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Jesus: Unrepentant Severe Sexual Sin Leads to Exclusion from God's Kingdom
By Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon
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July 8, 2022
Pastor, author and theologian, J.D. Greear claimed in his 2019 sermon that "Jesus not one time ever said that it was difficult for the same-sex attracted to go to heaven." This is a meaningless formulation. We wouldn't expect Jesus to address "the same-sex attracted" explicitly, for three obvious reasons:
(1) Palestinian Jews in Jesus' day were not known to be engaging in homosexual practice, much less advocating it. It simply wasn't a problem.
(2) The Hebrew Scriptures had already "shouted" against homosexual practice (the clear male-female foundation for sex already in Genesis 1-2, the Sodom and Levite at Gibeah narratives, the severe Levitical prohibitions, the rigorous condemnation of homosexual cult figures [the qedeshim], Ezekiel's denunciation).
(3) We would not expect Jesus to condemn the "same-sex attracted" merely for experiencing (but not acquiescing to) an involuntary impulse.
What Jesus did do is warn that sexual sin could get you thrown into hell. Matthew placed the Jesus saying about tearing out one's eye or cutting off one's hand if it threatens one's downfall (i.e., being thrown into Gehenna) between Jesus' prohibition of adultery of the heart and remarriage after (at least invalid) divorce (5:27-32; cp. 19:4-6). Granted, Jesus did not use the precise expression "eye of a needle" (19:24) here but that is a pedantic, not substantive, point.
Jesus did not think that divorce and remarriage-after-divorce were worse than homosexual practice. Jesus predicated his limitation of two persons (whether serial or concurrent) on a male-female foundational prerequisite for sexual relations, which is positive coin-half to the negative prohibition of same-sex relations. The foundation is more important than any principle secondarily extrapolated from the foundation. That means that Jesus' warning about cutting off body parts goes double for the issue of homosexual practice. There is no "whisper" here.
Greear intimates that Jesus' outreach to sexual sinners indicates the lesser severity of that offense relative to "materialism and religious pride." "We see Jesus demonstrating great sympathy for those in sexual sin and great animosity toward the religiously proud." Yet "the religiously proud" is an inadequate description: Obviously, Jesus is going to save his harshest words for those who were trying to obstruct his ministry (viz., the religious authorities of his day).
The fact that Jesus reached out to sexual sinners is no indication that their offense was less severe than sins of materialism. Jesus also reached to tax collectors, who in his day had a justly deserved reputation for collecting tax revenue several times greater than assigned to them and profiting from the excess (compare Zacchaeus's words in Luke 19:8). His outreach to tax collectors was not a sign that Jesus was soft toward economic exploitation (that was a misunderstanding about Jesus common to the Pharisees; Matt 11:19 // Luke 7:34). Neither was his outreach to sexual sinners a sign that sexual sin was less severe.
On the contrary, his compassionate outreach to both groups was a product of the fact that they were at highest risk of not inheriting the very kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.
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