Lately, I’ve been thinking about grace—about who we forgive easily and who we still crucify with our silence. I’ve been wondering what it says about us, and about our image of God, that some sins seem to earn a soft place in our theology while others are treated like unforgivable transgressions.
In many Christian spaces, we’ve learned to live with certain kinds of brokenness. Divorce, for instance, no longer stirs the outrage it once did. We’ve seen too much of it to throw stones anymore. We’ve watched good people try and fail to hold a marriage together. We’ve sat beside friends in courtrooms, prayed over them when they started again, and celebrated when they found new love.
And though Jesus Himself called remarriage after an unbiblical divorce “adultery,” we don’t excommunicate anyone for it. We bless the new union. We wrap it in prayer. We trust that God’s mercy covers what law cannot.
That’s grace—and it’s beautiful. Because Jesus came to heal, not to humiliate.
What Scripture Actually Says
When Jesus spoke about divorce, His teaching was both stern and deeply compassionate:
“Whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” — Matthew 19:9
That single phrase—“except for sexual immorality”—has become known as the loophole, the one narrow allowance Jesus made for divorce. Outside of that exception, He declared that remarriage amounts to adultery.
Under Mosaic law, adultery was punishable by death (Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22). The same penalty appears only a few verses later for a man lying with a man as with a woman (Leviticus 20:13). Two behaviors. One punishment.
In the eyes of ancient law, they were moral equals.
Yet Jesus Himself never said a single word about homosexuality—not in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
He spoke passionately about hypocrisy, about greed, about neglecting the poor. He warned more about the dangers of money than about sexual behavior. He devoted multiple teachings to marriage and divorce, but never once mentioned same-sex love.
If we measure Scripture by focus, not assumption, the difference is striking:
“Divorce” and related terms appear more than 30 times throughout the Bible. Jesus discusses divorce explicitly four times, and Paul devotes nearly an entire chapter (1 Corinthians 7) to it. Meanwhile, homosexuality or same-sex acts are mentioned only a handful of times—two in Leviticus, one passage in Romans 1, and two brief vice lists in 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1.
By frequency and by emphasis, the Bible speaks far more about broken covenants between men and women than about same-sex relationships.
So if both were condemned under Mosaic law, and one appears dozens of times while the other scarcely at all, why has the church flipped the emphasis—treating divorce as forgivable and homosexuality as unforgettable?
Maybe it’s because divorce became our sin. It entered our homes, our pulpits, our families. Once sin wears a face we love, we learn mercy.
The Wider Wisdom of Grace
This truth isn’t unique to Christianity. When I look across faith traditions, I see the same current of mercy flowing through every sacred river.
In Judaism, law and compassion are always in dialogue. The rabbis call it chesed—lovingkindness that bends justice toward mercy. The Talmud says that when justice and compassion conflict, God chooses compassion.
In Islam, every chapter of the Qur’an begins with the invocation: In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful. Mercy isn’t an attribute of God—it is God’s essence. The Prophet Muhammad taught that divine mercy outweighs wrath, and that those who show mercy will receive it.
In Buddhism, there is no concept of original sin, only suffering and the invitation to wake up from it. The Buddha did not divide people into pure and impure; he saw all beings as travelers learning how to end suffering through compassion.
In Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita reminds us that God dwells in every heart. Krishna says, “Even if the most sinful worships Me with devotion, he is to be considered righteous, for he has rightly resolved.” Redemption begins not with purity but with devotion.
And in Shinto, the indigenous spirituality of Japan, impurity (kegare) is never permanent. It can always be washed away—by water, by ritual, by returning to harmony with nature. The kami (divine presences) are not offended by imperfection; they are moved by sincerity.
Every faith, in its own language, says the same thing: We are not loved because we are clean. We are cleansed because we are loved.
The Problem of Selective Mercy
If that’s true, then why do we still ration grace? Why do we forgive one person’s lifelong adultery through remarriage, but condemn another’s lifelong devotion expressed differently?
Why do we praise the divorced man who remarries yet shun the woman who loves another woman?
It isn’t Scripture alone drawing those lines. It’s fear.
Fear of being wrong. Fear of losing control. Fear of a God whose love might exceed the limits we’ve drawn for Him.
But God’s love—whether we meet it as Yahweh, Allah, Krishna, Amida, or through Christ—is untamable. It spills past our categories and dissolves our hierarchies. The divine is not scandalized by our humanity—it’s magnetized to it. That’s why Jesus touched lepers, why Muhammad freed slaves, why the Buddha sat with outcasts, why Krishna danced among the poor, why Shinto shrines open themselves to the wind.
The sacred never flinches at imperfection. It moves toward it.
A More Christlike Mercy
Jesus never asked anyone to meet Him halfway. He walked the whole way to the cross for people who couldn’t move at all. He told the self-righteous to drop their stones and told the guilty, “Neither do I condemn you.”
He didn’t say, “You’re perfect.”
He said, “You’re loved.”
If grace can cover the divorced and remarried—those who, by His own words, “commit adultery”—then surely it can cover others whose stories the ancient world didn’t know how to hold.
Maybe holiness isn’t about enforcing purity but about embodying compassion. Maybe the gospel isn’t about keeping the right company but about keeping company with the broken.
The truest test of faith isn’t how tightly we cling to rules; it’s how widely we open our arms.
The gospel was never meant to be a sorting system for sinners—it was meant to be a flood of love drenching everyone brave enough to stand in its path.
What Do We Worship?
Maybe that’s the question we must keep asking:
What do we worship?
Who do we love?
Who do we forgive—and who do we condemn?
If we worship certainty, we’ll always need an enemy.
If we worship control, we’ll always need someone to exclude.
But if we worship Love itself—the Love that spoke galaxies into being and forgave its executioners—then our work is not to guard the gates, but to open them.
Across every religion, mercy triumphs over judgment. Grace outlives law. And the divine, in every tongue and story, whispers the same truth:
“You are already loved. Now go and live like it.”
Author’s Note
This reflection is part of The Uncharted Territory series on grace across world religions—a meditation on how mercy, forgiveness, and belonging transcend doctrine. When I compare what Scripture emphasizes with what we emphasize, I see not contradiction but invitation: to love as largely as God already does.
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