Shame Is a Cruel Taskmaster
I always wished I had another body. The awkward years of middle school made me acutely aware of the ways I differed from some of my peers. Those differences haunted me each day. I wish I had a stomach like her. I’d kill for a higher metabolism. Could I ever get down to that size? Imagine how great I’d feel! The dream of a smaller body seemed like the answer to all my problems. Happiness, comfort, and yes—a boyfriend—lay at the end of that elusive yellow brick road.
So I got to work. Again and again. Throughout my teen years and into college, I tried multiple times to achieve the weight I wanted. Whenever I “slipped” past my restrictions, I’d find myself discouraged and yearning for more motivation. My favorite method was shame.
Late Friday nights I’d pop in one of my favorite chick flicks and feast my eyes on the gorgeous Hollywood stars on screen. Don’t you want to look like her? Isn’t it worth it? Look at her stomach. Come on, you need to work harder! I’d step on the scale and force myself to stare at the numbers, guilt hanging heavy around my neck.
Yet I would break those vows. As much shame as I heaped on, I still fell short of the dedication I needed. I just couldn’t do it. In hindsight, I thank God for keeping me from spiraling into the hands of anorexia or bulimia.
It wasn’t until my body carried another life that my perspective began to shift. After a difficult C-section and a dangerous infection, I began to look gently at my body. I realized the years of shame I inflicted hadn’t done anything but crush me. Shame may have felt like a good idea at the time to get my body in line, but its roots were too weak to sustain any real fruit in my life.
So why do we so often turn to shame? It’s a method we easily slip into in many areas, including our own sanctification. It seems to work after all. In an ironic twist, shame gives us a small feeling of empowerment. We open up God’s Word and badger ourselves with guilt like I did standing on the scale. In our humiliation we start to make new promises, goals, and aspirations. We determine to do better. My prayer life is wretched. I’ll start a new book on prayer and get up an hour earlier to pray every day. I’ve been impatient and prone to anger. Tomorrow will be different. This is the beginning of change!
Yet of course, just like my yo-yo diets, sanctification built on shame leaves us dependent on too frail a string. Though we feel empowered by our own will, the feeling is fleeting, because more shame is never the solution. No one made this clearer than Jesus himself.
Who Takes the Shame?
During the course of his earthly ministry, Jesus often showed us what to do with our shame. One of the best examples is the way he dealt with the woman caught in adultery. True to form, the religious leaders had crafted the perfect plan to trap Jesus. After catching a couple in adultery, they drug the humiliated woman before Jesus and demanded to know her fate. “Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” they asked him (John 8:5). Of course, Jesus knew their motives. If they truly cared about honoring the law of God, they would have brought the man along with her. Instead of playing their games, Christ used this as an opportunity to demonstrate exactly what he came to do.
Imagine this woman. Terrified. Humiliated. Shamed. She sat there, awaiting the stones to strike, and perhaps praying that somehow she could make amends for her sins. Jesus could have laid into this shame. He could have twisted the knife deeper, making her feel the guilt for what she had done. After all, it could really motivate her to follow the law in the future, right? What a better chance than now.
But he didn’t. Jesus had a better motivator than burdening her with shame. He had the solution. He responded to the crowd saying, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7). Kenneth Bailey provides rich commentary on this line from a Middle Eastern perspective, showing that this response is one that left the entire audience humiliated (Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, 235). No one could answer and speak to the statement, for they knew the Jewish law said “there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins” (Ecc. 7:20). They sat speechless and furious.
No longer caring about the woman and her punishment, the crowd’s rage boiled even more at Jesus as they sulked away. Alone with the woman, Jesus told her, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more” (John 8:11). Did you hear that? Jesus did not beat her with shame and humiliation in order to exact change in her life. Instead, he shifted her shame by turning the anger of the crowd away from her and onto himself.
The woman wasn’t condemned by Christ because he didn’t care about her sin, but because he took the condemnation in her place. This shift of shame in that moment was a precursor to the day when he would bear the full shame of her sin and ours while hanging on a cross. Christ was her solution. And he is ours too.
The Place of Shame
Shame is not necessarily always bad. We will and should feel conviction from the Holy Spirit as we grow and walk with the Lord (John 16:8). But the difference is that godly grief will lead us to repentance and dependence on Christ, not ourselves. It prompts us to confess and to realize our guilt has been laid on the person of Christ. This kind of shame leads us to hope and life through Christ.
Yet this goes against so many of our natural inclinations. Individualism preaches that we can take our shame and do something to change it. Legalism tempts us with handy formulas for guilt that will turn us into the saints we aspire to be. Often we take these ideas to our Bibles and hope to shame ourselves into godliness. But Christ tells us we must always begin by realizing that our shame has been moved to the shoulders of Christ. As Charles Hodge commented, “Instead of holiness being in order to pardon, pardon is in order to holiness. This is the mystery of evangelical morals” (Commentary on Romans, 205).
Paul reiterates again and again throughout Romans that we can only serve righteousness because we have been set free from the slavery of sin (Rom. 6:17–18). Freedom comes first, and that freedom only comes by our sin and shame-bearing Son of God. Because of Christ’s work, we can bear fruit because we aren’t doing it by our own strength anymore. We can “go and sin no more” because our support is the perfect work of Christ, not the frail string of our guilt and willpower.
Shame is a cruel taskmaster. Though I felt like I was taking control of my health, in reality I was pushing myself deeper under a crushing weight I couldn’t bear. We do the same when we approach the Bible hand-in-hand with shame.
Don’t let shame fuel your Christian walk. It will only ever disappoint. Let your guilt guide you to dependence upon the solution to your weaknesses. Let it push you to the scarred hands of Christ—the one who bore your shame and who looks at you and says in his mercy, “Neither do I condemn you.”
Brianna Lambert is a wife and a mom to three, making their home in the cornfields of Indiana. She loves using writing to work out the truths God is teaching her each day. She is a staff writer with GCD and has contributed to various online publications, such as Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition. You can find more of her writing paired with her husband’s photography at lookingtotheharvest.com.