More shame on you
10 February 2008 Jeff Gill
The thing about shame is that it is easy to apply and often gives good immediate results. But it has no power to effect long-term change, and it stands completely in opposition to the ways of God.
Some quick thoughts gathered from around the New Testament.
- It is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance.
- There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
- Who is the one who will condemn? Christ is the one who died (and more than that, he was raised), who is at the right hand of God, and who also is interceding for us.
- Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.
What is shame if not accusation? It is finger-pointing. It is the Daily Mail. And it carries with it a revolting sense of moral superiority. It casts everyone who is Wrong into a sort of leper colony where they must stay until they cure themselves.
I love this story about Jesus from Luke 7:
A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is – that she is a sinner.”
Jesus goes on to tell a parable about forgiveness. The transforming power of Jesus’s forgiveness overpowers and confounds the shame from her culture.
That’s the point I’m trying to get to. If we decide to agree with God and choose kindness instead of condemnation, if we become agents of grace instead of shame, then we will begin to become effective in enabling people to change their shameful behaviour.
That’s what we’re after, isn’t it?
Being right is hollow satisfaction when compared to the happiness that comes from joining with God in the transformation of someone’s life.
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tags: church,
leadership,
shame
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