This title is of course a little - and intentionally - provocative: it suggests that a theology and spirituality of sexuality (including homosexuality) genuinely rooted in the Gospel - that is, in Christ's Good News - is still widely to be elaborated, and this, almost 2000 years after the birth of the Christian community. What is that to say?

Modern exegesis has brought us to realize that early Christianity, in the years which immediately followed the death and resurrection of Christ, understood Jesus' teaching in quite literal eschatological terms: Christ was soon going to come back in full glory, God would soon establish on this suffering earth His Kingdom of peace and justice; there would be no more poverty, misery, war, injustice, pain, hunger; death itself would be vanquished. Human relationships would be radically transformed: one would no more take a wife or a husband, beget children. Somehow, human beings would have become like angels...

And this, in all likelihood, quite seemingly explains to a large extent why the Gospels have apparently paid so little attention to - and transmitted almost nothing about - sexuality (if one excludes indirect allusions like, for example, when Jesus suggests that desire is not limited to genital acts but roots itself in the heart [Mt 5:28]): soon life would no more be lived on those terms...

We know that this enthusiastic expectation of a close «end» - if not of the world, at least of this world - was so strong among several Christian communities that Church leaders of the time had to shake and admonish many Christians who were simply waiting for the great day with their arms crossed...

Then the years passed and the Christian communities had to surrender to the blunt evidence that things would seemingly follow a different course: Christ would certainly come back as he had promised, except no one knew exactly when and how; and, meanwhile - well... one had to dwell on this earth, in this world, to roll up one's sleeves and try to make straight the highway for the Lord's Second Coming.

(Later, in Middle Ages theology, Christianity interpreted this delay of Parousia in all sorts of ways: as a consequence of the presence of «Pagans» (Muslims, for example); but also as a definite invitation to transform the earth and the world, to turn society into a Holy City, a new earthly Jerusalem which Christ would take possession of when it would be ready for - and worthy of - His second coming).

In the early Church, this reinterpretation of the eschatological teaching of Jesus meant decisions - concrete, down to earth, trivial decisions - concerning daily life: money, labour, human government, power, war, food, Church oganization.

Sex.

We have to do an effort to imagine this situation - and the imagination that was required from early Christian leaders and «intellectuals» who had to propose answers to their communities and who did what - I suppose - anybody would have done in the same situation: their best!, rushing to the most urgent, grasping here and there what seemed fit (among other things concerning sexuality, which interests us particularly, here).

Christians of Jewish background were of course tempted to go back to the Biblical tradition which was theirs, and all the more since it contained a strong and vigorous theology of sexuality centered on fecund marriage as a sign of an existence consistant with God's plan and as a proof of His own blessing.

In that respect, we also have to keep in mind that the belief in personal life after death did not really emerge in the Old Testament doctrine until a late period (around the Macchabean era, and under Eastern influence) and that it was not even accepted by all streams of Judaism in Jesus' own time (by the Sadducees, for instance). It is essentially through their own children, through their natural posterity, that men and women of the Old Testament survived in History.

Consequently, sterility was considered a terrible curse, - indeed as a stream of water dying in the sand of the desert... Without entering the details of a more complex analysis, it is at least not difficult to understand that, in such an anthropological/theological landscape, wilfully sterile sexuality of course always had a tendency to be considered as madness and even as blasphemy.

We know on the other hand that Christians of non-Jewish - Gentile - origin, or those living in a Greek Hellenistic environment were, for their part, exposed to - and to a large extent inspired by - some of the Greek philosophical doctrines which were spreading in thast period, and which proposed high moral standards in a society which in many respects looked like our own - that is, for the better and for the worse, which was often described as a «decadent» society (with its undertones of cynicism, crualty, immorality, cultural anxiety, spiritual pluralism, lack of religious and ethical direction, etc.).

One especially thinks of late Stoicism, of course (with its illustrious representatives like Seneca and Marcus-Aurelius) which had a striking influence of nascent Christianity (notably, as onr can easily understand, in the context of the fierce persecutions which the early Churches soon had to face). The «problem» with Stoicism, if one may say, is that it was rooted in a quite rigid, very austere and rather narrow conception of Reason and rationality (indeed, to a large extent in reaction to irrational dimensions of the Greco-Roman civilization), notably as far as sexuality was concerned: indeed, we know that for Stoicism, sexuality was considered ethically wrong outside of its (sole) rational end of reproduction.

Well, we have here, very rapidly drawn, in a nutshell, so to say, the two main sources - or roots - of what was going to become for centuries - and even down to us - the core of the Christian sexual ethics and theology.

It would certainly be stupid - and at least historically very short-sighted - not to acknowledge the value, quality and even beauty of such an ethical ideal. The problem, of course, as far as we are concerned, is that this these theology and ethics of sexuality (and the spirituality which developed in their wake) were not in themselves particularly Christian...

As an author suggested, it is not so much Christianity as such which made the world ascetic, it is the world in which Christianity was born which turned Christianity into an ascetic religion. (Such a sociological explanatation, relevant as it may be, is however not sufficient. French theologian J.-M. Pohier (Le chrétien, le plaisir et la sexualité. Paris, Cerf, 1972) suggests intrinsic reasons inscribed in the very dynamics of (Western) Christianity which are also to be taken into account in order to understand the strong «anti-sexual bias» of (Western) Christianity through the ages. This inspiring line of thought should also be given proper consideration in a longer development.)

But one of the vital questions that concern present day believers - is whether there is another possibility for Christianity. We know - we have known for 2000 years! - that Christianity can get along pretty well with an ascetic tradition. And despite all the criticism which that tradition and its consequences require, it is probably wiser to avoid throwing away the baby with the bathtub water. Who knows: we might after all appreciate that possibility in our own cultural context if there is some relevance to find analogies between modern Western culture and the end of the Greco-Roman world...

Yet we cannot avoid the other question - that is, the possibility of another Christian intelligence of sexuality, different from the one which emerged from both its Old Testament and Greek philosophical roots.

We cannot avoid it for two reasons: first, because of the very experience of thousands of contemporary men and women (and among them gays, of course) which challenges that tradition and which therefore demands a reappraisal : thousands of men and women, thousands of gays and lesbians, and among them a good number who do not want to choose between their sexual reality and their faith, but who do not find in that traditional Christian theology and ethics of sexuality the spiritual relevance and adequate moral directions they look for and need in their lives.

But we also need to face the question, I would say, for the sake of the Gospel itself and of its full unfolding, for the sake of faithfulness to Christ's teaching.

Indeed, one might well come to the conclusion that the sexual ethics and theology which early Christianity developed and proposed missed some fundamental basic intuitions of the Gospel which were veiled both by Old Testament heritage and Greek philosophical borrowings.

It has to be strongly recalled that, with Christianity, salvation does not come any more through the belonging to the «elect people» of Israel [cf. Ga 3:28] but is henceforth offered to all through Christ's mediation, Christ who has become the unique Way to God [cf. Jn 14:6]. In the same way, and still more precisely, Christ opens doors which the Old Testament theology of sexuality had kept closed and locked. Marriage, procreation, circumcision are not any more the caracteristic signs of God's people and God's blessing, but a new fecundity which roots itself in Christ - and without which the very tradition of Christian consecrated chastity loses all meaning and significance [cf. Mt 19:12].

As if that was not enough, the Acts of the Apostles [8:26-40] dramatize that radical change by pointing to the rather provocative episode of the conversion and baptism of the Ethiopian court official soon after Pentacost. We know that this man was a eunuch, that is, a man whose own sexual condition excluded from the Church of the Old Testament [cf. Dt 23:2]. For us today the impact of such a text has become more or less obscure. We have a tendency to overlook it without noticing its striking content. And we need an effort to imagine how radical such a proposition was for the hearers of the time in the background of the Old Testament religion - as much as the very idea of a resurrection of the body (or of an incarnation of God in the human flesh) was a slam in the face of Greek philosophical sensibility which, from Plato on, imposed on the Western mind a dualistic conception of reality according to which the «divine» soul had fallen into the flesh and was held «prisoner» of the body; salvation was therefore equivalent for the soul to escape that bodily jail as soon as possible, to reintegrate its divine spiritual homeland.

So radical indeed was the change that both Jewish and Greek Christianity somehom immediately shut back the door which Christ's Gospel had unlocked. So radical that the history of Christianity (let us think of Gnosticism and Docetism, for example) has constantly been tempted by interpretations which denied the scandalous proposition of the Gospel that God Himself had come to dwell in human flesh; and, consequently, not only was the human flesh redeemed but no one could henceforth reach God except through Christ and no one could from now on reach Christ except through the body of men [cf. 1 Jn 4:20; Mt 25:40]:

The one who does not love his brother he has seen cannot love God who he has not seen.

To the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine (...), you dit it to me.

I know that I would probably have been burned for less then that a few centuries ago, yet I would like to take advantage of the fact that I speak in Erasmus' country, in the present century, to go on with Matthew's verse and suggest: To the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, you made love to me...

Actually, I suggested that idea to my students a few weeks ago. The discussion we had was interesting. Several of them were rather reluctant, stressing what they felt more or less clearly as a «difference» between that suggestion and the other examples given by Matthew: feed the hungry, visit the sick, etc. Indeed they had some difficulty to express that difference but, finally, some came to the - embarrassed - conclusion that feeding the hungry and visiting the sick was most of the time a rather unpleasurable and costly «sacrifice» whereas having sex was... well, fun! But also feeding the hungry was giving something - without expecting anything back - whereas having sex implied reciprocity and sharing, giving, but also receiving...

Well, this is precisely, I think, the knot we have to untie. That is why we need this unfinished epistle on evangelical sexuality. It is a challenge, no doubt, requiring both courage and imagination, demanding that we go back to the core of the Gospel. Since there is practically no clear indication concerning sexuality - for the reasons that were mentioned -, we have to listen to its basic drive and interpret it in the terms of our own lives. And then, perhaps, we will - finally - understand some more of the revolutionary logic of Christ's Good News such as it lies, for example, in this statement of Jesus (according to Saint Matthew) with which I will conclude this paper, suggesting - again in a deliberately provocative way - that we keep in mind even its potentially sexual undertones:

Not what enters into the mouth defiles the man but what proceeds out of the mouth (...) The things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. [Mt 15:11.18]