Super-Sized Me v. Easter: Shame Part 3

Enter Easter. What happens when super-sized me meets Jesus on the cross and the empty tomb?

First, and perhaps counter-intuitively, Easter confirms all our own worst fears about ourselves. Much of the anxiety we feel about ourselves is actually true. We are creatures that do not live as we were designed to live.

God is not interested in comforting sick people by trying to tell them that they are not sick. He is interested in healing sick people, which means that we have to get to the first step: admit the problem.

Easter is God dying a nasty execution-style death for you and for me. Easter rails against the soft-pitch humanism that is so rampant in our culture that would have us to only celebrate the potential of our humanity (which is true) while working overtime to ignore all that is disordered, broken and evil that is at work in us.

Easter declares that we are guilty. Easter does not excuse the brokenness and rebellion and selfishness and arrogance in us. Easter forgives it. There is a tremendous difference between excusing and forgiving.

Easter also confirms our desires for a new name. The super-sized self that we create is a feeble attempt at making ourselves live up to our potential. It fails, because simply imagining a super-sized self does not give us the power to live up to it.

Instead, the Scriptures say that God himself has come to give us our new names and also to re-wire us to actually be able to live into that new name: specifically a new heart and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Easter is God's buying back the right to name and re-name us and then gifting us the power to live into our true new name given to us in love by a good Father.

We long to be more than we actually are. Shame reminds us of that. Of course, some of our shame is false shame, just like there's false guilt. And false guilt and shame are made all the worse when they're put in the context of religion--Christianity worst of all.

Because the point of Christianity is that God meets us in the midst of that mixed bag of true and false shame and he replaces our super-sized self that would rule as a tyrant over us and instead gives us a true new name, a new identity to live into that doesn't kill us but instead affirms us to the core of who we truly are.

When we're living into that new name that God gives us in Christ rather than the self-invented super-sized self, shame is eliminated. Forgiveness and grace are the operating system instead of fear or anxiety or guilt. We don't owe anyone anything any more, all our debts are paid. Freedom and joy and life are ours.