Scripture Daily

Context No. 621 of 4322 · 1 Corinthians

Context · Reflection

1 Corinthians 7:1-5: in context

1Now concerning the things about which you wrote to me: it is good for a man not to touch a woman. 2But, because of sexual immoralities, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband. 3Let the husband give his wife the affection owed her, and likewise also the wife her husband. 4The wife doesn’t have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise also the husband doesn’t have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5Don’t deprive one another, unless it is by consent for a season, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer, and may be together again, that Satan doesn’t tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

Paul is answering questions the Corinthians had written to him about marriage and the body, and what he says about the marriage relationship would have been striking in his culture and is worth hearing carefully in ours. He tells husband and wife to give each other their due, and then he frames it with a symmetry that cuts against every hierarchy of his day: the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Read both halves together, because the balance is the point. It is not a one-way ownership. Each spouse belongs to the other; each has a claim on the other; the obligation and the authority run in both directions equally.

That is a picture of love as mutual self-giving, not self-assertion. In the marriage Paul describes, I do not hold onto my own body as my exclusive property to do with as I please; I have given myself to the other, and received the other's self-giving in return. Neither person is merely taking, and neither is merely giving; both belong to each other. And he adds that they should not deprive one another, except by mutual consent for a season of prayer, guarding the relationship as a place of generous, reciprocal self-giving rather than selfish withholding or selfish demand. The whole vision is symmetrical: two people who have handed themselves to each other.

That principle of mutual belonging reaches well beyond marriage into how I love anyone closest to me. My instinct in relationships is to assert myself, to hold onto my own rights and preferences, to take what I want and give grudgingly. Paul describes something else entirely: a bond where I belong to the other and they to me, where love is mutual self-giving rather than self-assertion. In my closest relationships, am I operating out of that mutual, generous self-giving, or am I mostly asserting my own rights and holding myself back, taking more than I give?

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