The vow of chastity 1. Old Testament; life of Jesus

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The vow of Chastity

What is actually chastity? It is difficult to give an exhaustive answer in few words. Every man is called to find his fulfilment in God who is pure love. The love of God is a pure one, free from every possible human attachment, but our nature , which craves for such love, is at the same time ruined by sin and so feels also the pressure of other attachments which often at his eyes look look like real love.

Chastity is the combination of three elements:
The call of making the journey of purification of our love
The commitment we undertake to do our best in this journey
The much needed grace of God to make this journey possible.

So the vow of chastity is much more than celibacy (not getting married), but regards all the ways in which we deal with our relationships.
We sin against chastity whenever we try to possess others, we exploit them for our purposes, we put them before God. Whenever, in doing things, we look for human appreciation rather than righteousness.
Chastity is about how we love and, for the followers of Christ, love is the only possible way of living.


Chastity in the OT

Since creation God gave human kinds the order “grow and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). All through the Old Testament fertility has been the greatest gift God could give to a woman, and sterility was considered a curse from God. Furthermore, when the promise came that God would send a Messiah, all women pondered the chance that they could become his mother. Finally women were very much considered at the service of the household and of the upbringing of the children, so it was unthinkable for a young Jewish lady not to get married.
Based on these facts all the protestants scholars reject the idea that Mary remained a virgin after Jesus' birth.
Indeed the desire of Mary to remain virgin is understandable only as a strong spiritual inspiration raised in Mary by God himself and for the sake of the motherhood of Jesus. After all she was betrothed to Joseph.
If by the vow of chastity we consider the fact of not getting married, we can say that it does not exist in the Old Testament.
Even from the point of view of men the duty of procreating in order to strengthen the people of God was felt important and it was considered an offence to God to deny this. Even the prophets and the priests in the temple were married. It is true that we do not have news about wives or children of some prophets like Elijah and Jeremiah, but this does not mean that they were not married.
From sources parallels to the bible we know of a Rabbi, more or less contemporary of Jesus, who did not want to get married because he had stuck his heart to the Torah.


The life of Jesus
 Jesus is the model of Chastity because he is the perfect model of Love and of relationships. In his life (in the three years spent for the apostolate), he dealt with people of every kind: children, youth, adult, men and women. He always acted with love, respect for the dignity of the person in front of him and concern for his well-being. This he did even if the person he was dealing with was a prostitute of a public sinner.
He was free to deal with them all and concerned for their good; he was not worried to break some cultural taboos of the society of his time. No master would spend time to play with children, no one would entertain women, especially those with bad reputation or doubtful behaviour. Jesus, instead, accepts their condition and actions and uses them as entrance point to send them a message of conversion and salvation. He seems to make no difference if the sinner is Zaccheus or the prostitute, if he is speaking to Nicodemus or to the Samaritan woman.
What makes Jesus so special is the inner freedom he has. All his words and actions are driven only by the desire that the person should be saved and for that to send him a message of redemption. But his words are not cold or apologetic; his relationship is warm, full of passion and striking the chords of the heart.
In the meeting with the young rich fellow it is written: “Jesus, looking at him loved him, and said: 'you lack one more thing'” (Mk 10:21). With the Samaritan woman he manages to uncover the most shameful situation (she had 5 husbands and is living now with another one), but without judgement or reproach. He saves the adulteress who is about to be stoned and simply says to her “neither do I condemn you. Go and so not sin any more”. When a prostitute comes into the house and wets his feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair and kisses them (all highly shameful actions for that time), Jesus justifies her in the name of love: “Her many sins are forgiven because of her great love” (Lk 7:47).
If we consider the vow of chastity from the point of view of not getting married, then Jesus speaks directly about it only in one occasion. In Mt 19:10-12, after the talk about marriage and divorce, the question comes to him: “if that is the condition of a married man then it is better not to get married”. And Jesus replies: “Not everybody can accept what you have said, but only those who have received this gift. … There are some who have given up the possibility of marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who can accept it, accept it”.
So we take our teaching mainly from the example of Jesus' life. He married no one because his heart was fully for the Father and his life fully dedicated to the mission, a mission in which he had to love everyone with the same intensity.
In the New Testament we have also some other example of chastity.
First of all we have Mother Mary. She was married but we know by faith that she remained virgin through the whole life. In her we see a strong attachment to the will of God and to her vocation: to give birth, raise and accompany Jesus. She has become the mother of all living because her love was so pure that could be somehow compared to the one of the Father and the one of her Son.
We know that some of the apostles, maybe all of them, considering the mentality of the time, were married. Of Peter is said that Jesus entered his house and healed his mother in law. An old Eastern tradition of the Orthodox Church, says that the person getting married at the wedding of Cana was the apostle James (a first cousin of Jesus and the first Bishop of Jerusalem). Maybe John was still too young to get married, when he first met Jesus. But we have good reasons to think that Paul never married because of his busy life at the service of the Gospel. He himself gives us a hint in 1 Cor 7:8-9 when he says: “To the unmarried and the widow I say to remain as I am, but if they cannot control themselves, let them marry, because is better to marry than to burn with passion”.

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