Experts weigh in on Christianity

Patrick McCormick, chairman of Gonzaga University’s religious studies department, and James Edwards, chairman of Whitworth College’s theology and philosophy department, shared their answers to three questions about the central message of Christianity, its power for people who are in pain and their best guesses on how Jesus, if he were walking the Earth today, might respond to gay issues under debate in America now.

1. What does the message of the Gospel really mean to you?

James Edwards: The real meaning of the Gospel to me is that God, in love, sent his son Jesus into the world that we have disfigured and defiled. God did this so that we may know him, and that by the death of his son of the cross we might be forgiven our sins and transformed by grace into the lives God intends for us.

Pat McCormick: Jesus reports in Luke 4 that he has come to bring “good news” (gospel) to the poor, and tells us in Matthew 25 that those who feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and visit the sick and imprisoned will enter God’s kingdom. I believe the Gospel calls believers to prepare for God’s reign by becoming persons and communities of mercy, compassion and forgiveness.

2. What would you want to tell someone in deep pain about God’s love that would have the power to make his or her life better?

Edwards: When we are in pain, we feel alone, and when we suffer alone, we end up either in despair or isolated in bitterness. It is deeply moving to know that when God became a human being in Jesus Christ that the single word to describe his experience, according to the Creed, is that he “suffered.” Jesus, too, experienced rejection, pain, suffering, and death – and in the midst of it he cried out to his Father. God can, of course, relieve our pain, but God can also use our pain when we relinquish it to him to draw us closer to himself and his love.

McCormick: The God we meet in Scripture hears the cries of the poor and suffering and does not abandon them. Indeed, the story of Jesus in the Gospel is the tale of God taking on our frail and broken flesh – being born in a stable, fleeing into exile, becoming an itinerant preacher, being arrested, abused and murdered, and tossed in an open grave – so that we are never alone in our suffering.

3. If Jesus were listening in on today’s debates about homosexuality among his followers, what do you think he would say?

Edwards: I trust he would say the same thing that he said when he walked Palestine in human form, when he reaffirmed God’s creation of human beings in sexual complementarity as male and female, and when he reaffirmed that the covenant of heterosexual marriage is God’s will for the proper expression of sexual relationships.

Here are Jesus’ words: “From the beginning of creation God created persons as male and female. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh, so that they are no longer two but one. What God has joined together, no human is to separate” (Mark 10:6-8). This understanding of human sexuality is why the Christian tradition has not condoned fornication, adultery, or homosexuality.

McCormick: Jesus said little about sexuality, but a lot about compassion, hospitality and justice, and welcomed all sorts of folks cast aside by society and religion. I believe Jesus would demand that all our sexual acts express mutual love, commitment and generosity, that we never manipulate, cheapen or abuse others through our sexuality, and that the rights and dignity of all gay and straight persons be recognized and protected.

I doubt that Jesus would see homosexuals as a threat to marriage, but I think he would rail against the plague of domestic violence that victimizes millions of our mothers, sisters and daughters and would criticize a consumer society where we spend more time shopping than playing with our children.