If people knew the real you, the stuff you have never told anyone, the things you are most ashamed of, they would eventually walk away. We manage it by editing. We show the good bits and keep the rest hidden, because somewhere deep down we assume that love has a limit, and that our worst would push someone past it.

That fear is exactly where this talk from Pete Farrington starts. It is the next step in the Jesus the Revolutionary series, and Pete takes us to a dinner party in the Bible where one woman does the opposite of hiding. She walks into a room full of people who know her reputation, and instead of managing the moment, she falls apart at Jesus' feet. What happens next is not what anyone in the room expects.

What Actually Happened At Simon's House

The story is in Luke 7. Jesus has been invited to dinner by a man called Simon, one of the religious leaders of the day. Think of it as an invitation into the respectable, well-connected end of town.

Then a woman turns up. Luke simply calls her "a woman who was a sinner," which was the local shorthand for someone with a past everybody knew about. She brings a jar of expensive perfume, stands behind Jesus weeping, and washes his feet with her tears. Then she does something genuinely shocking.

She lets her hair down and wipes his feet with it.

That detail is easy to skim past today, so it is worth understanding what is happening here. A respectable woman in that culture kept her hair bound up in public. Letting it down was intimate, the sort of thing reserved for home. Doing it in a room full of religious men was far bolder and far more scandalous than it reads to us now. Anna Kettle put it well in the conversation afterwards, saying it was a bit like being very forward with a married man in front of a large group of people. Everyone in that room would have felt the awkwardness of it.

Simon certainly did. He thinks to himself that if Jesus really knew who this woman was, he would never let her near him. And on a human level, Simon has a point.

Simon's Mistake And Ours

Simon assumes that knowing someone completely must mean rejecting them. If Jesus could see her whole history, surely he would pull away.

Pete names why that logic feels so obvious to us. We live it. If someone spent a day inside your head and knew every thought, every secret, every thing you have done, you would expect their acceptance to run out. We all have a line, a point beyond which we quietly assume forgiveness stops.

Simon's real mistake was assuming Jesus works the same way we do. Because Jesus knows this woman's past completely, and yet receives her completely.

Jesus knows her past completely and yet receives her completely.

The Excuses We Bring To God

CS Lewis noticed that when we ask God for forgiveness, what we are often really doing is asking God to accept our excuses.

It makes sense why we do this. There usually is some excuse, some genuine circumstance, something that happened to us. So we spend our energy explaining all of that, pointing out the parts that can be excused.

But Lewis said the important thing is the bit left over. The part that excuses do not cover, the part that is, in his words, inexcusable but not, thank God, unforgivable. Real forgiveness is not God agreeing that it was not that bad after all. It looks steadily at the thing, sees it honestly, and still fully accepts the person who did it.

Pete added a sharp modern twist, imagining Jesus answering Simon in today's language. In his satirical rewrite, Jesus refuses to

"Simon, I have something to say to you. We must stop essentialising this woman through the harmful label of 'sinner.' That language perpetuates stigma and reinforces exclusionary power structures. Instead, we should affirm her authentic lived experience and recognise that her behaviours emerged from a complex matrix of socioeconomic disadvantage, patriarchal oppression, and structural inequity that constrained her agency. Calls to repentance merely perpetuate shame culture. What she needs is affirmation, empowerment, and the redistribution of social power. Simon, I invite you into a posture of radical allyship, where you decentre your privilege, examine your implicit biases, and participate in dismantling the systems that produced this harm."

It is funny because it is close to how we actually talk now. And as the hosts were quick to say, some of it is even true. The systems we live in really do damage people. But Pete's point is that none of that touches the woman's deepest problem. Jesus does not spend a second on her excuses. He goes straight to the bit that is left over.

A Quick Word On Sin

That word, sin, needs a moment, because outside of church it can sound either dramatic or old-fashioned. In the conversation afterwards, Anna offered the frame that gets used a lot at Crowd. Sin is not a label that means you are an evil person or living some wild life. It simply means falling short of God's very best. It is the self-centred pull that runs through all of us, the gap between who we are and the perfect standard.

By that definition, it is not a category for bad people over there. It includes everyone at the table, the nice, well brought up, trying-their-best people too. Which is oddly good news, because it means nobody is being singled out.

The Twist Nobody Sees Coming

Watch what Jesus actually does. He does not defend the woman by softening the facts. He agrees she is a sinner. He says her sins are "many." He knows her story better than Simon does, and worse than Simon imagines.

And still he takes her side.

The woman, for her part, says nothing. She offers no defence, no explanation, no "yes, but you don't understand my background." She just sees herself honestly and comes anyway. Pete draws out the beauty of that silence. She does not need to defend herself, because Jesus has become her defence.

Then comes the line that holds the whole talk together. When your past follows you everywhere, when the accusations are loud, and worst of all when they are true, one of the most staggering things about the good news of Jesus is this.

The one who knows you most intimately is the very one who becomes your defender.

Cheap Grace And Why It Leaves Us Cold

So why is Simon so scornful and the woman so grateful? Anna named it as the difference between cheap grace and the real thing.

Simon never really faced his own need, so grace stayed cheap to him, a thing other people needed more than he did. Because he had not received much, he could not give much. He judged the woman from a distance.

The woman had faced her need head on, so grace was anything but cheap. She had been forgiven much, and it poured out of her. Jesus sums it up by saying whoever has been forgiven little, loves little. That is not about who has done more wrong. It is about who has honestly reckoned with it. Sharon captured the same idea from her own experience, describing what it is like to see your own stuff clearly for once, feel how ugly it is, and then receive forgiveness anyway. Her words for it were being fully seen and still fully loved at the same time.

Conversation Street

After the talk, Matt, Sharon and Anna picked up some of the honest questions this raises.

Why do we find the word sin so hard

Sharon told a story from years of doing school assemblies. One school was happy with everything except one line, "I have sinned." And once you remove that line, the whole thing falls apart, because if there is nothing to forgive, there is no need for grace. The team agreed that sin is a hard word for people with no church background, which is exactly why they keep translating it back to something plain. Not "you are evil," but "we all fall short of God's best, every day."

What about the things that were genuinely done to me

This is where the conversation got tender and careful. Sharon shared how she once realised she had been using real hurt as a reason not to look at her own part. Being wronged is real, and the person who wronged you is accountable to God for it. None of that gets waved away. But, as she put it, we are still responsible for our bit. The talk takes both seriously at once. It takes seriously what was done to us, and it takes seriously our own hearts.

Any advice on actually accepting God's forgiveness

Someone watching asked this, and called it a stupid question. It is not. The team offered a few honest, practical thoughts. Be willing to face your own heart rather than hide from it. Bring it into the light by talking to a trusted friend, pastor or counsellor, because sin left in the dark rarely loosens its grip. And do not go digging through your whole past looking for things. As Anna put it, let it be God-led.

Sharon offered one practice that many people find helpful. The Bible often talks about sin like a debt, so she writes down what comes to mind, prays through each item, receives forgiveness for it, and then crosses it off, as if to say that debt is paid. It is a way of helping your head catch up with what is already true, especially if you are someone who keeps circling back to the same guilt.

What about when self-hatred takes over

One viewer shared how they ask forgiveness for the same things again and again, especially during low periods when self-hatred gets loud. Matt drew a line between two things that can feel similar but are not. Conviction is God gently pointing at something so you can turn from it, and it comes wrapped in kindness. Condemnation is the crushing, shaming voice that keeps you circling, and that voice does not come from God. Sharon added that the mind can be a real battleground, and that a thought turning up does not make it true. You can notice it, name it as false, and choose to hold onto what is true instead. That shift is rarely instant, and she was honest about that. Her simple encouragement was, do not give up.

Where This Lands

If this stirs something up, here are a few honest, doable next steps drawn from the talk and the conversation.

• Stop building your case. Notice when you are explaining your excuses to God rather than being honest about the bit that is left over. Try naming one thing plainly, without the "yes, but."
• Bring it into the light. Tell one trusted person something you have kept in the dark. Shame loses much of its grip the moment it is spoken.
• Let it be led, not dug up. You do not need to excavate your whole history. When something genuinely surfaces, deal with it. When it does not, let it rest.
• Learn the difference between conviction and condemnation. If a voice is gentle and points you forward, it is worth listening to. If a voice only crushes and circles, it is not from God.
• Receive it, then move on. Forgiveness is a once-and-done thing, not a debt to keep repaying. If you keep circling the same ground, that is worth talking through with someone.

One Last Thing

Near the end, Sharon noticed something lovely in the story. When the woman walked in with her hair down, all the shame in the room settled on her. Jesus could have joined in. Instead he moved the shame off her and onto himself, treating her with dignity in front of the very people who were whispering. He sends her out with peace.

That is the invitation here. Not to clean yourself up first, patch yourself into a presentable state, and then hope to be accepted. Jesus meets people at their worst, not their best.

So here is a question worth asking this week. What would change if you really believed that the One who knows everything about you is not waiting to walk away, but has already chosen to stand with you?

If that is something you would like to talk through, you would be genuinely welcome at Crowd. Come as you are, questions and all.