Last Tuesday, when I first saw Sister Cindy, an American evangelist who’s caught internet fame for preaching on college campuses and her posse of preachers out on the quad, my initial instinct was to set up shop 20 yards down and get on my own soapbox. As a Jesus follower, hearing these speakers on the quad was frustrating.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t stay for long, mostly because of my overwhelmingly emotional response to what was going on, but I was there long enough to have some thoughts on what Jesus would have thought of Sister Cindy’s message.
It’s possible I’m taking this entirely too seriously and everyone else could just enjoy the absurdity of it all, but I saw a performance and then heard words I radically disagree with. In all our biblical records that I see, Jesus loved the hoes.
I want to be clear from the get-go: it’s dangerous to speak for God, whether it be Sister Cindy or me and that’s not my intention. Rather, I want to shed light on what the Bible says about Jesus’ thoughts on those whom Sister Cindy so easily was able to call hoes and sinners.
To note, when I quote Jesus, I’m quoting the words written in the four gospels about him, words that I have found to be life-giving, trustworthy and true, but that is completely up to your interpretation of the historical evidence.
Jesus was a man who also angered people with his words and actions, but I would argue that it was for the exact opposite reasons as Sister Cindy. He called out religious leaders and those in places of power who wielded it unjustly. He used big inflammatory words at times, like calling the religious rule followers “a brood of vipers.” Yet, what Jesus did in calling out sin and unrighteousness was a far cry from Sister Cindy’s finger-pointing. While he hated sin—any wrong action of ours that separates us from God because of its damage to fellow humans and the Earth—he sure loved the sinner.
Jesus’ main source of controversy, second only to his claims to be the Son of God, was that as a powerful miracle-working prophet, he chose to eat with the hoes and the hated. Jesus’ main dinner buddies were tax collectors—the political oppressors hated for stealing money from basically everyone in Judea—and sinners, as seen in Mark 2. The Pharisees see him eating with these tax collectors and sinners and immediately ask what he is doing. In Mark 2:17, Jesus overhears them and says, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Here’s another one. In Luke 7, Jesus is eating with his disciples and the Pharisees at another dinner party. Enter a woman known for her ‘sinful living,’ a local prostitute. She comes to him and weeps at his feet, washing them with her tears and then wipes them with her hair and kisses them. Then she breaks a bottle of expensive perfume and pours perfume on his feet. This extraordinarily intimate act makes everyone around them brutally uncomfortable. Jesus’ response?
He turned towards the woman and told her that her many sins have been forgiven.
A hoe, identified not just as someone who doesn’t belong and deserves social shaming, but as one with great love.
I fear in all the silly TikTok-ness of Sister Cindy’s vain condemnations, she has forgotten Jesus’ kindness. Now, I’m not saying Jesus did not draw a radical line for how he calls us to live. We see in this story he’s not cutting corners; he says she has many sins. But then he offers forgiveness and that’s not something I hear from Sister Cindy.
Jesus called those who followed him to pick up their cross, a torturous device of death created by the Roman Empire and to follow him—essentially leaving behind everything you believe will bring life and taking his instead. Of many things that he calls us to give up, one is sex outside of his design of marriage. But I’m not quite sure why Sister Cindy has decided this is the gravest sin of them all. All sin hurts God’s heart; there is no rank, regardless of what American evangelical culture may have caused you to feel.
In John 8, the same rule-following, arguably woman-hating Pharisees bring a woman caught in adultery to Jesus. The rule in the law is that she and the man she had sex with, who is noticeably nowhere to be found, must be stoned for their sin. Jesus responds radically to their claim for her life: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” One after another they leave in disappointment, and he turns to her and says, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
Hoe forgiven. It’s not that Jesus doesn’t call us to repentance; it’s that he does it with grace and mercy, without religious condemnation. So when I, a Christian, see someone like Sister Cindy with her finger pointing and her graphic language, it grieves my heart, because it is so wildly different from the Jesus I have come to know.
Sister Cindy spent some time yelling and singing about margaritas. That living water Sister Cindy argued for in opposition to the margarita ironically comes from a story that involves one of Jesus’ most revolutionary interactions with, quite literally, the town hoe.
This woman is from Samaria, a mixed-race, ethnically outcast people who most of the religious Jews believe to be unworthy of the blessing of their God. Sound familiar to any lines our modern societies like to draw? Jesus is sitting by a well outside town, waiting for his disciples to bring back lunch. It’s midday, probably boiling hot outside and a woman comes out to draw water. The only reason she’d be here is that she is socially unaccepted by the other women who traditionally come in the early morning to avoid the heat. In a moment of expected isolation, Jesus reaches out to her and asks her what she is doing. Her first response? “What are you doing, talking to me, a Samaritan woman?” Jesus crossed the line on multiple societal expectations. Men and women didn’t talk one-on-one. Samaritans and Jews certainly did not.
In this brief yet bursting conversation, Jesus reads her mail. He reveals himself to her as the Messiah, the one who will save both Jews and Samaritans—notably the first time he chooses to reveal himself—then tells her to bring out her husband to meet him. She tells him she doesn’t have a husband. He essentially says, “Yea, I know, you have five husbands, and the one you are with now is not your husband.”
She’s the town hoe and Jesus has called her out on it. But somehow, the way he does this frees her. He makes her see that he has seen her sin, but instead of outcasting it, like the rest of the town, he shows her it doesn’t change how he is willing to interact with her and the love he feels for her. He offers radical grace and freedom in repentance.
And that’s the living water. Jesus isn’t here to point out everything you’re doing wrong, but he will tell you that you need a savior. It’s simply not about our performance in changing our act or getting clean. Jesus certainly did not target women for their sex lives. If anything, we see in the gospels that these are the women he raises up, gives names and identities and calls out religious mockers in their hypocritical judgment.
Freedom comes from leaving behind old ways to get to know a man who loved us so much he was willing to die for us to make us right with God. I wish Sister Cindy said that. You can do all the right things the modern church will applaud, but if your clothes are clean and the inside of you is still dirty, it doesn’t matter—that’s another Jesus metaphor. He doesn’t care how you look. He cares how you are. And I’ve learned firsthand that the water of life he provides really does bring my life more meaning than a margarita can. But don’t get hung up on the margarita. See the radical man who forgave those Sister Cindy railed against and ate with those she shamed.
You don’t need to take me any more seriously than Sister Cindy. But I’m hoping this brought some perspective on where Jesus would have been in that crowd. In my opinion, he certainly would not be with the Pharisees at the front, but somewhere in the crowd speaking with a hoe.