Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot contains a wild and tragic character named Nastasia Philapovna. She is a temptress who enjoys seducing men of all sorts with her charm and intoxicating beauty. After spending only an hour with her, each of these men fall madly in love with her, but Nastasia takes even more delight by teasing them with her presence. She sleeps with the men during the night, but leaves them by morning, leaving them hopelessly pining for her love and attention. Naturally, she is despised by the other women in the town who are both jealous and afraid of her.
Prince Mishkin, who is the hero of the story and whom many readers of Dostoyevsky believe is a kind of Christ-figure in the story, sees more deeply into Nastasia’s soul. He understands what drives her—a “ferocious, self destructive sense of shame.”
The story reveals that Nastasia was abandoned and homeless as a child. She was eventually taken in by a wealthy patron who abused her and “kept her around like an ornament on a shelf that he could take down and occasionally fondle.” The shame of being abandoned, abused, and misused in this way had scarred her soul. Mishkin explains her plight to others in the story like this:
“Oh, don’t cry shame upon her, don’t throw stones at her! She has tortured herself too much from the consciousness of her undeserved shame…She had an irresistible inner craving to do something shameful, so as to say to herself at once, ‘There, you’ve done something shameful again, so you’re a degraded creature. Do you know that in that continual consciousness of shame there is perhaps a sort of awful unnatural enjoyment for her, a sort of revenge on someone?”
Dostoyevsky wrote his novel in 1868, but his insights into the human experience are timeless. He understood that shame, growing out of deep-seated and long-lasting human hurt, is the root of much self-destructive behavior.
There is much to be said about the story of the Samaritan woman whose encounter with Jesus we read about in John 4. Last week, we looked at Nicodemus’ conversation with Jesus—Nicodemus being a wealthy and respected member of the Jewish elite. It’s interesting, then, that John follows up that story with this one—the story of one who is socially, religiously, and personally an outcast. Where Nicodemus is defined by respect, this woman, like Nastasia, seems to be defined by her shame.
The story opens with Jesus and his disciples traveling north from Jerusalem to Galilee, which was not an easy trek because it would take you into the land of the Samaritans—not a place for a pious Jew to travel. The Samaritans and Jews hated each other because of a civil conflict that had taken place between north and south after the death of Solomon. The northern king set up his own Temple so that his people wouldn’t go to Jerusalem, and the southern Jews hated them for it. When the Assyrians invaded the northern kingdom, the northern Jews intermarried and intermingled, making themselves less “pure” and shamefully gave into the invaders. The southern Jews, on the other hand, had been taken into exile but largely maintained their “pure” Jewish ancestry. The hatred had thus been going on for a long time, so much so that most Jews walked the extra distance around Samaria rather than walking through it and risking an attack.
Jesus, however, leads his disciples right through Samaria, and in a town called Sychar he stops at a well that would have been important to both Jews and Samaritans—the well of Jacob. It’s there, in the middle of the day, that he encounters a single woman drawing water from the well.
Without explaining it in detail, John tells us everything we need to know about this woman. She is a Samaritan, first, thus an outsider. She’s a woman—a second class citizen in the ancient world. She’s alone—women had no status without a man. And she comes to the well in the middle of the day, the hottest part. In most villages, the women would all come to draw water early in the morning and late in the evening, not only to avoid the heat but to catch up with each other on all the latest gossip. This woman, however, is clearly not welcome among the others. She is, after all, the one they’re probably gossiping about the most. Her shame keeps her separated.
That Jesus, a single man, even speaks to her, a single woman, is scandalous. Speaking to her, especially to a Samaritan, makes Jesus, a Jew, ritually unclean. Asking her for water, risking actual contact, makes it even worse. This is a conversation that should never happen, but John tells us that Jesus makes sure that it does.
As we have seen in John, conversations are often happening on two levels. Jesus asks for a drink, she refers to the well. Jesus offers living water and she thinks he’s talking about running water, which is what “living water” meant to most people. Jesus is trying to engage her on a spiritual level, a personal level, but she is focused only on what’s in front of her.
There’s certainly a lot of theological reflection we could do here about living water. Last week we read about new birth through “water and the Spirit” – a clear link to what Jesus is talking about here.
But what always intrigues me about this story is the fact that Jesus changes the nature of the discussion almost on a dime. “Go and call your husband,” he says to the woman. But she has no husband—in fact, Jesus somehow knows that she has had five husbands and the man she was living with was not her husband. There may have been many reasons for this and not all of them salacious. Life expectancy was short, wives were property given to the next brother in line when a husband died, we don’t know exactly. But the fact that she is alone at the well in the middle of the day seems to indicate that she has been shamed in some way, put outside the fellowship of the community. That Jesus asks about her husband in the midst of all this theological talk about living water would appear to somehow address the state of her life. He names her shame.
Shame is incredibly isolating and is usually an outcome of long-kept secrets. If we have felt rejected, abused, unloved, unwanted, exploited, or used in ways that damage our personhood, we can experience what John Bradshaw calls, “toxic shame.” Says Bradshaw:
“Toxic shame, the shame that binds you, is experienced as the all-pervasive sense that I am flawed and defective as a human being. Toxic shame is no longer an emotion that signals our limits, it is a state of being, a core identity. Toxic shame gives you sense of worthlessness, a sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic shame is a rupture of the self within the self.” He goes on to say that toxic shame is what fuels all addictive behaviors. Because the painful self-exposure is too much, people turn to drugs, work, food, sex, or something else in order to find relief and acceptance.
Shame puts us on an island out there by ourselves, keeping up appearances, avoiding the pain and hiding from the hurt.
I’m coming up on my 30th high school reunion next year. I haven’t made any of the previous reunions, but technology has enabled me to get in touch with many of my classmates who I haven’t heard from in years It was fascinating to me to learn things I didn’t know was going on with the people around me in the hallways each day. One of the girls wrote about her alcoholic father and her fear of going home each day. Another wrote of being abandoned emotionally by his parents. Another friend shared that she was sexually abused by an older brother and told that if she said anything he’d kill her. Now, as adults, all those teenagers who wore Members Only jackets and feathered hair in the 1980s bear the shame and scars of the past. I had my own pain to deal with—my mother had passed away, my father was absent, my stepmother verbally abusive—but we all tried to compensate by being cool or by overachieving or, for some, by engaging in risky or promiscuous behavior.
When shame goes deep, it alters our sense of who we really are and we construct a “false self” in order to hide it. I used to be afraid of the kids who smoked in the bathrooms between classes, wore big railroader boots and bullied people in the hall. I now know that that’s likely not who they really were. I can’t imagine what they may have dealt with at home. I used to be jealous of the jocks and cheerleaders, but now knowing some of their stories I see that many of them were hiding things, too. Then there were the kids that nobody talked to—what kind of pain did they feel? I found myself being profoundly sorry that I didn’t know then what I know now. I hope that any high school students here today would think about this and cut their classmates a break. You have no idea of the burden that person walking past you in the hall is carrying.
Last week we talked about new birth, birth from above. That’s powerful language, especially to those who because of shame believe that they are a mistake, that their birth into the world or into a particular family is a shameful thing. I know I’ve shared this with some of you, but my own birth is one that comes out of the shame of an affair between a Salvation Army Officer (a pastor) and a young woman in the early 1960s. It’s such a shameful thing that when I tried to contact my birth mother through an agency, she refused. My birth is still a deep, dark, shameful secret to her family. She could not open that wound because it’s just to painful.
Steve Seamands, who is one of my professors at Asbury, points out that “no matter how early or smoothly adoption occurs, every adopted child interprets being separated from its biological mother as personal rejection.” He goes on to say that “children of divorce generally perceive the split up of their parents as rejection, too.” I read that and it really hit me—I’ve spent much of my life trying to measure up, trying to make something of myself, trying to be the best, all as a way of trying to prove that my existence isn’t a mistake. Shame makes some people overachieve and it makes others give up altogether.
I imagine there are some of you here today who know what I’m talking about. The shame of rejection, the shame of abuse, the shame of a sordid past. Shame is a mark on many of our lives.
Somehow, we all learn to live with shame by hiding it or deflecting it. The Samaritan woman doesn’t seem to want to talk about it. How did this guy know about me? Sure, he must be a prophet, but let’s get off the personal, shall we? So, she does what a lot of religious people do—she starts a debate. “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place people must worship is in Jerusalem” (v. 20). Let’s talk temples, not the touchy subject of my inner life. It’s a lot easier to get wrapped up in the rightness and wrongness of religious beliefs and practices, jump on the debates of politicians and pundits, to sort out the differences between me and “those people” than it is to go deep inside and touch the places we hurt. I wonder sometimes if the vitriolic anger expressed in our political and theological debates isn’t merely a byproduct of unresolved shame—the more I can demonize another, the less I have to deal with myself.
Jesus, however, isn’t here to debate the building of temples, but to rebuild a heart broken by shame. It’s not the temples that matter, he says. Remember what we said last week, the great news is that Jesus is himself a new temple. You don’t go to the temple for forgiveness, it comes to you in the person of Jesus and, by extension, his Spirit. “But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him much worship in spirit and truth” (v. 23-24).
Spirit and truth. To know the truth about oneself, to have your spirit cleansed by the living water of Spirit of God, to be born anew by water and the Spirit, that’s real worship, that’s real transformation—that’s the beginning of a cure for shame.
“Someday,” she says, “the Messiah will come and make this a reality for us.” Most people who are bound by shame are always waiting for someday—the day when everything will be better, the day when they can feel whole again, the day that someone will recognize them for who they truly are—the day that someone will tell them they’re not a mistake. Someday…
How about today? Jesus says. “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” Someday is today.
Jesus’ disciples burst on to the scene at this point and wonder what’s going on. What is Jesus doing with this woman? Are we going to have to manage a scandal here? But she blows right past them and heads back to the city, back to the very people who had shunned her and shamed her, and becomes one of the first real Christian evangelists. And here is her message:
“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”
That’s not exactly the five happy hops to heaven. But it is a cry of good news. Someone has named her pain, someone has quenched the thirst of her dry and lonely life, someone has acknowledged her as a child—a child of God.
The good news of the gospel, the good news of Christ, is that he names our shame. Naming what we have done and what has been done to us, is the first step toward breaking the chains of shame.
But not only does he name our shame, Jesus takes it on himself—all of it. Jesus knows our shame. Hebrews 12:2 says that Jesus, “for the joy set before him, endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of God.” The cross was the most shameful way to die in the ancient world: naked, beaten, bleeding men hung by the side of the road to be spat upon and taunted, their bodies left to rot and forgotten by everyone.
How did such a symbol of shame become a symbol of hope? Steve Seamands puts it this way: “Because Christ willingly endured shame on the cross, we are able to find healing for our shame at the cross. Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating fruit from an alluring tree in a garden. As a result, they were naked and ashamed. Jesus obeyed God while nailed to a shameful tree on a hill. As a result, we can stand before God, naked and unashamed.
‘A tree had destroyed us,’ said [the early church father] Theodore of Studios. “A tree now brought us life.”
In Jesus, God did not heap shame upon us. In Jesus, God did not ignore human shame and sinfulness. In Jesus, God did not condemn us. In Jesus, God instead took on our shame, participated in it, understood it, suffered with it. No matter what shame we have experienced, we now know that God has been there first and goes through it with us. I am not a mistake—I am beloved by God.
Let that thought hold you for a second. No matter who you are or what you’ve done or what has been done to you—you are beloved by God. That’s what this cross means. It was the ultimate symbol of shame—now it is the ultimate symbol of love.
Jesus is lifted on a cross, as we learned last week, so that everyone who sees it and trusts in the power of his suffering and death, will be healed—people like Nastasia, people like the woman at the well, people like you and me.
“Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did.” Come and see a man hanging on a cross. Come and see…and your shame will be washed away.
