Missing the mark

If the concern of the passages on homosexuality is not the acts in themselves, but the social impact of the act, then there is room for further investigation and the final word has not been spoken. What is needed is to look into the nature of "sin" itself under the New Covenant.

I specify the New Covenant because sin is defined as transgression of the Law when the Old Covenant was in effect, but there is a new qualifier under the New.  "hamartia" is the Greek word translated as "sin" in the New Covenant and it means literally "missing the mark."  This is significant because "the mark" is different under the New Covenant; law is not enough.  There has to be a commitment to agape as the basis for our actions in society, as illustrated in James 4:17, "If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it, it is sin for them."  I will grant that the Law is not just a list of "Thou shalt nots," but the point is that it IS a list of requirements that had been subject to over-analysis in the same way that lawyers examine laws today for ways to pervert the purpose because of incompleteness or error in wording.  We work with the purpose and change the rules that express that purpose as required by the leading of the Spirit.  The current examination is just one example of that process just as the long examination into the morality of slavery was.

So, what is a cogent expression of the major, underlying purpose?  I believe Jesus gave us that when He gave us the New Commandment: "That you love one another even as I have loved you."  Honestly, this is just a restatement of the commandment to "love your neightbor," so what is "new" about it.  I believe that Jesus was saying that this is the new and immediate basis of the covenant He mediated and that it embodies the two "greatest commandments" as love of God is implied and illustrated by the assertion that " whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen," and by "7Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.8The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love." (Both citations from 1John)

"Sin" then is a failure of love.