The Bewilderment of Shame

We are going to have to decide whether existence arises in an impenetrable question and is expressed in thin yet coherent terms in the Bible, or if existence is held properly to be wonderfully logical and is drawn out for us in a marvelous scriptural tapestry displaying the mind of God.  This latter course is held to most usually by the theologians, who exercise themselves in explaining how this or that thing in God's intended scheme for humanity can be pinned down by appeal to Scriptures arranged arduously in purported "salvation plans."

If, as the theologians claim, God's intentions for humanity ought to be imagined as expressed in terms of a "salvation economy"--that is, some weighing of humankind's moral burden against God's proffered method of exoneration--then it is no surprise that the assessable (or at least rank-orderable) concepts of sin and sin-types would be the seized-upon manifestations of our debts.  Necessarily, an "economy" is founded upon some baseline of measure, and for the purposes of the theologian there is the handy benchmark of "The Fall."

Somehow (in this preponderant set of salvation theories), Eve's scurrilous entertainment of unseemly conversation with the devil differs qualitatively from the "first sin" of eating from the forbidden tree.  How this qualitative distinction is to be justified is a doomed enterprise, but this viper in the nest of the theologians' conceits is a price that is thought worth paying in order to establish the baseline of "The Fall."  The man was innocent, and then the man sinned--this must be so.

Of course it is the premise of this blog that the foundational aspect of humanity's dissociation from God is not sin, but shame.  The concepts of sin and shame can be thought of as disappearing into the miniscule (and disappearing into each other) as we trace the story of humanity back to the source, but it is intrinsic to our operative understandings that "sin" is parsed out into particulars, whereas "shame" is less describable in terms of type or quantity.  We sin by doing this or that--we encounter shame merely by existing.

Humanity was always humanity, and humanity was sinful always and most importantly shameful always.

And Jesus encountered shame merely by being the medium of all that exists in the Creation as described by John.  We pursue salvation properly by allowing ourselves to be subsumed into the shame that is intrinsic to our Jesus-created selves, and we look to Jesus' willing collection of Creation's shame to himself as the offered means of our salvation.

The committing of sin is the increase of proper shame to ourselves, and the poison of sin is our refusal to own the concomitant shame.  Shame, in the accepting or the disavowing, is the fulcrum of the relationship between us and God.  Our shame, properly understood, is unquantifiable and inextinguishable--and howls in our consciences warnings greater than can any prohibition of described sin.  Next to this consideration, the notion of sin is child's play, and the notion that the dread punishment of eternal damnation is somehow commensurate with a finite lifetime of finite sin is enough to fool only a child, a child abused from earliest memory with religion at its toxic worst.

A child can be presented, in a psychologically supportive manner, with notions about sin that are humane and understandable, but the unquantifiable element of shame in any person's life is present in the child from the very beginning, and shame is something that the child needs to learn to manage, not to attempt to stamp out as one would sin.  It was shame that accompanied Adam and Eve out of the garden, for they had already endured the punishment for their sin (and it is surely fatuous to contend that they--who knew nothing of "death"--got off lightly in that their sovereign God relented in their threat to kill them.  To say nothing of the fact that they had not been promised immortality at any rate.)

It is the unquantifiable notion of shame that equates most suitably with the notion of damnation, and we see this demonstrated in Luke.  The ancient notion was that "the wages of sin is death."  In ancient Judaism, and dating back to Noah, the punishment of a murderer was to be executed.  It is the theologians' conceit--and the foundation of innumerable "salvation economies"--that "sin" in its force survives any earthly punishment, even that inevitable death that all humanity has earned.  On the contrary, as I have mentioned, is the story of the Good Thief in Luke.

The Good Thief is being punished, and punished horribly.  Even as he is upbraiding his fellow "thief" for mocking Jesus (and it is usually accepted that the guilty pair bracketing Jesus were more than "thieves"), the so-called "Good Thief" is contending that he is being punished for what he himself did.  The account-book is being balanced, and yet the Good Thief knows there is something more.  Contrasted against the shameless non-God-fearing behavior of his fellow criminal, the Good Thief lays his shame out before a figure whom he equates (with questionable theological insight, it must be imagined) with God.  Sin is being expiated, and yet there is something more to do.

Living with shame, and dying with shame, is that "something more to do"--always.  Endlessly it is contended that Jesus bore a "shameful" death, yet that purported shame (as any that is imputed to anyone without cause) is a "shame" only if the recipient allows it to be so.  And the Jesus who deserved no shame in his earthly life would not lie, either to himself or to others.  No, Jesus did not die a "shameful death," as the theologians imagine mistakenly that he did, and to compound the shame of this mistake with a concomitant neglect of the absolutely-other-than-shameful Jewish regard for the Suffering Servant, is shameful conduct indeed.

No, the living with shame and dying with shame that is the lot of every creature, and that persists in much more volatile and enduring form than sinfulness, is the "lot" of Jesus only in that his overarching sacrifice for humanity--indeed for all Creation of which he is author and medium--is the sacrifice of enduring all shame undeservingly.  The Thief paid his price, and then cried for succor in his unextinguished shame.  Jesus paid the price for all, and then cried out to his father in a pure form of the bewilderment of shame that besets us all, from newborn to the grave.