“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)
‘”For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church’. (Ephesians 5:31-32)
John and Paul are covering the same ground here. But St. Paul makes explicit the human sexual element with the Genesis allusion of becoming “one flesh”.
In John there is no explicit human sexual element, but instead the invoking of the fertility of the earth. But the two are very closely connected. Human and natural generation are analogically related to each other and symbolically inseparable. Nature’s power of generation is the figure of human generation. Hence, Paul’s “one flesh” is analogous to John’s “grain of wheat”.
When a man and woman become one flesh, the seed falls into the earth and dies, and so bears fruit, etc.
Paul connects the mystery of becoming “one flesh” directly to the mystery of Christ and the Church.
In John, Jesus does not directly mention his passion, death, and resurrection, but this passage is clearly alluding to these impending events.
So Paul and John seem to be in agreement here, that the great mystery of Christ’s relationship to the Church is imaged by the great cosmic mystery—of which man in his sexual nature is a part—of the generation of life.
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Couldn’t help but remember that orgasms are sometimes referred to as “little deaths”.
Eva, yep. There are so many parallels, analogies, and connections between the structure of sex, the rhythm of nature, and the Paschal Mystery that it’s hard to know where to begin unpacking them all. But everything is contained in that one little sentence from John’s Gospel about the grain of wheat. I would like to explore this further.