Skip to main content

Views of the cross #2: shame and reunion

Let's say you do something stupid and selfish and it hurts someone else.  What do you feel?  I guess in that situation most of us would say "I feel guilty".  So what would take that guilt away?

In our legal system we atone for our crimes by doing a punishment, after which we have "paid our debt to society".  But does that work in everyday human interactions?  If I have hurt someone, do I ask them to name a punishment, and when I've done it, do they feel better?  Do I?  

Some have argued that what we often feel when we do stupid, selfish things is shame rather than guilt - or perhaps as well as guilt.  Shame is a feeling of badness - not that I have done something bad, but that I AM bad.  It's not focused on what we've done but on ourselves.  When I hurt someone else, I don't focus on the thing I can do to make it better; I agonise over the damage I have done and feel diminished as a person.  Doing a punishment doesn't change anything - I am still bad.

A punishment won't take away shame - what is needed is the restoration of the relationship.  Shame is overcome by reunion, by loving acceptance of the transgressor.  When we are ashamed, we hide away; our shame is taken away when we are brought out of our hiding place, back into a relationship of love.

On the cross, some have argued, Christ shares our shame and wins us back into a relationship of love with our Heavenly Father.  Christ seeks us out in the places where we are hiding, our faces turned away, and draws us back into a community of love - Father, Son, Holy Spirit and - miraculously - us too.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties.  This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks.  The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids).  I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday.  The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children.  I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too.  I decided to carve a simple f...
6 comments
Read more

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral.  The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness.  During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead.  I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home.  Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that.  But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness?  My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent.  I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity.  I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have hea...
4 comments
Read more

Turn or burn: OCD and evangelism

Recently I came to realise that my psychological makeup, specifically my OCD, had probably influenced my theology and indeed my vocation quite profoundly. I'm an evangelist, which is a word which means different things to different people, so I'll tell you what it means to me.  Being an evangelist means that my principal concern as a Christian minister is for people who don't follow Jesus, and that communicating the gospel or 'good news' to people who haven't heard it a thousand times already is the most important thing I do.  My faith has been nurtured in evangelical churches, and it's probably fair to say that evangelicals place a greater emphasis on evangelism than other Christian traditions.  That's partly because we emphasise conversion and making a personal decision to follow Christ.  In Baptist churches we practise believer's baptism, which means that we only baptise people who have made that personal decision for themselves (which is why ...
Post a Comment
Read more