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Bearing the Shame
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 4, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Leviticus 26, selected verses Matthew 3:1-12
This difference between guilt and shame, it has been said, is the difference between saying what you did is wrong and saying who you are is bad. Before us this morning are two stories about guilt and shame that defy understanding. The first tells of a jealous husband, a suspect wife and a ritual designed, we assume, to ascertain the guilt or the innocence of the supposed adulterer. The second tells of an unsettling conversation between Jesus and a Canaanite woman. The story has baffled exegetes for centuries (we, this morning, will be no less baffled!) leaving a trail of convoluted interpretations bent on absolving Jesus of ill will. What has one story to do with the other and what have they both to do with guilt, shame and the God thereby revealed? In the first place, both stories are set in a culture that continues to mystify most who inhabit the Western world and the 21st century. It is a culture ordered by honor and shame more than guilt or innocence; a culture constructed along lines of purity and impurity more than justice and mercy; a culture divided by issues of cleanliness verses uncleanliness more than reconciled by occasions of forgiveness and compassion. And though these lines in the sand are not set in concrete, though the culture in which we live mingles shame with guilt and pits purity against justice as it suits our ends, we would do well to explore the mindset of the culture into which our Savior was born…as well as the worldview of the culture whose honor presently calls for our annihilation! In a provocative article on Honor and Shame in a Middle Eastern Setting, Roland Muller suggests that every society since the beginning of time has had to deal with three human issues: fear, shame and guilt. Admittedly painting the world with a broad brush, Muller groups cultures by the predominate paradigm ordering their relationships: fear/power (tribal societies in Africa, Asia and South American); guilt/innocence (Western nations); honor/shame (Middle Eastern and Asian cultures). Surely we know ourselves as a culture ordered predominately by guilt and innocence, a nation obsessed with right and wrong, good guys and bad buys. “It is such an integral part of religion and society,” says Muller who is himself a Westerner, “that [we] often cannot imagine a world where ‘right versus wrong’ is not the accepted basic underlying principle.” Only after many years of living in the Middle East did Muller start to realize that Arabs were “not operating on a level of guilt versus innocence….Rather, [they] were living in a worldview where the predominant paradigm was shame versus honor….Everywhere I moved in the Middle Eastern culture,” he recalls, “there were things that pointed to honor or shame. What chair I chose to sit in, who entered the door first…the very way I walked and held myself, all communicated to others around me ‘my place’ in the world.” Conforming to that place brought honor; violating that place brought shame. So it was in the fifth chapter of Numbers! The innocence or guilt of the wife is not the main attraction. At issue is the honor of the husband and, by extension, the honor of the tribe. Whereas in Leviticus, we read that the penalty for adultery was death, here we read of a ritual that may or may not determine guilt but, at the end of the day, will restore honor. Therefore the offering brought to the priest is an offering made not to atone for the wife’s guilt but to cover the husband’s jealousy…his honor. The disheveling of the wife’s hair is an act of shaming as is her drinking of holy water made bitter by mixing it with the dust from the floor of the tabernacle. More than any other offense, she has forgotten her place: that place is under the authority of her husband. God knows that this story and others in the Bible have been used to just this end, especially when that place involves abuse and violence. At the end we read: “the man shall be free from impurity.” In other words, his honor will be restored. “The woman shall bear her iniquity”: she shall bear the shame that restores her husband’s honor. We, on the other hand, can barely bear to read this story! What sort of God could possibly be revealed in these verses? Listening to the text critically from the perspective of the 21st century as we must, we rail against the place accorded women in Scripture and what that place has done to the powerless throughout the ages. But if instead we hold the lens of honor and shame up against this story that has to do with the relationship between God and God’s people (not of husband and wife!), the text appears to have less to do with adultery and more to do with idolatry! In fact, the word used for the wife’s unfaithfulness is unique in this context. Every other instance of its use refers to the unfaithfulness of human beings to God! Not women, then, but God’s people have shamed themselves by their idolatry. Here, says God, is a ritual that will restore God’s honor and redeem the relationship. What then becomes of our relationship to the same God when our text from Matthew also is read through the lens of honor and shame? What if, in addition to ringing the changes on the laws given to reveal right from wrong, Jesus also has come to turn the honor and shame of the Middle Eastern mind inside-out? Take, as a less loaded example, Jesus’ story concerning two sons who were asked to work in the vineyard. The first refused but later went to work. The second answered, ‘I go sir’ but stayed put. “Which did the will of his father?” Jesus asks. “The first!” comes the answer, meaning prostitutes and tax collectors who do God’s will, will trump Pharisees in the kingdom of God. But when the exact same story is told in the Arab world where, says Muller, “to give the wrong answer would be shaming, the storyteller knows that his listeners will give the correct answer. The second son is the better of the two because he has saved his father’s face by not defying him.” Likely Jesus’ advice to take the lowest seat when invited to a banquet [where one was due the seat of honor] or his admonition about hearers versus doers of the word [when what mattered were appearances] or his warning that “nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing is secret that will not become known” [when “he who has done a shameful deed must conceal it”]: all had to do not only with what was right or wrong as regards the law but also with the reversal of a code of honor and shame written into the fiber of the Middle Eastern mind and writ large in the religious life of Israel. All of which brings us to Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman. Matthew prefaces our story with the Pharisees’ questions concerning cleanliness and uncleanliness. “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me…” says Jesus. Then calling the crowd to him before he leaves the Galilee for Tyre and Sidon, he teaches that it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles. The context, in other words, is the context of a society that has disordered honor and shame! Enter the woman described by Mark in political terms (a Syrophoenician) but by Matthew in religious terms (a Canaanite—an idolater). They meet on the border: the border of cleanliness and uncleanliness, of Jew and Gentile, of the holy and the profane, of faith and unbelief. They meet, contrary to Mark’s account, not in a house but on the street—in public. Having just heard Jesus concerning those who honor God with their lips, we hear the woman’s shout—Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David—as words spoken by an idolater. She honors the God of Israel with her lips; she shames the Son of God with her public address. Jesus mercifully does not answer. The disciples suggest she be sent away; but to their suggestion Jesus’ words either pose his firm conviction or lay bare his consternation at the border of cleanliness and uncleanliness, Jew and Gentile, holy and profane, faith and unbelief: I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Nevertheless, the Gentile woman not only comes closer to this Jew in all of her uncleanliness and need: she bows down. Lord, help me, she likely whispers. Jesus, in response, shames her. He shames her. We are stunned. It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs. “Calling someone a dog,” says Muller in Middle Eastern culture, “is a great shame, especially calling [a person] a dog in public, since dogs eat scraps and leftovers and not the prime meat that is reserved for the honorable.” Yet the woman concurs (and we are more than stunned), taking her place as a dog eating the crumbs beneath her master’s table. Again, as our yardstick for all things is our sense of right and wrong as well as our rights and the exercise of them, we feel only outrage. But from within the culture of honor and shame as it is turned inside-out by Jesus, we would do well to be amazed. The Canaanite woman, like idolatrous Israel in the Book of Numbers, bears the shame for the sake of God’s honor. “Even when [Jesus’] word did not appear to be a word for her but for someone else,” says another New Testament scholar, “she submitted to it and, in the end, heard what only one other in the whole of the Synoptic tradition lived to hear: ‘Great is your faith!’” If we take this story as it is told and not as we would recast it to fit our enlightened Western minds, “faith would be first hearing God’s ‘No,’…harsh and bitter, killing and destroying [How else can this be heard but with the strength of Jesus’ words, words that would put to death a life lived to idols?]. But [in] submitting to the ‘No,’ [the ‘No’ of God, mind you, not of a merely human being], in conceding the judgment of God as did the woman of Canaan,” says Roy Harrisville, “[we] may [hear] the ‘Yes’ of God, a ‘Yes’ present and intended from the beginning yet hidden to everyone but the [one] willing to [die].” In sum, it is the ‘Yes’ of the God who has chosen our place as God’s own! All of which is to see that these two stories strangely foreshadow the story which soon will follow in the Garden of Gethsemane. The bitter cup is not to pass from him until he drinks from it, bearing the depth of our shame, bearing our death in his body. To his twice voiced plea, God finally remains silent, shaming his Son with the mark of every culture’s estrangement from God, shamed by humanity’s powerless longing to return [to God]. Here in this garden he is shamed because in another garden we were those who lost our place and so lost something essential to our humanity. Naked and now at the borders of our human existence, the shame that is life without God is a shame we can no longer bear alone! To cover our shame, then, God in Christ endured an act of final shaming: God endured the cross. Defiled, dishonored, disgraced, shamed, Christ bore our death, our distance, our disunion with God all the way to the grave, so that death--finally defeated--would lose its power to shame mortals forever. So you and I come to this table today as the Gentile from Canaan once came to Christ: on the boundary of being lost without him and found in him. Our place, given who we are and what we have done or left undone, is on our knees whispering, “Lord, help me.” He has joined us, in our place, on his knees, even as in him God will raise us to the place that is eternally ours in God. In the meantime, our guilt and shame covered, he invites us to be God’s guests of honor. Astonished, may you take the place that is yours by his side. Thanks be to God! |