Jesus on gay marriage
Does Jesus Ever Talk About Homosexuality?
I was in my mid-20s living in San Diego. I joined some people from a nearby church and went to a Pride parade to pass out water, grant hugs, and hold signs saying “We are sorry the church hasn’t loved you the way Jesus would” (or something along those lines). All of a sudden, I was descended upon by a film crew with a microphone asking me what Jesus had to express about homosexuality. I was not expecting this, but I was giddy to share the love of Christ and talk about how we are all sinners saved by grace and how Jesus never singled out homosexuality as worse than any other type of sexual immorality. In the middle of my sentence (which I had been certain would be received with amazement, tears, and more questions about how to realize this Jesus guy), the film crew interrupted me and said, “NOTHING. He said nothing about homosexuality.” And then they walked away without a synonyms, off to find their next “interview.”
I sat there dumbfounded. What had just happened? And was it true that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality? And if not, why not?
Spoiler alert: Jesus really doesn’t ever address homosexuality specifically, and in our cu
What does the Bible say about same-sex attracted marriage?
Answer
The Bible says nothing about homosexual marriage directly, but it does position down the foundational principles of what constitutes marriagein God’s eyes. Every reference to marriage in the Bible indicates a union of male and female. The first description of marriage coincides with the creation of Eve in Genesis 2. According to that route, marriage takes place when “a dude leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).
In passages that hold instructions regarding marriage, such as 1 Corinthians 7:2–16 and Ephesians 5:23–33, the Bible clearly identifies marriage as existence between a gentleman and a chick. Biblically speaking, marriage is the union of a bloke and a lady in a lifetime commitment. Primary purposes of marriage are to illustrate the relationship between Christ and the church (see Ephesians 5:22–33) and to assemble a family and provide a steady, secure environment for that family to grow. As families prosper, so does society at immense , and stable families contribute to steady societies.
Again, the Bible does not explicitly mention gay marriage or same-sex marriag
A Secret Same-Sex Marriage in Scripture?
So even if the centurion and his servant did have a sexual relationship, it does not track that Jesus’ miracle affirmed every aspect of that association. In fact, the word “relationship” is really a euphemism, because this would be a case of an older man purchasing a younger male for sexual purposes, or what we would call a “sex slave.” I suspicion that the revisionist critic would portray this episode by saying, “Jesus restores a master-slave bond by a miracle of healing and then holds up a sex-trafficker as an example of faith for all to follow.”
The authors of this article admit that this relationship may come across “repugnant,” but they explain it away by saying that marriage in the same time period was also basically a kind of slavery, so what’s the big deal? They write, “In that culture, if you were a gay man who wanted a male ‘spouse,’ you achieved this, like your heterosexual counterparts, through a commercial transaction—purchasing someone to attend that purpose. A servant purchased to serve this purpose was often called a pais.”
There are differences: whereas slaves couldn’t “divorce” their masters, wives could divorce
This article is part of the What Did Jesus Teach? series.
Silence Equals Support?
In a 2012 article for Slate online, Will Oremus asked a provocative question: Was Jesus a homophobe?1
The article was occasioned by a story about a gay teenager in Ohio who was suing his elevated school after school officials prohibited him from wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Is Not a Homophobe.”
Oremus was less concerned about the legal issues of the story than he was about the accuracy of the statement on the shirt. Oremus suggests that Jesus’s views on homosexuality were more inclusive than Paul’s. He writes,
While it’s logical to assume that Jesus and his fellow Jews in first-century Palestine would have disapproved of gay sex, there is no record of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, let alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself suggest an explicit prohibition of homosexuality.
Oremus seems to suggest that since Jesus never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, he must not have been very concerned about it.
There are at least two reasons that we should be skeptical of this view.