Same-sex marriage: How Would Jesus Vote?
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
March 14, 2004

	How would Jesus vote on same-sex marriage?  We have watched the debates with fascination. The proposal before the Great and General Court of Massachusetts, sitting as a constitutional convention, is to amend the world’s oldest constitution in an attempt to undo a decision of the highest court of the state allowing same-sex couples, for the first time in the history of this country, to obtain marriage licenses.  The eyes of the world are on this legislative body, and they have by and large acquitted themselves admirably.  W have heard the great wisdom and rhetoric, the arguments and the stories from the senators and representatives form Wakefield, Cambridge, Newburyport, Barnstable, Gloucester, Ashburnham, Worcester, Pittsfield.  
	But there is one figure who is important in this debate whom we have not heard from, though many claim to speak for him.  That figure is Jesus.  A lot of liberals are willing to cede Jesus to the other side.  A lot of us think, Jesus, he’s their guy, why should I care about him?  Well here’s one minister who is not ready to give Jesus up.  It’s not that I need to talk about Jesus so that I can talk to the conservatives in their own language.  It’s that I’d like the chance to show that just maybe Jesus was our kind of person, and just maybe if Jesus was around today he’d be down at the statehouse vigils carrying a sign for same-sex marriage.  I want to argue that Jesus is actually the principal source of the liberal values that put you and I onto that vigil line, and we aren’t being true to those values when we concede Jesus to the opposition.
	I’ve just been reading this book by Robert Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman called the Message and the Kingdom: how Jesus and Paul ignited a revolution and transformed the ancient world.  Horsley is a New Testament scholar at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and is well known for his picture of the social context in which the Jesus movement operated.  In this latest work, he pulls together analysis of the texts of the New Testament with other apocryphal texts, the writings of secular historians, and the great volume of information now available to us through modern archaeology.
	He calls the movement around Jesus a movement for Jewish renewal.  He describes the plight of the peasants and fishermen of Galilee at the time of Jesus’ activism.  The picture is not pretty.  Basically the population, barely able to eke a living out of the soil in the best of times, was staggering under a load of taxation which came from two sources: there was Rome represented in the person of Herod Antipas, the Jewish client-king who had grandiose ambitions.  Herod built munificent cities in Galilee and taxed the people to pay for them. The other tax came from the Temple authorities in Jerusalem.  The peasants were ambivalent about both these sources of power, for both of them represented nominally Jewish entities who seemed to have sold out the people in order to make an accommodation with pagan Rome.
	Farmers struggling to pay the two sets of taxes would often have to mortgage the farm, borrowing against next years crops in order to pay for this years’ planting.  When the crops failed, the lenders would foreclose, and the farmer would find himself a tenant on land which had been in his family for generations.
	Herod for his part sought to be identified as the Messiah, the promised deliverer from foreign domination, but his idea of deliverance was conspicuous displays of wealth at the expense of the very people he pretended to protect.  The Temple, on the other hand, inspired ambivalent feelings.  It was supposed to be the focal point of Jewish worship, and said to the be God’s residence on earth.  Yet it supported a large staff of priests who seemed always to be demanding more from the people, and who seemed to have made a cozy arrangement with the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate.
	Jesus did not come onto this scene fresh; rather, he followed another reformer whom the scriptures call John the Baptist.  John the Baptist was pretty clearly an ascetic.  He lived on a diet of locusts and honey and abstained from strong drink.   He wore a shirt made of camel’s hair and leather belt, which recalled the garb of the prophet Elijah, baptized in the Jordan, and preached a fiery doctrine of repentance right in line with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.  All the gospel accounts say John baptized Jesus at the outset of Jesus’ ministry.  John called for a return to Jewish purity.  He had the temerity to criticize Herod’s marriage to Herodias, the wife of his half-brother, with the result that Herod had him arrested.  After his daughter Salome danced her enticing dance for Herod, he promised to grant her any wish and spurred by her mother, Salome asked for the had of John the Baptist.
	But Jesus was not John the Baptist, nor was he an ascetic.  Like the Buddha, he was conversant with the ascetics, but he himself practiced a middle way.  At one point he distinguishes himself from John saying, “John came neither eating nor drinking and they say ‘He has a demon;’ the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’  Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” (Mt. 11:18-19)
	Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.  Jesus is saying here, watch what I do, as well as or more than what I say.  What he was doing was to practice a table fellowship that broke through the old strictures of the Jewish law.  He was promoting a Jewish renewal movement, like John.  He was trying to establish the Kingdom of God.  But he was doing it in an inclusive way.
	To Jesus’ hearers, the Kingdom of God refers to the golden age of the Israelites, the four hundred years after they were brought out of the land of Egypt before the first earthly king, which was Saul.  This is the period covered by the books of Chronicles and Judges in the Hebrew Bible.  During this time, God was the only king the Israelites knew, and for many of them, things had gone downhill ever since.  For while the great kings Saul and David and Solomon were celebrated in the Hebrew Bible, it could also be said that the troubles of the People of Israel began in earnest with the transition to an earthly king, particularly since it was Solomon who built the first Temple.  So many Jews of Jesus’ time would look back fondly to the time when there was no oppressive Temple with its taxes and no earthly ruler, in contrast to the present when they were oppressed by both a Jewish ruler and the Roman emperor who stood behind him.
	Yet the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached was not just an ideal for Jews, but was available to the Gentiles, and to the outcasts, the marginalized, the despised.  A tax collector was about the most despised person in 1st century Galilee, but Jesus regularly shared a table with them.
	This is the Jesus from which we derive the values of diversity, inclusiveness and fairness.  This aspect of Jesus led St. Paul, a generation later, to proclaim that in Christ there is no male or female, slave or free, Jew or Greek.  All are one in Christ.  There is a direct line, I maintain, from this assertion to Jefferson’s assertion that all are created equal.   Our very notion of equality is founded and grounded in the life and practice of Jesus.
	That notion of equality is a revelation which is not sealed, but is still unfolding among us.  It led many of our Unitarian and Universalist forebears to oppose slavery, and that opposition to slavery led to the civil war.  Constitutionally, the civil war produced the thirteenth amendment, outlawing slavery, and the fourteenth amendment, guaranteeing that the states would provide due process and equal protection of the laws to their citizens.  It unfolded further in the women’s suffrage movement.  It unfolded further in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60'sd, in the great Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the gradual and still incomplete disestablishment of racial segregation.  It unfolded still more in the women’s movement of the 1970s, and in the movement among disabled people for the rights of mainstream Americans.
	The urge to equality, to full inclusion, once unleashed, had a powerful logic.  Any identifiable group which had been pushed to the margins of society had a claim that could piggyback on the claims made by African Americans, a claim for simple justice, for a place at the common table.  
	One of those groups which started coming forward in the early 1970s, with the Stonewall rebellion, was those of an alternative sexuality.  Gays and lesbians had been found in human society throughout recorded history.  Sometimes, as in ancient Greece, they were accorded some approval by society.  The word lesbian, as you all probably know, comes from the Island of Lesbos, where the poet Sappho had a colony of women in the seventh century BCE.  But in Victorian England and America, gay men in particular were persecuted and imprisoned by sodomy laws.  In the America in which I grew up in the 1950s, I was aware of only a handful of people who would admit to being gay or lesbian, and I didn’t know any of them.  It was only in the 1960's that I learned that I had a gay and a lesbian first cousin.
	Now we don’t know what Jesus thought about homosexuality, but we do know a few of his thoughts on marriage.  Conservatives might well point to Matthew 19:3-9.  This passage reads as follows:
3: And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?" 
4: He answered, "Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, 
5: and said, `For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? 
6: So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." 
7: They said to him, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?" 
8: He said to them, "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 
9: And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery."
	Now let me take a moment to unpack this passage.  First of all, the context presented is that Pharisees, that is, experts in Jewish law, are asking Jesus a question trying to get some evidence of blasphemy from which they can bing him up on charges.  They ask a question – is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause - which is unsettled in the law, for which the law of Moses gives no clear answer and on which there was a difference of opinion among the rabbis of the period.  
	Jesus’s answer to this starts out by invoking the creation story of Genesis.  But right there a question arises: which creation story in Genesis?  For we remember from our study of the Hebrew Bible last fall that there are two: the seven day creation story of Genesis I and the Garden of Eden story of Genesis 2.  The answer is,  he invokes both.  He invokes the statement in Genesis 1:27 “male and female he created them,” and he invokes Genesis 2:24, “therefore a man leaves his mother and his father and clings to his wife and they become one flesh.”
	Now this is very significant.  The conservative line on gay marriage is that we can’t allow this because God ordained marriage from the beginning for the purposes of procreation, and gay marriage should not be allowed because it does not lead in the natural process to the begetting of children.  But Paul Halsall, a scholar at Fordham, has pointed out in an Internet post, that the first Genesis story supports this reading but not the second.  The first Genesis story, after noting that God created them “male and female,” goes on to give the command, “be fruitful and multiply.”  However, the second story has Eve, woman, created out of Adam’s rib for what purpose: not to make babies with him but to relieve his loneliness.  As Genesis 2:20 puts it: “The man gave names to all cattle and to the birds of the air and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.”  
	So when Jesus, in answer to the Pharisee’s question, invokes both Genesis passages, he is saying in effect that God’s purpose in the institution of marriage is not only procreation but partnership.  And of course, if the purpose of marriage is partnership, you don’t have to biologically capable of procreation to enjoys its benefits.
	Paul Halsall comments:
Since *at this point* Jesus is dealing specifically with the relationship of married people, he locates that relationship in divine dispensation, and contrary to an entire tradition of treating marriage as a property contract, dramatically reinterprets it as a matter of companionship. Given the awful treatment a divorced and "used" women might face in his day, Jesus move here was to defend women in society.
	Moreover, the passage in question is followed by this passage:
10: The disciples said to him, "If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry." 
11: But he said to them, "Not all men can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 
12: For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it." 

	Now the term eunuch is a bit disturbing to modern ears, as it connotes a person who has been physically castrated.  I’m not sure this is what Jesus meant here.  The notes in the Oxford study bible to this passage say “Jesus recognizes a place for voluntary celibacy in the service of God’s kingdom,” and it cross references 1 Corinthians 7:1-9, where St. Paul discusses whether a Christian ought to marry or abstain from sex.
	Paul Halsall points out that the important point is that the people Jesus is defending here are not reproductive at all:
But he goes on *immediately* in the text to make it clear that marriage is a this-worldly institution, and he discusses with approbation "eunuchs". He is clearly not talking of physical eunuchs here [or Origen was right], but is talking of those who do not participate [some "from their mother's womb" - i.e. naturally] in the common round of physical reproduction. Given that Rabbinic teaching had been that a Jew without a wife was not a man, the revolutionary sexual ethic put forward by Jesus, can clearly be seen.”
	You don’t have to be a reproducer to be a man.  In this as in so many things, Jesus ameliorated the narrowness of the Jewish law while still seeking Jewish renewal.
	The movement Jesus led was a movement for human liberation from oppressive structures of his time.  From that day to this, the spirit of this movement has been on ths side of the marginalized, the spat upon, the tax collectors, the sinners, the reviled and persecuted.  Jesus said Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely.  The marginalized and despised were those he called the salt of the earth.
	The vision of the Kingdom of God is one which is accessible to all; in that kingdom there shall be neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight.  And that Kingdom is at hand as we work to make it a reality here in this place and in our own time.  The Supreme Judicial Court has done its part to declare the law: it’s up to us to move forward in the name of both Jesus and Justice to finish the job.  
Amen.