Lectionary readings: Genesis
15:1-12, 17-18 and Philippians 3:17-4:1 and Luke 13:31-35
The Season of Lent is a time when we are
invited to learn again how to be God’s people, or what it looks like to be
fully human within God’s family. And learning involves unlearning, involves
putting down burdens we have picked up that we have no business collecting.
Burdens such as shame and humiliation.
Shame is what we feel when we feel bad about
who we are. That is different from guilt, which is what our conscience feels
when we have done something wrong that has impaired our relationships. We
address guilt by confession, repentance, penance, and forgiveness: that is by
owning up, coming back (to God, and where appropriate—and it is not always
appropriate—to the person we have wronged), making amends (where that is
possible), and receiving a fresh start (sometimes this must have conditions
placed upon it). But shame is something we feel about ourselves, not our
actions. Abraham feels shame, because he is unable to produce an heir, unable
to give his wife children. There is shame at play, too, in our Gospel reading:
we can’t be certain of the motive of the group of Pharisees, but it is likely
that some of them wanted to see Jesus safe and felt shame at their
powerlessness in face of Herod.
Shame is when we feel that we are not good
enough, for others, not good enough to be acceptable to God. And shame can
cause us to not have self-compassion, which in turn can stop us from having
compassion for others. Shame prevents us from being able to respond to God’s
commandment that we love our neighbour as (or in the same way we love)
ourselves. And that can lead to actions or inaction that result in guilt. But
shame itself is not guilt. It is not addressed through repentance, but through
cleansing, through being washed away by the God who, in Jesus, removes his
cloak and stoops down to wash our feet.
Another experience, related to shame, is
humiliation. Humiliation is what we feel when we are belittled in the presence
of others, and for reasons that we believe are unjust. Shame is where we feel
that we are unworthy; humiliation is the burning sensation when we feel that we
are worthy but discover that others do not think we are. Abraham is humiliated
when he lays out a corridor of sacrificed animals as God instructs him, and the
birds of prey come down and try to have their fill of the carcasses. Again, in
our Gospel reading, it is possible that some of the Pharisees wanted to see
Jesus run from Herod, to mock him for being a coward. (It is clear in the
Gospels that the Pharisees as a group include those who are for Jesus and those
who are against him.) Humiliation is where an awkward teenage boy asks a girl
to go to the prom with him, and she not only turns him down, but everyone finds
out and laughs at his expense. And humiliation is dangerous. Research shows
that the thing high school shooters in the USA have in common is that they had
experienced humiliation. Clearly, not everyone who is humiliated turns to
violence, but humiliation is very often a key step on that path. That is why
the mocking of Mr Trump on social media for having tiny hands, or of Mr Putin
for being a closeted gay man, contributes to a spiral of violence against
others. And yes, Jesus calls Herod a fox, but that is not humiliation: he is
not laughing at or belittling him for being sly, he is calling him out on
account of his actions.
Shame and humiliation are both experiences you
can likely relate to. And God wants to set you free.
Our other reading today is from Paul’s letter
to the church in Philippi. In Philippi, Paul had planted a church in the household
of the city gaoler after Paul and his mission partner had been beaten in public
and imprisoned without trial and then prevented the gaoler from completing
suicide when an earthquake compromised the jail and the gaoler mistakenly
assumed that his prisoners had escaped. Paul experienced humiliation and the
gaoler experienced shame. Now, later, writing under house-arrest in another
city, Paul writes:
‘…
our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a
Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation so
that it may be conformed to the body of his glory …’
Now, the term ‘transformation’ refers to a
change in form or outward appearance, in how we are perceived, by others as
well as by ourselves; and the term ‘conform,’ here, refers (not to an outward
uniformity, but) to sharing the same inner, essential identity or nature. An
acorn transforms into an oak tree because an acorn conforms to an oak.
We have already thought about humiliation, and
Paul contrasts our body of humiliation with Christ’s glorious body. ‘Glory’
refers to the intrinsic, inherent value or positive worth of God’s nature.
He will transform the body of our humiliation so
that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.
Humiliation is destructive. It is never
transformative, in a positive sense, because it does not conform us to God’s
glory; for it is not in the nature of God to humiliate anyone. The failure to
recognise this is behind so much abuse meted out at the hands of the Church,
such as when humiliation has been used by teaching orders of nuns as a tool to (a
false, external) conformity among pupils. Instead, God takes on our humiliation,
and our shame, and extends glory to us in return. This is what is taking place
in the reading from the life of Abraham, where the Lord instructs him to lay
out a corridor of blood. From what we can tell, this was the ritual by which
two kings entered into a covenant agreement, each standing at either end of the
animal sacrifices and passing between them, exchanging places, and returning to
their own place again, to symbolise that what is mine is yours and what is
yours is mine. God the Creator takes Abraham’s low sperm count and exchanges it
for more descendants than the stars of the sky or the grains of sand on the
seashore.
And in the Gospels, Jesus, tortured, mocked,
hung naked on a public execution scaffold as a lesson for others to learn not
to step out of place (those who come from Galilee are inferior to those based
in Jerusalem) takes up the body of our humiliation into God. And in so doing, the
body of humiliation is fundamentally changed from the inside out. For his body is
revealed to share in God’s glory, to be, in its essential nature, good and
worthy of praise. That transforms how we see the outside, streaked with blood
and sweat and faeces, and radiant. As we gaze on this body, the divine presence
is made manifest among us: the God who is fully, unashamedly human. And Jesus
saves those who hope in him, in precisely this way: as we say when we commit bodies
to be cremated, ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust: in sure and
certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ,
who will transform our frail bodies that they may be conformed to his glorious
body, who died, was buried, and rose again for us. To him be glory for ever.’
This eternal life, this life of divine quality, already exists, now. We share
in the divine nature that Jesus fully shares: as he is the Son of God, so we,
too, are sons and daughters, children, of God.
In him, our bodies are glorious, share in and
reflect the nature of God. Our black and our white bodies. Our male and our female,
and non-binary, bodies. Our youthful and our elderly bodies. Our LGBTQ and our straight,
cis bodies. Our Ukrainian and our Russian bodies. Our body of humiliation,
transformed, not by humiliation but by being conformed to the body of his
glory. And that changes how we perceive our neighbour when we look upon them,
and how we perceive ourselves. God, we need to experience this saving grace in
our lives today.
The Season of Lent is a time when we are
invited to learn again how to be God’s people, or what it looks like to be
fully human within God’s family. If you have been carrying the mire of shame or
the burning of humiliation, Jesus comes to cleanse and to heal. To cast out
demons, today and tomorrow. If you would like that, if you would like to say
yes to that process of transformation—and it is a process—then I would love to pray
for you today, and to anoint you with oil of Chrism, the symbol of our sharing
in Christ’s glory.
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