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I have often been invited by my denomination (PCUSA) to debate proponents of homosexual lifestyles, especially those who advocate the ordination of practicing homosexuals. One of the stock refrains that I hear in nearly every debate is that Christians who believe the practice of homosexuality is a sin and who refuse to ordain practicing homosexuals are guilty of an ugly and punitive exclusiveness that is contrary to the open, inviting, and inclusive spirit and practice of Jesus.

Those who oppose homosexuality are accused of "a selective reading of a few Old Testament texts," as the refrain goes, and are dismissed as legalists who fail to understand the grace of Christ that is offered in the gospel to all persons, regardless of their condition. Repeatedly I have been reminded that since we all are sinners, heterosexuals have no right to single out homosexuality as a deviant lifestyle.

So runs the argument, which usually garners easy assent in our permissive day. But the argument is mistaken—and rendered so by Jesus himself.

In many respects, Jesus was inclusive. He offered forgiveness and fellowship to outcasts within Judaism, and to Gentiles outside it, in a way that was unprecedented among Jewish rabbis. But in other respects, Jesus was more exclusive than his Jewish contemporaries: he refused political alliances with Herod Antipas, the "fox" (Luke 13:32) who beheaded John the Baptist; he refused to replace God with Torah (or with any ideology); and he refused to identify the kingdom of God with any of the prevailing sects of Judaism.

The first century pulsated with a plethora of mystery cults and Greco-Roman religions, including quasi-emperor worship, many of which penetrated into Palestine. Judaism, often thought of as ethnically and religiously homogeneous, was actually a patchwork of royalists (Herodians), isolationists and purists (Essenes), liberation movements (Zealots and Sicarii), and renewal movements (John the Baptist and Jesus), in addition to establishment Pharisees and Sadducees.

How did Jesus relate to this diversity? Consider only the two most centrist sects, the Pharisees and Sadducees. There is no record that Jesus sought to engage the Sadducees—or the Sanhedrin dominated by them—with his message and movement. There are, to be sure, isolated references in the Gospels to Jesus' disputes with Sadducees and the Sanhedrin, but it was they—not he—who initiated contact. For his part, Jesus remained aloof from the Sadducees and from their considerable influence on Judaism.

Jesus, however, did seek to engage the Pharisees with his message and movement. Why the Pharisees and not the Sadducees? The answer seems to be that on confessional grounds—belief in divine providence, the sinfulness of humanity, the resurrection from the dead, and the existence of the spiritual world of angels and demons—Jesus and the Pharisees shared common ground. (That is why they disagreed so!) Of the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus said: "Obey whatever they say to you, but don't follow their example" (Matt. 23:3, nlt). The Sadducees did not share this common confessional ground with Jesus, and the New Testament leaves no record that Jesus shared the kingdom with them.

Nor was Jesus' response to the Sadducees unique. There is no record that Jesus sympathized with either the Zealots or Herodians, two influential (though vastly different) political parties. As for the Essenes—a rigorous and respectable sect in first-century Judaism, knowledge of whom has been greatly enhanced by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls—they are not once mentioned in the New Testament.

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April 5 1999, Vol. 43, No. 4