When I lived in West Virginia, my friend Doug and I were on a road trip
one morning and passed one of those gentleman's clubs off the side of the
Interstate. I remarked on how
interesting the layout was to the place.
It was hidden behind a high fence on the outskirts of a town like a
leper colony. There were no
windows. The entrances were hidden. The proprietors had obviously gone to great
lengths to protect the identity of their patrons. Doug and I began to discuss why anyone would
ever become a regular patron at a strip joint.
It is such a degrading and often abusive business so why support
it. One of the answers we came up with
was that this was a way for a person to acknowledge and express a deep-seated
sense of shame. Why is it that people do
things they know the majority of people consider shameful? It’s not that they’re rebels. It’s that they feel deeply ashamed of
themselves and it’s just coming out.
Shame is a very powerful force in our lives.
So what is shame? Shame is much
different than guilt. Guilt comes from
knowing we’ve done something wrong and we relieve guilt by making reparation
for that wrong. Shame, on the other
hand, is the sense that there is something wrong with us to the extent of
making us feel that we are unacceptable, unlovable. Shame often accompanies guilt but doesn't go
away by simply righting the wrong. It is
only relieved by touch, physical signs of inclusion - eye contact, a smile, a
handshake, or a hug. Shame does not
always arise because of something we’ve done.
Too, often it is incurred from what others have done to us. The shame of having been victimized is often
more debilitating than the financial or physical effects of the crime
itself. Shame makes us feel cut off from
the love and comfort of human society and is at the heart of why humans in
general feel cut off from God.
Looking at ourselves, shame even affects us good, church-going
people. We like to boldly proclaim the
idea that God is love and God loves everybody.
Yet, too often it is the case that we, the churchgoers, deep down just
like everybody else feel shame. It
hasn’t really settled in on us that God really does love us too. We tend to gravitate towards our faith being
simply believing there is a God and doing good and…we have our principles. Yet, when it comes to experiencing, to
feeling the love of God we tend to keep all that at a distance saying,
"That God’s love stuff is for strippers and people out there to know, but
I’m a good person and God doesn’t really need to bother with me.” Occasionally, God’s love breaks through but
it doesn’t take long for us to return to thinking that we’re good enough as it
is and don’t need God to waste his time on making us feel loved. This problem is even more compounded if you
are a Christian man.
Well, looking at these two healing stories in Mark’s Gospel we find that
they are all about shame and how in Jesus Christ through the touch of the Holy
Spirit we’re healed of it. Let me start
with Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue.
Jairus coming to Jesus begging him to heal his daughter was a desperate for
a man who loved his daughter. But back
in Jesus day there was more to it than that.
Jairus was a leader of the synagogue.
Things like a child dying were not supposed to happen to such as
him. They exemplified the faithful and
God blessed and protected the faithful.
For his daughter to die meant that there must have been a secret sin he
or his family was hiding and therefore God was judging him and cutting him off
from the blessing. The death of a child just wasn’t supposed to happen to the
"good" ruler of the "good" synagogue. For this, Jairus and his family would suffer
public shaming. They would be deemed
unclean and could not be associated with nor could he go to the synagogue.
Jairus coming to Jesus for a healing was a bit outside the box for a
synagogue leader back then. Most of the
religious authorities thought Jesus was walking blasphemy. Yet, Jairus recognized Jesus’ divine
authority to forgive sins and restore a person’s life and believed Jesus could
do the same for him and his family.
Jairus not only acknowledged Jesus’ divine authority he took it to the
extreme of begging Jesus not just to heal his daughter, but rather the Greek
indicates he was begging Jesus to give her salvation so that she may truly live
a new life. Then, Jairus does the
unimaginable. Jairus the good synagogue
leader who knew better asked Jesus to break religious law and come and touch
his dying daughter. Her sickness and
eventually her death meant that she was unclean, not allowed in the presence of
God. Anyone who touched her would become
unclean with death as well. Jairus was
asking Jesus to take into his own person the uncleanness of his daughter indeed
his whole family. He was inviting Jesus
to join him in their shame.
Jesus very tenderly responds to Jairus.
He goes with Jairus to his home.
Comforts him along the way when they hear his daughter has died. When he gets to the house he tries to
convince everyone that she’s just sleeping.
Incidentally, sleeping is the euphemism used in the early church for the
death of those who had died believing in the Lord and were awaiting the
resurrection. Jesus also refuses to make
a public spectacle out of the miracle, taking only Jairus, his wife, and three
of the disciples into the room. Then, he
takes her by the hand, taking the uncleanness upon himself and with the words
“Little girl, get up!” Jesus takes away her death. She rises to a new life. The old is gone. The new has begun.
Sandwiched in the midst of this story is another concerning a woman who
has had a menstrual hemorrhage for 12 years.
No doubt, the people of her day would have shunned her. This malady made her unclean for it seemed
her life was perpetually spilling forth from her and being wasted. She could not go to the temple even to
present a sacrifice to ask for forgiveness.
No one could touch her for they too would become unclean for a period of
time. She would have had to live amidst
the shame of everyone thinking she was vile, that she had done something
terribly bad and was hiding it.
Mark portrays the woman as being desperate. She had tried everything medically to be
cured and only wound up broke and suffering much due to medicine in those
days. So, she came to Jesus having no
idea who he was. She had only heard
about his ability to heal. She was
desperate enough even to commit the unforgivable crime of knowingly touching
him and making him unclean. She played
that down in her mind by resolving only to touch his cloak. This woman, like Jairus for his daughter, wasn’t
just looking for healing but more so for salvation, to be restored to a
honourable life rather than a shame-filled life. The Greek word for “to heal” is the same for
“to save”.
The woman touches Jesus’ cloak and is healed. Jesus, realizing that saving power had gone
forth from him, starts searching for who had touched him. Realizing what had happened to her she comes and falls at his feet and Jesus
speaks to her as if God the Father was speaking to her and very tenderly says,
“Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go
in peace and know that you have been saved/healed.” By this bold pronouncement in the presence of
that great crowd he took her shame away and restored her to a full place in her
community…and healed her too. Her old
life was now gone. A new one had begun.
These stories tell us something about Jesus that we need to hear. As he is God the Son in human flesh he is our
only link to the Father who desires that we be saved, made well, rescued from
shame. God does not want us believing
that we are unlovable and have no value, or that he is angry and wants to get
us. God the Father sent God the Son in
the power of the Holy Spirit and he became one of us in every way even feeling
shame in order to fix the predicament that all of humanity has gotten itself
into as a result of sin. Sin isn’t a
list of wrongs. It is an innate
narcissistic sense of the self that is so pervasive that it makes us oblivious
to God’s love for us. God created us to
know and desire his love and companionship.
But, because of sin and its bedfellow shame we choose to act like we are
gods in our own lives and blindly grope for ways to fix ourselves that so often
make us feel worse brokenness.
But, Jesus heals us. He is the
once and for all union between God and us.
When Jesus walked the earth his physical body was so alive with the
presence of God that sin, shame, and even death though he felt and experienced
them could have no effect on him.
Rather, by his God-life and human faithfulness coming to bear on
humanity in his very self he puts an end to sin, shame, and death. He has sent the Holy Spirit, the person and
power of God’s grace, to come and touch each of us to remove our shame. He heals our sin, our narcissistic sense of
self, with making us to really know God and to truly desire to love our
neighbours and ourselves. The Holy Spirit
comes to live in each of us and restores us to communion with God by bonding us
to Jesus and making us share in his new resurrected humanity. There is no reason for us who are in Christ
to hold on to our shame and let it be a barrier between us and God and one
another. The Father has given each
of us faith to know that he loves us, faith to make us well with salvation,
faith that removes shame. So, trust this
all who are in Christ are new creation.
The old life with its brokenness, guilt, and shame is gone and a new
life has begun. Amen.
