Sexualizing the Eucharist?

A reader writes:

I am Orthodox and have been going to a Western Rite parish. But my son and I are pretty convinced about the role of the successor of St. Peter, so we’ve been attending Catholic Mass early in the morning before work and last night we went to an RCIA class.

The priest is a nice guy, but he said that receiving the Eucharist is like God making love to us. . . . What???

So . . . the Father likes to make love to his children? Is this the type of thinking that has led to pedophilia and rape among the ranks of the clergy?

Have you ever heard this before about the Eucharist? Can you help?

Thank you very much for writing! I think I can be of assistance.

I have heard of this concept before. Some have used language that employs a sexual metaphor for the Eucharist, though I am unaware of any document of the Church’s Magisterium that does so.

It sounds like, in this case, the concept was explained in a particularly unfortunate way that omitted important elements needed to properly understand the idea.

For those who use the metaphor, it is not meant to be homosexual in nature.

 

Christ and His Bride, the Church

Instead, the concept is based on the New Testament’s bridal imagery regarding Christ and his Church. This imagery is found in a number of New Testament books, and it is used in a particularly striking way in Ephesians, where St. Paul writes:

For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.  As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject 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, 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.

Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

“For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church (Eph. 5:25-32).

In this imagery, Christ is—naturally—seen as masculine and the Church as feminine.

As members of Christ’s Church, individual Christians can be seen as functioning in a feminine, receptive role with respect to Christ and his masculine, active role.

The same principle can be used to envision every creature as functioning in a feminine, receptive role with respect to God our Creator and his masculine, active role.

This mode of thought is based on the fact that God (for all creatures) and Christ (for all Christians) displays masculine qualities by protecting, providing, and ruling, while we display the corresponding feminine qualities with respect to them.

The imagery is thus intrinsically heterosexual, regardless of the physical gender of an individual creature or Christian.

Concerning Christ and his bride, the Church, the question then arises whether there is a particular moment that could be considered analogous to the marital act.

 

New Birth in the New Testament

The answer may be surprising. St. Peter tells his readers:

You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God (1 Peter 1:23).

This relies on the ancient way of speaking in which a husband’s “seed” (Greek, spora or sperma—from which we get the obvious corresponding English word) is implanted in the wife like a seed in a field to produce offspring.

Peter says we as Christians have been born anew not by “perishable/corruptible” (Greek, phthartos) seed—i.e., not through corruptible human reproduction—but by “imperishable/incorruptible” seed, which he identifies as “the living and abiding word of God.”

The word which converts believers to Christianity is thus envisioned as God’s imperishable seed which brings to birth new children for God.

The thought is paralleled in John’s Gospel, where we read:

To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:12-13).

Here again we have the Christian new birth compared to and contrasted with human sexual reproduction (“not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man”; other translations: “nor of the will of a husband”) and associated instead with God’s action.

On this passage, British scholar George R. Beasley-Murray observes:

The successive phrases contrast birth from God with human begetting, and emphasize the inability of men and women to reproduce it. The plural haimata (commonly = “drops of blood”) alludes to the blood of the parents who beget and give birth; the “will of the flesh” denotes sexual desire; the will of “a male” (andros) has in view the initiative generally ascribed to the male in sexual intercourse (Word Biblical Commentary on John 1:13).

Although Peter and John express it in different ways, both invoke human sexual reproduction in comparison with Christian new birth.

Both state that spiritual birth is not by human reproductive means, and Peter in particular compares the male seed to the word of God that brings people to conversion, allowing the new birth itself to take place in the sacrament of baptism (cf. 1 Peter 3:21, John 3:3-8).

The New Testament thus employs a sexual comparison for the beginning of the Christian life and the new birth it entails.

 

What About the Eucharist?

If it’s possible to employ a sexual metaphor for the beginning of the Christian life, is there an aspect of ongoing Christian life where one can be employed?

Advocates of a sexual understanding of the Eucharist propose that there is: Just as the marital act is an ongoing, intimate, lifegiving exchange between husband and wife, so the Eucharist is an ongoing, intimate, and (spiritually) lifegiving exchange between Christ and the members of his Church.

According to this view, Christ performs the masculine role by giving himself to us in the Eucharist, and we perform the feminine role by receiving him in the Eucharist.

So that’s the basis of the view.

Is it possible to use a metaphor like this? Well, it’s possible in the sense that you can always draw an analogy between two things as long as they have points of similarity of some kind.

Does that mean this metaphor will always be helpful? No. Every analogy has its limits, because two things are never exactly the same.

In particular, when we take the male/female image of Christ and his Church and try to cash it out in terms of Christ and the individual Christian, problems can ensue, for the obvious reason that not every individual Christian is female.

To put it forthrightly: I am a man, and I don’t find it helpful in receiving Communion to think, “Something like a sexual act is taking place right now with respect to me.”

Ugh!

I can imagine many women not finding it helpful at that moment, either, but in the case of a man it can be especially unhelpful, for exactly the reason that the reader pointed out when he first heard the idea.

So while one can make an analogy between any two things that have points of similarity, I personally don’t find this a helpful analogy, and I don’t employ it. It has too much potential to lead to confusion or even scandal, especially if explained only briefly.

I hope this helps!