Wanna Get Away?  

Jonathan KerhoulasMarch 16, 2010 

Part of the human experience is the suppression of shame.  Adam’s “streak” through the Garden and his sudden realization that he was fully exposed – before his wife and before his God – and the ensuing “cover-up,” is a trademark of being human. Said more simply: as individuals we hate to be exposed, we fear public embarrassment, we loathe humiliation.  No one likes looking stupid, inviting a laugh or a stare at their own expense.

 

Southwest Airlines has produced a series of witty ads built around the entire theme of embarrassment with the catch phrase “Wanna get away?”  

We laugh as individuals find themselves in outrageously embarrassing scenarios, yet we cringe imagining ourselves in the same situation.  The question “Wanna get away?” is simply a point of rhetoric.  Of course we want to get away!  We want to get as far away from our shame, embarrassment, and humiliation as we possibly can.

 

Within the mystery of the gospel we see a different picture painted of the Son of God.  Instead of running away from embarrassment and humiliation he uniquely ran toward it.  His entire life was one marked by public harassment, shame, embarrassment and humiliation.  Rather than a pompous display of divinity, Christ selectively and nearly secretly revealed his glory.  He was born homeless, was continually poor and itinerant (Matt 8:20), lived as a servant of all, was chastised, mocked, rejected and denied by his closest friends, considered an “enemy of the state,” delivered up for trial by those he came to save, was crucified upon a criminal’s cross, naked, exposed, hated, and finally dead.  If this isn’t humiliation I’m not sure what is.

 

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  Philippians 2:5-8

 

Christ came to earth for the humiliation. He came for the embarrassment. He came for the shame. Ultimately he came to release you and me from the shame and embarrassment of our own sin. He left the comforts of heaven for the discomforts of earth so that you and I might not cringe under the scrutiny of embarrassment any longer. If we were to categorize humiliation as “involuntary humility” then it might suffice to consider Christ’s activity as “voluntary humiliation.” But the world has no categories for this sort of love – in fact they call it “foolish” (I Cor. 1:25-29). But as Christians we call this Incarnational grace. 

102 Comments