Christian Ethics and Homosexuality: The Teachings of Jesus

It is very common for Christians who believe that the Church should approve of homosexual behavior to point to the teachings and example of Jesus in support of their position.  Jesus, they argue, never said anything about homosexuality being wrong.  Therefore, the Church should not condemn it.  Furthermore, Jesus did not condemn tax collectors, prostitutes, and others who were condemned and excluded as “sinners” by Jewish society; instead, He welcomed them and ate with them.  In the same way, the Church should welcome hurting and marginalized gay and lesbian people and include them within the Church.  Therefore, regardless of what the apostle Paul may have to say about homosexuality, the Church should approve of it.  

Now, as I have previously argued, it is wrong to pit Jesus against Paul or to regard the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels as being more Authoritative than what the Holy Spirit tells us through the apostle Paul.  Nevertheless, it is certainly fitting to begin a discussion of New Testament ethics by first looking to the teaching and example of Jesus.  Do Jesus’s teachings and example indicate that the Church should approve of homosexuali behavior?

Jesus and Sexual Ethics

It is true that Jesus never says anything about homosexuality being wrong in the Gospels.  However, the same can be said of many other moral issues regarding which there is little controversy among Christians, for example, racism, pedophilia, bestiality, and incest.  Just because Jesus does not explicitly condemn a particular action in the Gospels does not mean that we can assume that Jesus approved of it.  To argue that Jesus must have approved of homosexual behavior because He never condemns it in the Gospels is a fallacious argument from silence.

So, what would Jesus have said about homosexual behavior if He had explicitly addressed the issue?  Although Jesus does not explicitly condemn homosexual behavior in the Gospels, He does, arguably, implicitly speak against it. In a discussion about marriage and divorce, Jesus cited from Genesis: “At the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh” (Mark 10:6-8). Here, Jesus reinforces the fact that Genesis 2 is foundational for how God’s people are to understand marriage. But Jesus does more than that. He links what Genesis 1 says about God’s creation of humanity with the sexual difference of “male and female” to what Genesis 2 says about the origin of marriage, thus reinforcing the idea that marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman. While, by itself, this does not absolutely prove that Jesus objected morally to homosexual behavior, it does point in that direction. 

As we have seen, the Old Testament Torah clearly forbids homosexual behavior.Since Jesus had a high view of the Authority of the Torah as the Word of God (5:17-20), we should assume, unless we have good reason to think otherwise, that He agreed with the Torah’s prohibition of homosexual behavior.  While the Torah is no longer directly binding on Christians, it does have enduring ethical value for Christians in giving them guidance for how to live as God’s holy people.  The Torah’s prohibition of homosexual behavior, therefore, should be seriously considered as relevant for the Church’s moral debate about homosexuality today.  It should also be noted that the common Jewish attitude at the time of Jesus was that homosexual behavior is always wrong.^[1]See discussion by William Loader in Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), pages 24-30.  Thus, unless we have evidence to the contrary, the most reasonable assumption is that Jesus shared this common Jewish attitude.

Though some Christians seem to be under the impression that Jesus came to replace the moral teachings of the Old Testament with a looser set of moral commands, an actual analysis of Jesus’s moral teachings shows that this is utterly false.Far from relaxing the moral standards of the Old Testament, Jesus heightened them.  This is the case with sexual ethics just as it is the case with the moral issues surrounding money, violence, and so on.  While the Old Testament forbid all sexual relations outside of marriage (including homosexual behavior), Jesus forbid even looking at someone lustfully (Matt 5:28), and He forbid divorce and remarriage as tantamount to adultery (Matt 5:32).  Given this, we have no reason to think that Jesus would have been in favor of relaxing the Torah’s standards of sexual ethics with regards to homosexual behavior.  While it is impossible to say with 100% certainty what the historical Jesus believed about the morality of homosexual behavior, we have absolutely no reason to think that, in contrast to the teachings of the Old Testament and of Jewish tradition, He approved of it.

Jesus and Inclusion

One of the most distinctive and striking aspects of the ministry of Jesus was His willingness to associate with tax collectors, prostitutes, and other “sinners” (Mark 2:15-17; Luke 15:1-2, 19:1-7).  While the common Jewish attitude of the time was that one maintained holiness and righteousness by refusing to associate with sinful people, Jesus turned this conventional wisdom on its head.  From Jesus’s perspective, the righteousness of God’s Kingdom was manifest precisely in seeking out lost, sinful people, associating with them, and inviting them to become part of God’s Kingdom.  True righteousness meant reaching out to hurting and marginalized people who were condemned as “sinners” by the rest of Jewish society, rather than excluding and shunning them.

The parallels between such people of Jesus’s time and hurting and marginalized members of the LGBTQ community, condemned as “sinners” by most of the Christian Church today, should be obvious.  The example of Jesus is certainly instructive for how Christians should reach out to LGBTQ people, be willing to associate with them, and to invite them to become part of God’s Kingdom.  

But Jesus’s willingness to associate with people condemned as “sinners” by Jewish society does not mean that He morally approved of their actions.  Jesus’s willingness to associate with prostitutes does not at all mean that He approved of prostitution; as we have seen, Jesus taught very high ethical standards regarding sexuality that forbid not only all sex outside of marriage, but also lustful thoughts and divorce and remarriage.  Jesus’s willingness to associate with tax collectors does not at all mean that He approved of greed and oppressing the poor; Jesus taught very high ethical standards regarding money that forbid the accumulation of wealth and demanded radical generosity to the poor.  Jesus was willing to associate with Pharisees and to eat with them (Luke 11:37), but at the same time He harshly criticized their moral behavior (Luke 11:39-52).  

When others criticized Jesus for associating with marginalized “sinners,” Jesus’s response was not, “Their sins are not all that bad; stop judging them.”  His response was, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.  I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance” (Luke 5:31-32).  Jesus did not at all deny that these people were in fact sinners in need of repentance; in fact, His reason for associating with them was to try to bring them to repentance.  

We must make a sharp distinction between the crowds whom Jesus associated with, and Jesus’s disciples.  Jesus was willing to associate with, eat with, and be friends with all kinds of people, even and especially those condemned and excluded by Jewish society as “sinners.”  At the same time, however, Jesus made it very clear that the only way to have eternal life was to become one of His disciples, that the demands of discipleship to Him were radical and costly, and that anyone unwilling to submit to these demands could not be His disciple (Matt 16:24-25; Luke 14:25-33, 18:18-25).  Jesus did not at all teach that His followers should include unrepentant sinners within the community of His disciples; in fact, He clearly taught that the community of His disciples should discipline unrepentant sinners within its midst, even to the point of excluding them from the Church (Matt 18:15-18).  

The example of Jesus certainly tells us that Christians today must be willing to associate with LGBTQ people and befriend them.  To the extent that Christians have been unwilling to do this, they must confess their sins and repent.  However, the example of Jesus tells us nothing about whether Christians should include people who engage in homosexual behavior within the Church, the community of Jesus’s disciples.  If traditional Christian sexual ethics is correct, then the teachings of Jesus actually demand that the Church discipline its members who act in this way, even to the point of excluding them from the Church if they stubbornly refuse to repent.  

Conclusion

While many Christians point to the teachings and example of Jesus as providing support for the inclusion of practicing homosexuals within the Church, careful analysis of Jesus’s teachings and actions in the Gospels show that this is not the case.  We have no reason to think that Jesus’s silence on the issue of homosexuality means that He approved of it; if anything, Jesus’s silence on the issue should be interpreted as indicating His agreement with the Old Testament and Jewish tradition of the time that homosexual behavior is wrong.  While the example of Jesus certainly tells us that Christians today should be willing to associate with and to befriend hurting and marginalized LGBTQ people, it tells us nothing about whether Christians should approve of homosexual behavior and tolerate it within the Church.  If we are going to overturn traditional Christian sexual ethics on the subject of homosexuality, we must find support for this elsewhere than the Jesus of the Gospels.

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