Grieving Without God Is One Thing. Grieving Without God’s People Is Another.
Embroidery by Maria Imrichova circa 1990s ~ courtesy foto Pavel & Janka
Babkine embroidery circa 1980s Foto courtesy Aga Imrichova
Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. (Othello, act 2, scene 3)
What is left if you have lost your reputation?
Western culture has increasingly featured shame as an instrument of moral judgment. If we disapprove of what someone does, we seek to humiliate them by drumming up the indignation of the crowd.
The annual Easter Passion play at Oberammergau in Germany. We in the West are as concerned for honour and shame as anyone.
The target may be an elite boys’ school accused of covering up bad behaviour, a trusted national brand suspected of squeezing small producers, or a sports star charged with racist abuse after a drunken night out.
It may be a social influencer thought to have sent inappropriate texts to a minor, or a military hero alleged to have engaged in war crimes. It may be a church leader who turns out to have a secret side.
To disrace them is to hit them where it hurts the most. We know it hurts them because we know it would hurt us, too.
We have deep within us a visceral dread of being shamed, and so we know the power of shame as a weapon.
Shame sticks
We’ve lately been transfixed by a series of defamation cases in which people seek legal (and financial) redress for loss of reputation. But you cannot restore lost honour with a judge’s gavel. Shame sticks.
I’m not making a call about the rights or wrongs of particular cases – simply noting that our moral vocabulary has shifted from the question of innocence/guilt to one of honour/shame.
This is a change from the description of cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict in her classic 1946 work The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Benedict described Western cultures as “guilt societies” and Eastern cultures as “shame societies”.
According to this scheme, Western culture – being more supposedly “rational” and individualistic – prefers the objective establishment of guilt based on law, whereas for Eastern cultures the chief question is: What do others think of me?
That division scarcely holds today (if it ever did). We in the West are as concerned for honour and shame as anyone. I suspect that we always were.
The gospels do not dwell on the physical suffering of Jesus as much as on how he was shamed.
Is there anything wrong with this state of affairs? There are things that people do that might be legal, but are definitely shameful. Some reputations are undeserved. Wrongdoing and corruption should be exposed for what they are.
But the problem with honour and shame as instruments of judgment is that they rely so strongly on the crowd’s whim. A crowd may quickly turn. A crowd can be manipulated.
And a crowd loves a scapegoat. We are strangely comforted by the thought that someone else has been caught out – that the disgrace has not fallen on us.
This feeling of self-righteousness covers up that dread within us all: that if we’re honest, there is none of us without shame and guilt.
We curate ourselves to avoid exposure precisely because we fear what exposure would bring. Our pride is fragile.
The shaming of Jesus
We need exactly what Easter offers: divine love beyond shame. God, it turns out, is far less judgmental than we are.
The Easter story appears to be the story of the destruction of an individual – Jesus of Nazareth – by shaming him.
The gospels do not dwell on the physical suffering of Jesus as much as on how he was shamed.
Jesus was betrayed by a friend and abandoned by others. He was mocked and ridiculed by the soldiers and by passersby.
A sign intended as a sarcastic joke, “the King of the Jews”, was placed above him on the cross. He was spat on. He was stripped naked.
The mob turned on him, shouting to Pontius Pilate: “Crucify him.” Pilate – shamefully – capitulated.
Humble love
This was not just judicial punishment: it was wholesale, dehumanising rejection. As the American theologian Fleming Rutledge puts it: “Degradation was the whole point.”
But Easter claims that Jesus died for us.
It was an act of divine love, to cover our guilt with forgiveness and our shame with honour. They tried to humiliate Jesus, but instead, we find here his humble love.
At the cross, when we say “no” to God, God says “yes” to us. The cross is a terrible and ugly symbol of how hellish we are – and how deeply we can shame one another.
But because God himself was, in Jesus Christ, healing our shame by bearing our guilt, the cross becomes something beautiful – not a sign of shame, but of honour, not of hate, but of love.
It’s a love that means that we can come to the cross with all our shame, whether we’ve shamed ourselves or been shamed by others, and know the truth of God’s promise from Isaiah 45:17: “Whoever trusts in him will not be put to shame.”
