Did We Fall in Love with a System or a Person?
Reclaiming the Red Letters
I struggled to read my Bible for a long time after I started deconstructing from the church theology I grew up with. I felt stuck, like I just couldn’t even flip open the cover and look at the pages inside. It didn’t feel like a sanctuary; It felt like a minefield of weaponized proof-texts, high-stakes guilt trips, and theological traps designed to catch me stepping out of line. The pages where I once found comfort and hope now felt flat and hollow.
I missed the spiritual connection, but I flatly refused to deal with the baggage.
If you are currently experiencing that same kind of text-induced vertigo, I want to invite you to take a long, slow breath. You don’t hate the Bible and you don’t hate the truth. But it may feel triggering because institutional religion trained us to fall in love with an intricate system of ideas rather than the actual character of a person. We were pushed into intellectual assent; that we had to believe the ‘right things’ to be a Christian. We were taught to view the Gospels as a giant puzzle where we had to extract code-words for salvation, rather than a biography of a muddy first-century rabbi who walked in sandals through dirt.
We have been taught what the Bible is supposed to say according to church tradition, rather than being taught how to read it.
But if we are going to sort the seeds of deconstruction this month, we have to learn how to bypass the theological clutter and look directly at Jesus. And to see just how human—and beautifully disruptive—He really was, we need to crash a very tense dinner party in the Gospel of Luke.
The Uninvited Guest
In Luke chapter 7, Jesus is invited to have dinner at the home of Simon, a wealthy and highly respected religious elite. This isn’t a casual hangout; it’s a high-stakes cultural performance. Everyone is on their best behavior, watching their manners, and ensuring the religious boundaries are strictly maintained.
But mid-meal, something startling happens.
A woman from the streets, someone the town had already labeled, judged, and discarded as a “sinner,” walks straight into the dining room. She doesn’t say a word. She just falls to the floor at the edge of Jesus’s dining couch, completely unraveled. Her tears start splashing onto His dusty feet. Realizing she has made a scene, she wipes the tears away with her hair, kisses His feet, and pours a jar of expensive perfume over them.
The room goes dead silent. You can practically hear the ice clicking in the cups.
Simon, the religious host, looks at this messy, emotional spectacle and immediately starts running his internal system-analysis. He thinks to himself: “If this man were a real prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him. He would know she is dirty.”
Notice how Simon sees her. He doesn’t see a grieving woman who is desperate for safety. He sees a theological category: Sinner. And because his system is built on maintaining boundaries, his immediate instinct is to evict the clutter to protect the clean space.
The God Who Notices Tears
But look at Jesus. He doesn’t pull His feet back. He doesn’t ask for her background check or demand a confession of doctrine. Instead, He turns to His host and drops a question that cuts through the religious pretense:
“Simon, do you see this woman?” (Luke 7:44)
It sounds like a simple question, but it’s a massive indictment. Jesus is saying, “Simon, you see a rule violation. You see a theological problem. But you don’t actually see her at all.”
Jesus then goes on to point out the raw, physical, human details that Simon ignored. He notes that while the religious elite gave Him no water for His feet, this woman washed them with her tears. While the institution gave Him no welcome, she hadn’t stopped kissing His feet.
In a world obsessed with maintaining the pristine, manicured lawn of religious purity, Jesus completely rewrote the rules of engagement. He didn’t see people through the lens of institutional metrics or moral categories. He met them in the actual, messy soil of their lived experience.
Freeing the Human Jesus
When you begin to reclaim the “Red Letters”—the literal words and actions of Christ—you start to realize that the version of Jesus presented by the institutional machinery is often a stained-glass caricature. The corporate church needs a corporate Jesus—one who fits neatly into building campaigns, political agendas, and dogmatic checklists.
But the Jesus of the dirt is entirely unmanageable.
He got tired and fell asleep in the back of a fishing boat.
He loved a good dinner party so much that the religious critics literally accused Him of being a glutton and a drunkard.
He consistently ignored religious protocol to touch the people the system deemed untouchable.
If you are trying to figure out how to navigate a shifting faith without losing your heart, your assignment this week is remarkably simple: Stop trying to force yourself to understand systematic theology, and just look at how Jesus treated people.
You don’t need a commentary for this, and you don’t need another lecture. You just need to look at the dinner table, watch Him defend the broken person over the pristine policy, and realize that you are finally safe to put your guard down.
The Garden Notes
📚 On the Nightstand
If you want to dive deeper into stripping away the institutional layers from your faith, pick up a copy of “Freeing Jesus” by Diana Butler Bass. In it, she beautifully explores how we can move past the rigid, standardized dogmas of corporate religion to rediscover Jesus as a friend, teacher, savior, and a real presence met in the ordinary chapters of our lived experience.
🌿 From the Shop
If you want to take this week’s reflection deeper into your own life, I designed the Cultivating the Word specifically for this
Quote of the Week
We were pushed into intellectual assent; that we had to believe the ‘right things’ to be a Christian. We were taught to view the Gospels as a giant puzzle where we had to extract code-words for salvation, rather than a biography of a muddy first-century rabbi who walked in sandals through dirt.
We have been taught what the Bible is supposed to say according to church tradition, rather than being taught how to read it.
The Greenhouse Preview
This Friday in The Weed-Puller’s Lab, we are practicing The Red Letter Reset. I’m giving you a minimalist, 3-step contemplative reading worksheet designed specifically to help you read the Gospels without your old church trauma triggering a fight-or-flight response. We are trading doctrinal extraction for simple character observation.
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The Closing Question
If you temporarily stopped treating the Gospels like a theological puzzle to solve, and just looked at how Jesus interacted with people, what is the first thing you think He would say to you in your tiredness right now?