These words of wisdom speak so eloquently of the compelling truth that in our body we are to serve God. This is especially so in Christian marriage, for it is in this unique of all relationships that a man and woman, in their bodies, join their lives to one another in total self-giving at the service of love and life. As God creates man in freedom, He does so in order that through the proper exercise of that freedom, man will offer himself back to God. Thus, by having offered themselves to the Lord, a Christian husband and wife become stewards of their bodies and, in their openness to love and life, fulfill the unitive and procreative meanings of marriage.
Human Freedom
The most generally understood and accepted definition of Christian stewardship is that it entails a lifestyle of total accountability and responsibility that acknowledges God as the Creator and ultimate owner of all. If we say, therefore, that in marriage a husband and wife are stewards of their bodies, then this must mean that they are not their own but that their bodies belong to someone else. In order to comprehend effectively the reality of stewardship of the body in Christian marriage, we must first fully understand the operative meaning of freedom in the human person.
How can we say that a man is free to give himself and at the same time declare that in essence he belongs to God? This leads to the question of why man was created in the first place. The answer is that it was because of love. And love, in order to be real, must be free and capable of giving itself. Love can never exist by itself. It must always be directed reciprocally toward an “other” in communion and established in freedom. But this freedom that is given to man can never be above love, which it constitutes, but rather must be subordinate to it. As St. Paul writes, “For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the fresh, but through love be servants of one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Galatians 5:13-14). Here, Paul seems to imply that there is accountability for the way in which we use our body. We are free but only in respect to the extent that we fulfill the law of love. In marriage, the opportunity arises in self-giving.
The Body as Gift
Our Holy Father John Paul II teaches:
As an incarnate spirit, that is a soul which expresses itself in a body and a body informed by an immortal spirit, man is called to love in his unified totality. Love includes the human body, and the body is made a sharer in spiritual love (Familiaris Consortio, 11).
The Scripture tells us that God made man and woman in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:26-27). We were made by love and for love. So, it is only in love that we can become “who we are” and thus attain that supernatural end for which we were created. And that love is most perfectly displayed in self-giving. It is by giving ourselves away that we discover ourselves. This finding of oneself in giving is beautifully expressed by John Paul II in his Catechesis on the Book of Genesis, which makes up part of his Theology of the Body:
In the mystery of creation, the woman was “given” to the man. On his part, in receiving her as a gift in the full truth of her person and femininity, man thereby enriches her. At the same time, he too is enriched in this mutual relationship. The man is enriched not only through her, who gives him her own person and femininity, but also through the gift of himself. The man's giving of himself, in response to that of the woman, enriches himself. It manifests the specific essence of his masculinity which, through the reality of the body and of sex, reaches the deep recesses of the “possession of self.” Thanks to this he is capable both of giving himself and of receiving the other's gift (Original Unity of Man and Woman: Catechesis on the Book of Genesis, General Audience of February 6, 1980).
We can see that in marriage, then, a man and a woman are not only stewards of their own body towards God but also of each other’s body; they are a gift to each other. Consequently, when they give their body to each other, it is an entrusting of one to the other, knowing that together, by finding themselves, they can fulfill the Creator’s two-fold commandment of love towards Him and towards neighbor. How can they do this? Our Holy Father explains in his book Love and Responsibility that it can only be realized by recognizing themselves as “persons.”
Stewardship of the Body in Love
What sets man (in maleness and femaleness) apart from all the creatures on earth is that God willed him for his own sake and made him in His image and likeness, endowing him with free will, which gives him the power to determine himself. This is what makes a human being a “person.” He cannot, therefore, be “used” as an object or a means to an end, or for the mere sake of pleasure. And as a person, he is a “good” towards which the only proper attitude is love. This is the “personalistic norm” that, according to John Paul II, provides an appropriate foundation for the commandment of love. Love, he says, is a unification of persons. Only then is it real love.
A man is to love his wife as he loves himself; together, they become “one flesh.” They are united not only bodily but also spiritually. St. Paul writes, “For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church, because we are members of His body” (Ephesians 5:29-30). The Holy Father adds:
In the union through love the body of the other becomes one's own in the sense that one cares for the welfare of the other's body as he does for his own. It may be said that the above-mentioned words, characterizing the “carnal” love which should unite the spouses, express the most general and at the same time, the most essential content. They seem to speak of this love above all in the language of agape (Life According to the Spirit: The Sacramentality of Marriage, General Audience of September 1, 1982).
In other words, when they share conjugal love through their body, it should be gentle and chaste, always with total regard for the other. This is how we know that we love God, when we love our neighbor as ourselves, when we love our spouse as ourselves. In sexual union, a man and woman express that love through their bodies and by this total self-donation of themselves as persons, they become one in love, a love that by its very nature demands exclusivity and indissolubility. This openness to love is one aspect of stewardship of the body in Christian marriage.
Stewardship of the Body in Life
To fulfill the Commandment of love, husband and wife must be not only at the service of love, but also of life. Theirs is a mission of “responsible parenthood” (Humanae vitae, 10). Here, man and woman are called to cooperate with God as procreators. As Familiaris Consortio states, “Fecundity is the fruit and the sign of conjugal love, the living testimony of the full reciprocal self-giving of spouses” (n.28). The Holy Father continues by saying that:
In its most profound reality, love is essentially a gift; and conjugal love, while leading the spouses to the reciprocal “knowledge” which makes them “one flesh,” does not end with the couple, because it makes them capable of the greatest possible gift, the gift by which they become cooperators with God for giving life to a new human person. Thus the couple, while giving themselves to one another, give not just themselves but also the reality of children, who are a living reflection of their love, a permanent sign of conjugal unity and a living and inseparable synthesis of their being a father and a mother (FC, 14).
Knowing, therefore, that their bodies have been capacitated for this transmission of life and that it is God’s will for them, a married couple “are not free to proceed completely at will, as if they could determine in a wholly autonomous way the honest path to follow; but they must conform their activity to the creative intention of God, expressed in the very nature of marriage and of its acts, and manifested by the constant teaching of the Church” (HV, 10). Thus, “anything” that would impede this openness to life becomes a misuse of the human body.
John Paul II reminds us that justice towards the Creator, on the part of man, consists of two elements: emphasis on the value of the “person” and obedience to the order of nature. God is the one to whom we owe our love and our life. He gives us to ourselves so that we might be capable of giving ourselves back to him and to one another. And, in Christian marriage, which aims at being in His service of love and life, this is manifested in a proper stewardship of the body.
A version of this article was published in the September 2001 issue of Lay Witness magazine.
