Part Six: Institutional Sins and the Confession the Church Owes
27. The Divorced and Remarried - Who Came Looking for Grace
The Christian Statement
Jesus's teaching on divorce is among the clearest and most demanding in the Gospels: "I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery" (Matthew 19:9). The teaching is serious. The church is right to take it seriously.
The question is how the teaching is applied to the person who has already experienced divorce and remarriage and who comes to the church looking for grace, for community, for the God who meets people in the mess of their lives. The church that meets this person with a doctrinal statement about their marital status has not followed Jesus's pattern with any of the people He encountered in similar positions. Jesus did not turn the woman at the well away when He discovered she had had five husbands. He offered her living water.
The divorced and remarried person is not asking the church to change its teaching on marriage. They are asking whether there is grace for people who have failed to live up to it. The answer the Gospel provides is: yes. Emphatically. The cross covers every failure of covenant fidelity, every broken promise, every marriage that did not survive. The person who has experienced divorce and found grace is not a second-class Christian. They are a person who knows what they needed.
The church that makes divorced and remarried people feel permanently disqualified - from leadership, from full participation in the community, from the table - is applying a standard of exclusion that Jesus did not apply and that produces the exact outcome described in Section 3: the person who came looking for grace and found gatekeeping, and who will use that experience as the reason they never went back.
"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."
-- Romans 8:1 (NET)
No condemnation. This includes the person whose marriage did not survive. The church that adds a footnote to Romans 8:1 for the divorced has not understood the verse.