest, and it gives us some rest of our own. Jesus knew that the healed man needed no rest of his own, so the only value the Sabbath provided in this case was symbolic.

Does this mean that Jesus is teaching that we should ignore symbols when they lose their practical value? I actually don’t think that’s quite what he does here. His approach is more nuanced than that. If you remember, back in the first chapter, we examined another Sabbath healing. There, Jesus re-framed the Sabbath restrictions in a way that is valuable to think about in terms of symbolism:

Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come here.” And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. (Mark 3:1-5)

As I noted in the first chapter, Jesus’s question here is nonsensical within a legalistic framework. There is no provision in the Law about whether we can do good or harm, or save life or kill, on the Sabbath. But Jesus wants his listeners to leave behind their legalistic framework and instead view the Sabbath restrictions through a better lens – the two great commandments: to love God, and to love others as ourselves.

It’s clear that Jesus uses this lens not just for the law, but for the entirety of the Old Testament. He implies as much when he introduces the two great commandments by saying that “on these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:40). So when, at Bethesda, he tells the healed man to take up his bed and walk, I don’t think he’s disregarding the symbolism of the Sabbath. Rather, I think he’s honoring it – but in a way that might seem nonsensical to a person who has taken the symbol as their idol.

Seeing that the Sabbath rest had lost its practical value, I think Jesus decided that he still wanted to honor the greater thing that the Sabbath represents, but in a way that fit the circumstances. Perhaps he thought that, for this man who had been paralyzed for 38 years, honoring God’s rest was not a matter of laying down, but a matter of joyously exercising the abilities he had for so long been denied. Perhaps he thought that, after 38 years, the best way for the man to honor God’s rest would be through a little bit of Jubilee. Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man. The symbolic purpose of the Sabbath is to remind us of something greater. If the specific rules of the Sabbath needed to be amended in order to achieve that symbolic purpose in a way that made sense, Jesus was perfectly happy to instruct the man to make the symbol fit his circumstance.

It may not be obvious how this is relevant to marriage. It strikes me as relevant in two very important ways:

1. Just as the Sabbath is a reminder of God’s rest, marriage is a reminder of Christ’s love for the Church. And just as Jesus instructed the healed man to honor the Sabbath in a way that fit his circumstances, we should feel empowered to honor Christ’s love for the Church in ways that fit our circumstances. If two men or two women want to marry each other and are able to honor Christ’s love for the Church in their same-sex marriage, they should feel free to do so, from a symbolic standpoint.
2. Just as Jesus was primarily concerned about the practical usefulness of the Sabbath restrictions, we should be primarily concerned with the practical usefulness of our marriage restrictions. It is abundantly clear that marriage has practical benefits for a person with same-sex attractions – the benefits are identical in almost every way to the benefits of heterosexual marriage.

Now, a skeptical reader might protest that this line of thinking opens the door to all sorts of debauchery. What if it starts to feel impractical or unloving to keep sex within marriage? they might ask. Should we then just have sex with anyone? Should gay men leave their wives for same-sex marriages? Should we just do whatever feels loving?

This is an important question, and it is actually quite similar to the question Paul poses to himself in Romans 6:1: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” Paul’s answer is “By no means!” and my answer is much the same. Remember, Jesus reframed the Sabbath through the lens of love, and Christians should strive to do the same with marriage.

Earlier, we discussed the practical purposes of sex, and why sex that is loving honors the marriage commitment. We also discussed the practical purposes of marriage, and how a lifelong commitment of love confers many benefits on a couple. These basic principles are true regardless of the gender of the married couple. It is difficult, impossible even, to demonstrate how a love commitment between two men or two women is inherently unloving. On the contrary, when we look through the lens of love, we can easily see the harm in divorce or adultery. As we discussed in the previous two chapters, it is our job as Christians to “walk by the Spirit” and discern what is loving. This discernment should guide our behavior, not a set of inflexible and legalistic restrictions.

Ultimately, if we hold the symbolic restrictions of marriage in higher regard than our sense of love, then we have taken the marriage symbol as our idol, and diverged sharply from Jesus’s path.

Marriage Was Made for Man, Not Man for Marriage

My point has been made, but there are a lot of complexities in this chapter, and I think it will be helpful if we draw them all together concisely. To that effect, here is a point-by-point summary:

1. Symbols exist to help us remember something greater, but they aren’t the greater thing itself.
2. Symbols also serve practical purpose.
3. The “greater thing” that the symbol of marriage points to is not Adam and Eve’s original marriage, but Christ and the Church.
4. Worshipping symbols is idolatry. When we begin to believe male-female marriage is the ideal for human relationships, we are worshipping the symbol instead of the thing it is meant to represent. It is untrue that male-female marriage is ideal, and we do harm to both single people and those with same-sex attractions when we pretend that it is.
5. When a symbol’s restrictions are not practically useful, Jesus’s example shows that we should honor its symbolic purpose in a way that best helps us to love God, others, and ourselves, instead of trying to contort ourselves to fit the symbol.
6. Preventing same-sex couples from marrying has no practical purpose; in fact, it prevents them from experiencing the practical benefits of marriage. If a same-sex couple wants to honor Christ and the Church in their imperfect marriage, just as heterosexual couples try to honor Christ and the Church in their imperfect marriages, there is no reason why they would be unable to.

Note that this argument is narrow in scope: it is only about the symbolic value of marriage, and it says nothing about why Paul condemns homosexuality. For this reason, I don’t consider this chapter to stand alone as an answer to the question of homosexuality, nor do I expect it to fully change anyone’s mind on the issue. But I do hope it demonstrates why it is wrong to claim that the symbolism of marriage precludes same-sex marriages.

Now, with all this talk of symbolism fresh in our minds, there is one last passage that we can and should address. Although, to the acute frustration of many, Jesus says nothing at all on the topic of homosexuality, there is one conversation in the gospel of Matthew which some consider to be proof that Jesus only allows for heterosexual marriage. Let’s examine it now with our newfound clarity on symbolism:

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.” (Matthew 19:3-12)

Of course, what is most notable about this passage is Jesus’s teaching on divorce, not homosexuality. But it is often argued from this passage that, by acknowledging that God “made them male and female,” Jesus is upholding male-female marriage as God’s original plan for marriage, and implicitly condemning same-sex marriage. I do understand the appeal of this argument, but it ultimately fails to understand the symbol of marriage as we’ve just discussed it at length.

It is wrong to assume that, by mentioning the original context of the symbol, Jesus is saying that that context is the only way to honor the purpose of the symbol. In other words, the fact that Jesus affirms one thing doesn’t mean that he condemns all things that aren’t exactly like that one thing. Jesus shows us on the Sabbath that there is more than one way to honor the purpose of a symbol. It is idolatry that leads us to claim that all marriages must look exactly like the first marriage to be legitimate or to have practical and symbolic purpose. Jesus makes no such claim whatsoever. What Jesus does passionately defend is the binding love commitment of marriage, which truly is necessary to symbolize Christ and the Church.

This makes perfect sense; the Pharisees were asking about divorce, not homosexuality. Some even argue that Jesus’s peculiar explanation of three types of eunuchs at the end of the passage is a tacit endorsement of homosexuality, though I wouldn’t go that far. The truth is that Jesus isn’t recorded ever talking about homosexuality. Our attempts to read arguments about homosexuality into this passage says more about our desire to find answers to this difficult question than it does about Jesus’s thoughts on the issue. And our attempt to read symbolic legalism into his plain quotation of Genesis says more about our worship of the marriage symbol than it does about our worship of Jesus.

With this in mind, I have only one parting request: that as we move forward to the final chapter with eyes that see and ears that hear, and as we strive to deal carefully and honestly with Paul’s words on homosexuality, let us please leave our idols at the door.