Jesus is both compassionate evangelist and commanding Lord.

This article was published alongside an article by Marty Shupack.

As I was in the midst of writing this essay, I was also preparing a sermon on John 4:1-42, the story about the Samaritan woman at the well and Jesus. A well-known story, it is one of many in the Gospels that display, narratively, what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself.” We are provided a vivid portrait by Jesus of what welcome and compassion look like. Attentive readers are reminded that those who seek to be followers of Jesus must, like our Lord, embody this unusual, engaged and honest love.

Ever since that day, I have known two things.

First, his full story clarified for me that sexuality is never a discreet issue.

Second, he needed me to be as Jesus was to the Samaritan woman—someone who listened and elicited his own honesty about who he was.

In the midst of my ongoing relationship with him, I have tried, when possible, to help him encounter the transforming power of Jesus—so he could know Jesus and the “spring of water gushing up to deep, lasting life,” in the way she did. (For that I still await.)

As I was finishing the preparation for my sermon on the woman at the well, I realized that most everyone I know likes what might be called the “evangelist Jesus,” the one in this passage who is welcoming and loving. However, I wonder how many of us today like the “commanding Jesus”?

What we read in John 4 is only the beginning of that story. If this woman—and the others from her city—truly became followers of Jesus, then they, like all other followers of Jesus, would hear him say words like the ones he uttered later in John’s Gospel. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (14:15).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his extraordinary book Discipleship, has helped many of us more fully grasp the wonders of grace and how it is costly and therefore inherently entails a costly discipleship.

From what he says about the vital importance of sexual fidelity, it appears Bonhoeffer agrees with me in affirming what I have sometimes described in the following way:

A traditional Christian view of marriage: God created human beings as male and female—not wanting either gender to be alone—and made them both in the image of God. As the images of God, the Lord commissioned them to be stewards of the earth.

They were created as sexual beings and are not to be ashamed of that.

A man and a woman leave their parents’ households in order to join together as husband and wife and become one flesh in a covenant for life. As husband and wife, God blesses them and tells them to “be fruitful and multiply.”

The New Testament clarifies that the central purpose for all of us who are in a covenant relationship with God is to witness to the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

This leads to three sometimes offensive conclusions.

First, though family is important, we should not idolize the family.

Second, a corollary of the first: whether situated within families or not, our lives are to be given to praise of God, which necessarily includes compassionate service and hospitality in his name.

Third, we should also honor a life of celibate singleness as a worthy way to serve God.

Our covenants of sexual faithfulness (to God and others) are fragile according to the New Testament. Many passages strongly emphasize various sexual temptations often simply subsumed under general warnings against sexual immorality.

In the midst of these warnings, Jesus and the New Testament as a whole reaffirms that the vitality of marriage bonds depends on the sexual differentiation of male and female.

The New Testament does not view sexual intercourse as essential for a healthy fulfilled life—sex is less important than we make it today. On the other hand, these passages make sex more important than the view of “casual sex” often does.

Instead, sexual intercourse is a powerful gift intended to bond the married couple—a gift effective enough that when it is divorced from this union it becomes the sins of lust and sexual immorality.

Without sex being connected to the past (parents), the future (through the possibility of children) and the Christian community that lives in light of the vision of the coming reign of God, sex can easily lose its moorings and purpose (and thus resist appropriate constraints).

There have been dissenters from this normative position (as there are from any normative Christian teaching). And as is implied by my summary, almost all of us have struggles at one time or another.

But having struggles, being honest about temptations or even moral failings is qualitatively different from redefining or effectively dismissing the call to the specifics of sexual faithfulness.

Or what seems common today: pronouncing as oppressive any notion of faithfulness that doesn’t fit neatly into a squishy understanding of love and inclusiveness. Such pronouncements gain traction largely because—despite mostly empty rhetoric about community—our approach to subjects like sexuality is, mimicking our larger culture, mired in an almost unquestionable affirmation of a libertarian individualism.

(Listen, for instance, to the rhetoric that emanates from LGBT activist groups—when not doing PR to be acceptable to “more traditional” constituents.)

Marty Shupack and I are long-time friends. He used to be my pastor; he was a board member of my Christian peace and justice organization in central Illinois for the six years I directed it. As it happens, it was with him in an ecumenical study group that I first started seriously studying the same-sex issue in, if memory serves, 1983.

At that time, among other things, I read books by John Boswell and Robin Scroggs on the same-sex issue. I remember that Scroggs said that Paul, when he discussed same-sex relationships, was not talking about the same thing we are. Paul only knew about pederasty: unequal and abusive man/boy relationships.

Ever since this book, the claim that the Bible is not talking about what we are talking about has become a mantra among those who want to marginalize the 2,000-year-old consensus Christian view rooted in apparently clear biblical teachings. The claim is that our knowledge of homosexuality and homosexual relationships has changed. In some ways that’s true. Our understanding of many things has changed. However, in this case not in the dramatic ways imagined.

From considerable reading over the last 30 years, I now know, e.g., that, according to lesbian scholar Bernadette Brooten, the ancient Greco-Roman world at the time of Paul had its own concepts of orientation; according to primary source material collected from his time, Paul’s world knew of long-term committed, equal gay and lesbian relationships as well as unequal abusive ones; and in the midst of this, according to William Loader’s massive study, there was a consensus among ancient Jewish teachings that all same-sex sexual relationships were wrong.

(I should also mention that the most obvious reason that Jesus never mentioned same-sex relationships would have been because he agreed with the Jewish consensus. Paul, on the other hand was much more fully engaged with the Gentile world, so it was an issue for some of the churches he addressed in a way it was not for Jesus’ mostly Jewish world.)

What has changed dramatically, however, is not our understanding of homosexuality but a sexual revolution, beginning with my generation, joined to an ever deepening form of radical individualism and a weakening of the church’s influence in society at large (along with the Mennonite church’s greater engagement with popular culture).

For approximately six years I tilted in an affirming direction (influenced by writers like Scroggs and Boswell). Then I read more. I read not only more in biblical studies and theology but more facts (in light of my lifetime of relationships with various gay and bisexual boys and men, as well as more limited relationships with lesbians).

I repeatedly noticed the apparent disinterest in facts on the part of many well-meaning people (read chapters four and five of Unprotected by UCLA psychiatrist Miriam Gross for a sample of what I mean).

Facts, it seemed to me, confirmed the traditional view regarding heterosexual marriage.

And I typically observed an apparent slim range of reading in terms of theology and biblical studies.

I totally agree with Marty that Augustine, Calvin and Anabaptists such as Menno Simons all agreed that we must interpret Scripture “in light of Christian love.”

They—and the early church fathers before them—are following Paul, who says in Colossians, “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience” (3:12).

Earlier in the same chapter, though, he says, “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry)” (3:5). The whole passage is instructive (along with Ephesians 2-5).

But the problem for Marty is that Paul, Augustine, Calvin and Menno agree with me, not him, on same-sex relations.

The only reason a reader of his essay can’t imagine true love would be joined to a prohibition against sexual immorality (including same-sex relations) is because “love” functions in our present culture the way Karl Barth said “grace” was functioning for Dietrich Bonhoeffer in mid-1931 (six years before he wrote Discipleship); it was being made “into a principle and bludgeoning everything else to death.”

Let me end with this. At a prominent place in every presentation I now give on this subject, I say something like the following: I wish I could devote almost 100 percent of my time on this issue to helping us discern how we can, in real ways, know what it means to be loving and supportive of real gays and lesbians—with names, faces and particular lives—who are among us (after having affirmed the traditional view of marriage).

That is to say, I want us to live with the question of how we embody what it means to be true followers of Jesus, the compassionate evangelist and commanding Lord.

Mark Thiessen Nation is professor of theology at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisonburg, Va., and is on the elder team of The Early Church, a Virginia Conference congregation in Harrisonburg.