It struck me recently that some of Jesus’ most important words for us today were arguably redundant when he first said them.

In Mark 10:1-12 (and Matthew 19:1-12), the Pharisees are trying to test Jesus. Desiring to catch him out, they bring up one of the big contentious issues of their day: divorce. Jesus’s response is well known. Rather than debate a point of law with the Pharisees, he goes back to creation, back to Genesis, to God’s design for marriage and makes his case from there.

Jesus’s basic point is simple enough. In marriage, God unites two to become one and no human should seek to separate what God has joined together. To support his case, he quotes Genesis 2:24, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh’. It’s this concept of the two becoming one flesh that Jesus is drawing on to support his position on divorce.

But Genesis 2:24 isn’t the only part of the creation narratives that Jesus quotes here. He also quotes Genesis 1:27, ‘God made them male and female’. Strictly speaking, as far as I can see, Jesus didn’t need to include that quote. His point about not separating what God has joined is rooted in Genesis 2:24, and Genesis 1:27 has nothing to add on that point. In formal terms, Jesus’s use of Genesis 1:27 in this conversation is redundant.

And yet, for us, the inclusion of this additional Genesis verse is vitally important. By quoting these words, Jesus gives us an insight into his perspective on two of the biggest debates of our day. In this post, I’ll look at the first of those debates. I’ll come back to the second in another post.

Sexuality and marriage

When Jesus thinks of marriage, he thinks of God’s creation of male and female. The juxtaposition of Genesis 1:27 – ‘male and female he created them’ – and Genesis 2:24 – ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife…’ – shows that Jesus viewed the creation of two different types of human, men and women, as a key reason for the existence of marriage.1

The fact that Jesus retains the original ‘Therefore’ at the beginning of his quote of Genesis 2:24, placed immediately after the quote of Genesis 1:27 in Mark’s account, further strengthens this point. The word ‘therefore’ means ‘this thing I’m going to say is true because of what I’ve just said’. The thing he’s going to say is that a man and woman unite in marriage. The thing he’s just said is that God created men and women. Jesus is saying that marriages exist because God created men and women. He couldn’t make it any clearer: he believes that marriage is, by definition, the union of a man and a woman.

The claim that Jesus has nothing to say about same-sex marriage just isn’t true.

This is of huge significance to us. At a time when the Church is tearing itself apart over the question of whether to bless and accept romantic and sexual unions of two people of the same sex, we need to hear Jesus’s words. The claim that Jesus has nothing to say about same-sex marriage just isn’t true. When trying to help people understand what marriage really is, Jesus explicitly stated that it is the union of a man and a woman. He could have made this point simply by quoting Genesis 2:24. After all, the union in that verse is clearly of a man and a woman, and yet, he decided to put it beyond doubt by also quoting Genesis 1:27.

To be a follower of Jesus is to submit to him in our thinking and our living. Any person who wants to take following Jesus seriously has to take what he says here seriously when considering the topic of same-sex relationships.

This post has been adapted from a blog originally published at thinktheology.co.uk

1. One pushback to this view I’ve heard is that we can’t be sure how Jesus understood these words from Genesis 1:27. However, it feels safe to assume that Jesus understood ‘male and female’ in Genesis 1:27 in context with Genesis 1:28 – ‘be fruitful and multiple and fill the earth’. That is, male and female are bodily categories, linked to the way human bodies are structured to play one of two roles in reproduction. Jesus’ mention of eunuchs at the end of the Matthean account (Matthew 19:12), doesn’t challenge this: eunuchs were understood to be biological males who were unable to father children (cf. Isaiah 56:3-5). And the existence of intersex conditions also doesn’t undermine God’s creation of humanity as male and female. See Preston Sprinkle, ‘Intersex and Transgender Identities’, Living Out.