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Written by Tom Hobson
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Monday, 30 August 2010 18:06 |
The new proposed language for G-6.0106b calls for us to joyfully submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life. But how do we decide which Jesus to follow, in a day when we have wildly different concepts of “What Would Jesus Do? The answer is in our second ordination vow: we “accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the church universal, and God’s word to [us].”
What the Bible says about Jesus trumps any other claim on the market, according to what we have vowed. It trumps the Quran, the Gnostic gospels, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and the voice of the “spirit” within us. Our vow to accept the canonical Jesus as our authority also does not permit us to play the game of claiming that parts of our picture of Jesus were invented by the early church. The early church was in a far better position than we are to know what Jesus really said and did.
If we claim obedience to a Jesus who is a contradiction to the total witness of the Old and New Testaments, then we are not following the real Jesus.
Which picture of Jesus is correct? The Great Rulebreaker — who came to get rid of dos and don’ts, who came to replace a religion of law with a religion of love? Or the One who had standards for his followers to live by? The problem with Jesus is that it is too easy to make him into the great Fill-in-the-Blank who looks and thinks like us, a “Stepford Savior” who loves us and never contradicts us, a product of our own wishful imagination, an idol (if you will). Look out whenever your Jesus begins to sound and look too much like you: Democrat or Republican, rich or poor, light or dark, permissive or Puritan. If my Jesus makes me too comfortable, if he doesn’t shove me into my discomfort zone at times, it’s not the real Jesus.
To avoid distortions, it is important for us to accept the entire picture of Jesus we find in Scripture, not just the parts we like. We need to embrace both the loving Jesus, and the no-nonsense Jesus who did not tolerate hypocrisy or playing games with God. We need to embrace both the radically inclusive Jesus who welcomed outcasts who were not welcomed by the Pharisees or Qumran, and the One who let the Rich Young Ruler walk away; the One who loved both the woman at the well and Zacchaeus too much to leave them in unrepentant sin. We need to embrace both the One who shows us God’s love more than anyone else in Scripture, and the One who talked about hell more than anyone else in Scripture; the One who gives us a morality too high to reach, and the One who can save the most wretched of sinners. We need to embrace both the Jesus who broke rules that were based solely on human tradition, and the One who beefed up laws where people had gotten lax.
If we settle for anything less than the full Jesus of Scripture, we settle for a distortion.
So what does Jesus say in his teaching on sexuality? The centerpiece of his teaching on this subject is where he cites a quote from the Torah that is also reaffirmed by the apostle Paul: “the two [man and woman] shall become one flesh” (Matt 19:5 = Mark 10:8). Jesus, the Torah, and Paul all teach that sex was created to form a lifelong inseparable bond between a man and a woman. Any other use of sex, whether it be fornication, prostitution, homosexual intercourse, or a marriage that is less than lifelong, is a violation of this thrice-repeated central teaching of Scripture on sexuality. Jesus names both porneia (fornication) and aselgeia (a veiled reference to homosexual behavior and similar offenses) on his sin list in Mark 7:21-23.
Jesus’ strict puritanical approach to sex may be seen in his teaching that even lust in the heart is a form of adultery (Matt 5:28), and in his teaching against divorce, where his point is that no one can erase a sexual relationship. There is no intellectually honest way to stretch this Jesus into a Jesus who is permissive toward sexual immorality. If we were serious about following Jesus, we wouldn’t be having this debate about sex.
Jesus has a whole lot more to teach us, by his words and by his life. As we seek to follow Jesus, let’s settle for following no less than the complete Jesus to whom the Scriptures bear unique and authoritative witness.
TOM HOBSON of Belleville, Ill., a PC(USA) pastor for 27 years, has degrees from Gordon-Conwell (M.Div.) and Concordia (Ph.D.), and is currently seeking a call.
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