Perfect Love

A woman from my church used to wash away her sins in the shower.

Not symbolically.

Literally.

Whenever she knowingly sinned, she would pray and ask God for forgiveness. But that wasn’t enough. Even after she had confessed, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something inside her was still dirty.

So she would go and wash herself.

She told me that standing under the water helped. Scrubbing her skin made her feel clean again.

When she told me this, I remember thinking it was a little strange. I remember googling “obsessive compulsive disorder” at the time. But the more I have reflected on it over the years, the more I think her behaviour made perfect sense.

After all, what had she been taught?

She had grown up in a church system, being taught that sin makes us dirty. That it stains us. That it separates us from God. That human beings are fundamentally unclean and that God’s holiness cannot coexist with our corruption. She had been taught that something had to happen before a sinner could enter God’s presence. Something had to wash us. Cleanse us. Purify us.

If you spend enough years absorbing those ideas, is it really surprising that some people begin to experience sin almost physically?

I think many Christians do.

Not necessarily in the same way this woman did, but the underlying feeling is often the same. We sin and feel contaminated. We feel stained. We feel as though something inside us has become spoilt. We feel less worthy, less acceptable, and less lovable than we were before.

Recently, a reader left a comment on one of my articles that brought all of this rushing back to me. She argued that God cannot simply forgive sinners because that would somehow make Him "dirty". Heaven itself, she suggested, would become “tainted” if sinful people were allowed in. God’s holiness, she argued, requires that sin be dealt with before people can enter His presence.

Now, before you dismiss that as an unusual belief, it is worth recognising just how common this way of thinking actually is.

Many Christians have been taught some version of it their entire lives.

Sin is not merely something we do. It is a contaminant. It infects. It spreads. It corrupts whatever it touches. God is holy. Heaven is holy. Therefore, sin must somehow be removed before we can be welcomed into either. Once you accept those assumptions, an awful lot of Christian theology begins to make sense.

The woman in the shower begins to make sense.

The fear of a “tainted” heaven begins to make sense.

Even the idea that God requires violence before forgiveness can be offered begins to make sense.

The question I keep coming back to, however, is whether Jesus actually saw the world that way.

Then Jesus Arrives and Ruins Everything

To be fair, this idea of separation is not entirely without biblical precedent.

When you read parts of the Old Testament, there are certainly moments where God’s holiness appears dangerous to approach. There are purity laws, sacred spaces, ritual washings, and all sorts of boundaries designed to keep the holy and the unholy apart. The Tabernacle and later the Temple were filled with layers of separation. Certain people could go certain places, while others could not. Uncleanness was treated seriously, and the presence of God was often portrayed as something that required careful preparation.

It is not difficult to see how generations of believers came to the conclusion that God and sinners simply cannot mix.

The problem is that then Jesus turns up.

And if Christians are right about Jesus, this is where things get interesting.

Christians don’t merely believe that Jesus was a prophet, teacher, or holy man. We believe that Jesus was God in the flesh. The visible image of the invisible God. The exact representation of God’s nature. If you want to know what God is like, Christians insist that you look at Jesus.

Which raises a rather obvious question.

If God is unable to tolerate sinful, unclean people, why does Jesus seem so comfortable around them?

He touches lepers. Not after they are healed, but before. He allows a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years, a condition that rendered her ritually unclean, to touch Him in a crowded street. He shares meals with tax collectors and sinners so often that it becomes one of the primary criticisms levelled against Him by religious leaders. He allows a woman known publicly as a sinner to weep on His feet and wipe them with her hair. He reaches out and touches corpses. He enters the homes of the dead. He walks directly into situations that, according to the purity codes of His day, should have rendered Him unclean.

And yet, Jesus never appears remotely concerned.

In fact, the religious people seem far more worried about contamination than Jesus does.

What makes this even more difficult to ignore is that all of this is happening before the crucifixion.

Before the resurrection.

Before any supposed transaction has taken place to make people acceptable to God.

If the common theory is correct, then these people are still sinners. They are still unclean. They are still, according to many popular understandings of salvation, separated from God.

Yet Jesus happily eats with them, touches them, welcomes them, and spends time in their company.

Why?

Because the picture we encounter in the Gospels is not of a God desperately trying to protect His holiness from sinners. It is the picture of a God moving toward sinners at every opportunity. And the more I read those stories, the more I find myself wondering whether we have inherited a view of holiness that owes more to our fear of contamination than it does to Jesus Himself.

So What Exactly Changed?

At this point, some Christians will already have an answer.

Yes, Jesus spent time with sinners. Yes, He touched lepers, ate with tax collectors, and welcomed people that respectable religious leaders avoided. But, they would argue, none of that changes the bigger picture. The cross had not happened yet. The crucifixion was still necessary. The debt still needed to be paid. The penalty still needed to be satisfied before forgiveness could truly be offered.

The problem I have with that explanation is that Jesus does not merely spend time with sinners.

He treats them as though God has already moved toward them.

When a paralysed man is lowered through a roof by his friends, Jesus says something extraordinary before He heals him. “Your sins are forgiven.” The religious leaders immediately recognise the significance of what He has just said. In their minds, forgiveness belongs to God. It is not something Jesus should be handing out so casually. Yet He does.

The same thing happens when a woman known publicly as a sinner crashes a dinner party and begins washing Jesus’ feet with her tears. While the religious leaders around Him are scandalised by her presence, Jesus tells her that her sins are forgiven and sends her away in peace.

The corrupt tax collector, Zacchaeus, who has spent years enriching himself at the expense of his own people, is yet another example. Jesus invites Himself over for dinner, much to everyone’s disgust, and by the end of the encounter declares that salvation has come to Zacchaeus’s house.

What strikes me about these stories is not simply that Jesus is willing to be near sinners. It is that He behaves as though forgiveness, grace, and restoration are already available to them.

He never acts as though God is reluctantly waiting for a future event before He can finally extend mercy. He never says, “I would love to forgive you, but justice won’t allow it until a few years from now.” He never suggests that God’s hands are tied until the machinery of atonement has been completed.

Instead, forgiveness seems to flow from Him naturally. Effortlessly. Abundantly.

Which raises a question I don’t remember anyone asking when I was growing up.

If God required the death of Jesus before He could forgive sinners, why does Jesus spend His ministry forgiving sinners before His death?

I keep coming back to that question because I genuinely don’t know what to do with it. If Jesus is the fullest revelation of God’s character, then His actions have to count for something. Yet when I read the Gospels, I don’t encounter a God who seems reluctant to forgive or uncomfortable around sinners. I encounter a God who is constantly moving toward them. Before the cross, before the resurrection, before any of the theological explanations Christians have developed to explain what happened on Good Friday, Jesus is already eating with sinners, restoring outcasts, and assuring people that they are welcomed into the kingdom of God.

So, perhaps the cross changed everything. I’m sure it changed something.

But perhaps the cross also revealed something that had been true all along.

Perhaps it was never the moment God finally became willing to forgive. Perhaps it was the moment we finally saw how far God’s forgiveness was willing to go.

What If The Cross Was Revealing God Instead?

For much of my life, I was taught to think about the cross as the moment something changed in God.

Before the cross, God was holy and humanity was sinful. Justice stood in the way of forgiveness. A penalty needed to be paid. A debt needed to be settled. Only once Jesus died could forgiveness finally flow.

But the more I read the Gospels, the harder it becomes for me to see the story that way.

Jesus does not seem to spend three years introducing people to a God who wants to punish them. He spends three years introducing people to a God who wants to forgive them. He tells stories about fathers running to embrace prodigal sons. He forgives sinners. He welcomes outcasts. He shares meals with people everyone else has written off. Everywhere He goes, He seems determined to convince people that God is far more gracious than they imagine.

Then comes the cross.

And what do we see there?

We see the worst thing human beings can think to do. We see betrayal, corruption, injustice, political violence, religious hypocrisy, public humiliation, torture, and murder. We see humanity taking the very best person it has ever encountered and nailing Him to a piece of wood.

If there was ever a moment that should have exhausted God’s patience, surely this was it.

Yet the words that come from Jesus’ lips are not words of condemnation: “Father, forgive them.”

This is why I increasingly wonder whether the cross was never about changing God’s attitude toward humanity. Perhaps it was about revealing God’s attitude toward humanity.

The cross does not convince God to forgive.

The cross reveals a God who forgives even while we are in the act of crucifying Him.

Seen this way, the cross becomes something even more profound than a transaction. It becomes a window into the very heart of God. It shows us a God who would rather absorb human violence than return it. A God who would rather suffer at our hands than abandon us. A God whose forgiveness extends further than we ever imagined possible.

Perhaps it was never the moment God finally became willing to forgive.

Perhaps it was the moment we finally saw how far God’s forgiveness was willing to go.

The Tragedy Of Getting The Story Backwards

The more I think about that woman from my church, the less interested I am in whether her theology was technically correct. What stays with me is the image itself. A woman feeling the need to jump in the shower after praying for forgiveness because she still felt dirty.

I suspect she is not alone.

Over the years, I have met so many Christians who carry around a similar feeling. They might not have the obsession with cleanliness. And they would probably never describe it as spiritual contamination, but the idea is there all the same. Beneath the prayers, the worship songs, and the church attendance sits a nagging sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Something that makes God uncomfortable. Something that keeps Him at a distance.

And yet, when I read the Gospels, I find myself wondering if we have somehow got the story backwards.

The religious leaders in Jesus’ day spent an extraordinary amount of time worrying about who was clean and who was unclean, who was worthy and who was unworthy, who belonged near God and who did not.

Jesus seemed far more interested in closing the distance.

Again and again, He moves toward the very people everyone else assumed God would avoid. The leper. The tax collector. The prostitute. The outcast. The sinner.

If anything, the story of Jesus is not about people finally finding a way to get close to God.

It is about God refusing to stay away from people.

Perhaps that is why I find it so difficult to believe that the central message of Christianity is that human beings are simply too dirty for God.

Because when God finally shows up in person, He seems remarkably comfortable in our company.