Jesus reached out to sexual sinners because they, like the exploitative tax collectors, were most in need of being called to repentance, so that they might yet inherit the very Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. Jesus both intensified God’s ethical demand and reached out in love to the biggest violators of that demand.
Rachel Held Evans is once again arguing against “The False Gospel of Gender Binaries.” Regrettably, she does little more than provide us with a reminder of a textbook example of eisegesis (reading “into” the biblical text one’s own ideology) rather than exegesis (reading “out of” Scripture with attentiveness to historical and literary context, even if it conflicts with one’s own personal views). To suggest that Jesus cared little for gender binaries is to distort badly the portrait of Jesus that we find in the Gospels, or for that matter any credible reconstruction of the “historical Jesus” in his first-century Palestinian Jewish context.
Some background: Rachel Held Evans has made a career out of undermining fidelity to the teachings of Scripture by ridiculing simplistic or non-existent notions of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics), while practicing a flawed hermeneutic of her own that often seems to be little more than an extension of her own ideology. After starting in the evangelical tradition, she abandoned that tradition to embrace a non-orthodox sexual ethic and is now a member of the Episcopal Church.
She believes that all who do not agree with her promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism—an overwhelming “cloud of witnesses” from the beginnings of God’s people to the present day—have been proclaiming a “false gospel.” That depends on whether the Gospel is determined by her or by Christ.
In Mark 10 (par. Matt 19) Jesus predicated a duality of number for sexual unions (what we call monogamy; a strict monogamy I might add) on the deliberate divine design of the duality of complementary sexes. Binary sexuality for Jesus, the singular fact that God created us (as part of an intentional Divine Design) as “male and female,” was the foundation for rejecting both polygamy and a revolving door of divorce-and-remarriage for any cause.
