hilaire,
That is an interesting angle on Jesus and tax collectors. But I think there are too many examples where sinners of all kinds were welcomed to Jesus table (which is the same thing as being offered God's grace).
"The tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you" (Matthew 21:31).
Yes, he was addressing the Pharisees at that point, but I don't see where tax collectors have any special significance except that they are reviled and marginalized by the society.
That quote in itself is extremely interesting, it is thought that at various points in its history the Temple had both a male sacrificial priesthood, and a separate female clergy which enjoyed various levels of power and influence and which would have practiced the endemic Near Eastern phenomenon of sacred temple "prostitution" which of course is nothing like real prostitution at all, but is a kind of female sexual fertility cult which later male historians called prostitution in an attempt to besmirch its reputation. We know that the Jews did worship and honour the Asherah (the female aspect of God) to varying degrees, and at times held both the Asherah and other Canaanitic female deities in the highest esteem. After all Solomon himself built alters to Astarte in the precinct of the first Temple and had sacrifices to her made on his behalf.
By the 1st century and over the couple of centuries leading up to it a kind of reform of Temple practice had occurred which relegated any worship of the Asherah to the sphere of private "heretical" folk religion and the male sacrificial clergy had effectively banished their female rivals from the Temple and blackened their names completely by association with common prostitution (a confusion which remains to this very day) and introduced a far stricter monotheism which the Christian and Muslim traditions later inherited.
So what exactly is Jesus saying when he tells the Pharisees that the Tax collectors who undermine their sacerdotal monopoly on taxes, and the "prostitutes" by which he could in fact mean the ancient female clergy of the Temple (the exact meaning of the original Aramaic saying of Jesus in question is after all opaque to us after all these translations and intervening millenia) will enter heaven before them?
Well much of the evidence; Jesus's fondness for Tax collectors who undermined the Temple priesthood by taking the taxes that priesthood claimed as its holy right, the prominence of women in his retinue (and "fallen" women too, by which we could read members of the suppressed female clergy), indeed many admit that these females were in fact his disciples, equals to the male disciples who have come down to us as the apostles etc. We have the fact that Jesus was a Nazarene, and therefore ethnically Galilean, the Galileans had only been converted to this reformed kind of Judean Judaism fairly recently and felt little or no strong attachments to the priesthood which had taken control of it which was generally speaking a Judean (as opposed to Galilean) tribal hegemony. Jesus's openness to gentiles, Romans, Samaritans and others and to hellenised Jews and Jews not of the priestly caste also adds to the evidence of his possible true mission.
All of this evidence tends to suggest that Jesus's real mission was to return Judaism to its pre-Pharisaical state, Jesus in this reading is a Jewish revivalist. Many believe that he recognised that the older form of Judaism which recognised other deities, specifically female ones, and which was less stridently exclusive of gentiles and gentile ideas, would allow the Jews to live more harmoniously within the Roman Empire, and indeed the fact that the leaders of the Jewish revolt which caused the destruction of Jerusalem and the chastisement of the Jews by the Romans which happened after Jesus's death were members of the priestly caste who took the reforms Jesus seems to have preached against very seriously, rather suggests Jesus was right.
It's a legitimate reading of the sayings of Jesus that he was preaching that the Temple priesthood's reforms were unholy and not supported by the best traditions, that he viewed the ancient faith of Solomon and the Kings of Israel as the true faith which had been hijacked by a mercenary tribal priestly patriarchy who's beliefs put the Jews at odds with their neighbours and the beliefs of their ancestors and (more importantly in some ways) with the Roman empire.
Jesus's opposition to pharisaical beliefs permeates the Gospels, and his entire life seems to show evidence of this mission to return the Jewish faith to its ancient roots. The youthful disputes with the priests in Jerusalem, his supposed descent (symbolic or otherwise) from David & Solomon, his explicit support for members of society the Temple priesthood had marginalised and anathematised, his ultimate direct conflict with the Temple priesthood during his last ministry in Jerusalem which precipitated the Sanhedrin's final decision to move against him. The evidence that the Roman authorities were reluctant perhaps even completely unwilling to act on the Sanhedrin's wishes when they questioned Jesus as to the nature of his teachings, which would have seemed to the Romans to be more amenable than the more extreme views of the pharisees.
So I don't think that Jesus' explicit support for Tax collectors and "Prostitutes" can be read in quite the way we have come to read it over the centuries as a simple attempt to reach out to the outcasts since it's the specific outcasts he reaches out to which says so much about the nature of his beliefs.
Beliefs, it must be pointed out, which while being certainly much more permissive than those of the Temple priesthood need not be interpreted as explicitly having anymore sympathy for homosexuals since he does not explicitly mention such a sympathy.
Though I admit that Jesus's fondness for hellenised Jews might well suggest he personally did not have a specific problem with homosexuality which in one form or another was a part of the hellenistic cultural package. But there is no suggestion that those hellenised Jews among Jesus's disciples and followers were not expected to give up the lifestyle they had lead prior to having converted to Jesus's teaching. Indeed the opposite seems to be true.
More important, I think, is Paul's lament about the incorrigible nature of man in the beginning of Romans. Paul is developing his thesis that man is incompetent to be judged under the law, so man therefore receives grace. Instead of death, we sinners get Jesus.
He puts it on the same level as other major transgressions. So I am not saying that the NT condones homosexuality. What I am saying is that the NT is saying that homosexuals are no less deserving of God's grace than any one else.
If you are a sinner or you are marginalized for any reason, Jesus is inviting you to his table, especially. That was my point.
So I am equating tax collectors with homosexuals. Jesus' disciple Mathew was a tax collector. I think by analogy, if Jesus were to spin us a modern day parable, or come back and form another posse of apostles, it would surely include one or more homosexuals.
This I can buy, Jesus does seem to say that no matter what your transgressions are if you repent God will forgive you your sins and that no sin is so great it cannot be forgiven. Even if he does not mention homosexuals by name its fair to presume that if Jesus were true to his own teaching that he would indeed have included them in his forgiveness.
What is implicit however in what you are saying, and indeed it is implicit in a number of mainstream Christian teachings on this, is that Homosexuality or at least homosexual sex acts are in and of themselves sinful.
Yes all mankind is innately sinful, according to Christian teaching, and yes you could regard any and all implicit sin as being at its root Original Sin, but specific acts do still carry a special sinly load. Lets not forget that Tax collecting and prostitution (of any kind) were regarded as unholy (sinful) in Jesus's time, and that was the source of the marginalisation those people suffered, and the reason Jesus reached out to them. And Jesus does not say that these marginalised people were sinless (nor even that the reasons for the marginalisation were not sinful), merely that they were less sinful than those who had marginalised them.
My problem with the notion that if Jesus were alive today that among his closest associates, his most beloved, the redeemed, would be homosexuals is that homosexuality as far as I am concerned is not in need of forgiveness as a sin since I do not regard homosexuality as sinful.
If Jesus were alive today and clearly was the Redeemer, the son of god, I would have plenty of sins to seek his forgiveness for, but my homosexuality is not a sin and is therefore not something I would seek Jesus's forgiveness for.