Deny Yourself
by Anne Le Bas

“Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful
generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the
glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

These are stern words from Jesus – puzzling words too perhaps – what can
they mean?

The harshness of those words isn’t the only problem with this passage,
though. Deny yourself, Jesus goes on and that opens up a whole new can of
worms. Self-denial is never going to be much of a vote winner, but for some
people it is a very damaging concept indeed. It’s one thing if you live a
life of reasonable comfort and freedom; you might need reminding of the
danger of selfishness. But many people never get the chance to be selfish.
Poverty, race, gender, disability, lack of education can all rob you of the
power to choose how you live. The last thing you need is someone telling you
that you should surrender even what freedom and self-determination you have
got. Women in abusive relationships sadly have often been told that they
should grin and bear it –“it’s your cross, self-denial is good for the
soul”, they are told. But how can you deny, give up, what you have never
really discovered? If Jesus means us to understand his words in that way
then I think he’s a monster.

So there are all sorts of difficulties in this reading. Frankly, it’s
tempting just to hurry over these awkward statements of Jesus and hope no
one notices. Only a fool would want to draw attention to them. Alas, you see
that fool before you! I am always fascinated by the bits of the Bible which
seem difficult or awkward, because they are often the bits which, if you
wrestle with them, yield real treasure.

The problem is that we easily forget that the Bible comes from a time and
culture that is very different from our own. We may recognise the words –
being ashamed, denying yourself – but we can’t assume people understood
those concepts in the same way as we do. So we’ll need to do a bit of work
if we want to understand what Jesus is saying here.  

The first thing we need to take on board is that the culture Jesus lived in
was far less individualistic than ours. People thought of themselves
primarily in relation to others, as part of a group. When they talked about
the “self” they didn’t mean the sort of inner awareness of thoughts and
feelings that we might mean – that’s a very recent idea. Ask them who they
were and they would say that they were someone’s mother, brother, son,
sister, a member of this tribe, that nation. We value our individualism –
“climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow, till you
find your dream!” We want to control our own destinies, make our own
choices, not just do what others expect or accept their view of who we are.
But the people of Jesus’ time would have thought that very odd – and many
societies around the world today would agree with them. To be on your own,
independent, wasn’t a sign of freedom, but something deeply worrying to
them. Who would look after you if you fell into difficulties? Who were you
if you didn’t belong with anyone?

So the “self” to them – this thing Jesus was telling them they had to deny –
wasn’t so much an inner, individual awareness, as something made up of the
expectations and assumptions of their community, who other people  thought
they were.  

Self-denial, in the way Jesus means it here, isn’t about giving up cake for
Lent. It isn’t about giving up your desires or hopes. It is about taking a
long hard look at the person you think you are, the person other people tell
you you are, and asking yourself how that fits with who God is calling you
to be. The people Mark wrote this Gospel for knew all about this sort of
self-denial. These early Christians were people who had had to make some
traumatic choices because they followed Jesus. Some of them had grown up in
Jewish families; others had grown up with a variety of pagan backgrounds.
Often, when they decided to follow Jesus, either those communities had
rejected them, or they had found they could no longer live in ways that
fitted in with them. The selves they knew– shaped by and tied up with those
communities – were gone. Who were they now? They felt cast adrift, orphaned.
However much joy there was in their new lives, they had also had to make
tough choices, to lose things that were precious.

Those choices weren’t made any easier by what Jesus goes on to say next
here. “Deny yourself” he begins, but then he goes on “and take up your
cross.” For us the cross has become a well-loved Christian symbol. We wear
it round our necks on a chain; we decorate our buildings with ornate
versions of it. But to the first followers of Jesus it was a symbol of shame
and fear. Crucifixion was a means of execution which was deliberately
humiliating – public, prolonged, painful. The Romans used it when they
wanted to send out a message that they would tolerate no rebellion. It was
regarded with particular horror by Jewish people. They took it as a sign
that the person concerned had been rejected by God, that God was ashamed of
them. 

That brings me to the second big difference between our culture and Jesus’.
His was a society in which shame played a huge part in controlling
behaviour. Anthropologists call groups like these “shame cultures”. They
contrast them with “guilt cultures” like ours where we try to look to the
inner voice of conscience to guide us, and we feel guilty if we do wrong–
it’s an inner, personal thing. In a shame culture, it’s the voice of the
community that matters. The worst thing anyone can do is to dishonour their
community in the eyes of others; if they do that, the community will
respond, must respond, to restore their honour. That means excluding or even
killing the one who has offended, to remove the shame. The awful “honour
crimes” that blight some communities are a product of “shame culture”. When
someone does something that is perceived as shameful, perhaps falling in
love with someone unsuitable, the family will drive them out, maim them, or
even kill them to restore the family honour.  They’d rather be guilty of
murder than carry that burden of shame. It may seem incomprehensible to us,
but it doesn’t to them, because shame has such a powerful place in their
thinking.

In Jesus' time, shame ruled too. The prodigal son’s real crime, in the eyes
of the people of the time, wasn’t that he wasted his money on loose women
and wild parties, but that he left home, abandoned his responsibilities to
the family, to pursue his own way. It was an insult to his father’s honour.
Couldn’t he control his own flesh and blood? What kind of father was he? No
one would have expected him to take the prodigal back – to do so brought
even more shame on him. The father did take him back, of course – that is
what was so revolutionary and baffling about the story to those who first
heard it– but that doesn’t lessen the shame the father suffered because of
his actions, the damage that was done to his reputation. Jesus message
wasn’t that there was no shame in what had happened. What he was saying to
this shame obsessed society was that shame wasn’t to have the last word.
Reconciliation and healing were more important even than family honour and
the respect of those around you. 

“Take up your cross” says Jesus. In the eyes of his community, the manner of
his death will bring enormous shame on him and on anyone associated with
him, shame which the resurrection won’t cancel out – it was only his
disciples who witnessed that. To everyone else Jesus would be just another
failed Messiah, a deluded fool. 

His followers have already seen Jesus courting shame and disapproval, of
course, through the people he has associated with in his ministry. He’s
eaten with sinners, talked with women with dodgy reputations, touched the
unclean and the outcast - shameful actions in the eyes of others. But his
death will be the most shaming act of all and his disciples will have to
choose how they react to that. If they want to share his work and the
building of his kingdom, they will also have to share his shame too and risk
being despised and rejected by those around them. Which do they want? To be
approved in the eyes of their society – to gain the world – or to be loyal
to Jesus, to stick with him and his vision of justice and peace?  

So where does all this leave us? Our choices probably aren’t as stark, but
if we want to follow Jesus there are choices for us to make too, choices
about who we are, and where our loyalties lie. As I’ve said, our society is
different to theirs, but perhaps it’s not that different. We value
individualism but we still let ourselves be shaped by others too – our
social circles, our family or friends, the media. Sometimes the “self” that
we become under their influence isn’t the “self” God calls us to be. 
And though shame isn’t as powerful in our society, it still matters to us
what others think. We’ll compromise our principles so our friends will like
us.  We’ll spend our money, time and effort to impress others we want to
keep in with. We’ll avoid people we don’t want to be seen with so others
won’t think we are like them. 

Look carefully, think carefully, says Jesus, before you make your choices.
God is not always to be found sitting on the throne of public acclaim and
popularity. Choosing his path may mean changing the way we look at the
world, at other people, even at ourselves. Now, as in the time of Jesus, God
may be at work in those places we would rather not go – outside us and
inside us too - we all have broken places in our own lives that we are
ashamed of. God may be at work in those people we don’t want to be
identified with - for whatever reason – in whatever seems shameful to us. If
we can’t go to those places and be with those people, he tells us, we may
find we have missed him, and missed the blessing he brings us. Amen.

(Comments to Anne at annelebas@DSL.PIPEX.COM.)