Introduction
In his Christmas Day sermon several years ago, our pastor here in Bucharest decided to stop and take an insightful “rabbit trail.” For about three minutes, Beni mentioned the cultural value of shame Mary and Joseph must have felt upon their arrival in Bethlehem. Earlier that year, I had been introduced to this cultural paradigm in a doctoral class. Then I began seeing honor and shame rhetoric everywhere, especially as it plays out in Romania.
One of the most helpful points made by writers on honor and shame (HS) is that HS is ubiquitous in the Bible, meaning that it is all over the place. More than twice as many verses in the Bible deal with shame rather than guilt, although most of us from the global West don’t hear many sermons on shame. It is worth remembering that, before Adam and Eve were declared guilty in the Garden, they felt the sting of shame. Why don’t we hear sermons like this? To a certain extent, the answer is cultural. In Western nations like the US, we’d like to think laws are either broken or upheld; if you break a law, you pay the penalty and it’s done. In a courtroom, the lawbreaker pleads innocent or guilty. Innocent until proven guilty.
But what if the lawbreaker is innocent, but accused of something socially despicable? Something like rape? The stigma and suspicion will most likely follow that person, forever tainting their reputation. Shame sticks and lingers. Shame becomes part of their identity. Further, what if that happened in a small town where everybody knows everybody?
Such a reality of social stigma and shame surrounded the events of the First Christmas. It is indeed mind-boggling to think that God entered our world in the midst of sin and shame. This great irony would not have escaped the attention of First Century Jews.
In Honor, Shame, and the Gospel of Matthew, Notre Dame professor Jerome Neyrey maintains that Matthew in particular was written to give Jesus praise and honor. With a Jewish audience in mind, Matthew structured his narrative in such a way that he highlighted people and events that vindicated Jesus amid circumstances which, taken at face value, are shockingly shameful.
In this short devotional of five parts, I take up the theme of honor and shame in the birth of Jesus Christ. Instead of writing abstractly, I have chosen what a former professor of mine calls “character theology.” My desire is to honor Christ by digging deeper into some of the surrounding characters of the story. Yet they are not principal characters. In fact, these characters do not appear in any Bible verse. None of them are given any lines to speak in either Matthew or Luke’s Gospel. I write them in the form of journal entries. The characters reflect on the scene before them, attempting to make sense of these events. In doing so, I hope we can all do the same.
Cameron D. Armstrong
Christmas 2020
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