One of the greatest discrepancies between Christianity as it is practised in the West today and Christianity as it was practised by Jesus is in the type of people who form part of the Christian crowd. By and large churches are filled with respectable people who hang round with respectable people. Most Christians don’t want to have drunkards or criminals or drug addicts or other undesirables loitering round their churches.
There are good reasons why churches want to keep undesirables away: churches want to provide safe environments for children; they don’t want to incur the costs of replacing items which could get broken; and so on. Inappropriate behaviour by a few can tear a community apart. Church leaders should not associate with disreputable people. The problem is that Jesus had different priorities, as illustrated by Luke 7:36-50.
It must have been very embarrassing when a woman of disreputable character started getting intimate with Jesus’s feet in a relatively public place. People would have been encouraged to think that maybe Jesus was involved in the disreputable activities in which the woman engaged. But Jesus made it clear that the issue was not his own safety or reputation: he had been called to serve sinners, just as Christians have today, and that means hanging round with them, regardless of the consequences.