From the book ‘The Christ Who Heals,’ Fiona and Terryl Givens share:
For God did not send His Son to the world that he may judge the world, but that the world may be saved through Him.
~John 3:17 (YOUNG’S LITERAL TRANSLATION)
I, the Lord, remember your sins no more.
(Doctrine and Covenants 58:42)
The first human emotion unambiguously depicted in the scriptural record is shame. Adam and Eve together hide from God’s presence, shielding their very bodies from the gaze of God—and from each other. What might the shame of their nakedness mean in the language of scripture? It may be helpful to consider that we are ashamed primarily before those we love. We can be embarrassed in front of strangers, but the piercing pain of shame is most acute among the circles of intimacy. To be unmasked as a fraud, or a dissembler in front of our child, would be pain with few parallels. We also suffer shame undeservedly, as we feel inadequate or unworthy in the face of family, friends, and God. We don’t want to disappoint those whose regard we most value. Shame is that disappointment we feel most acutely within a relationship; it is pain compounded by the gaze of another. Because we yearn for the affection and esteem of those we most love, we experience shame when we feel we have forfeited such love and regard. Even if we are frankly forgiven by the other, our intractable sense of justice convinces us that we are henceforth not deserving of that love or loyalty. We are no longer capable of reciprocity, we are no longer able to receive that love. This explains the serpent tooth of shame, and why we feel its sting most deeply with those whose love we most cherish.
How much more does this analysis hold true with our Savior. When we feel we have disappointed Him by our sin, of poor judgment, or an unfounded sense of nonspecific unworthiness, we think we have alienated him who most deserves our affection, for whose love we most hunger, whose approbation we most desire. The intellectual recognition that his mercy extends to us may help to dissipate the guilt, but not the shame.
Perhaps you have known this experience: you carry for years a low-grade, nagging guilt about a slight you have committed against a loved one. One day, in a moment of particular contrition and sharing, you ask forgiveness for that hurt perpetrated years ago. Your sibling says, with some surprise, “I don’t even remember that! Not only do you relax in sudden relief, happy to know that inflicted pain was less than feared; you relationship is suddenly transformed. Freed from shame you are now able to relinquish your fear. An invisible barrier has disappeared, a channel has cleared, and now love uninhibited can flow in both directions.
God and Christ are omniscient, and yet the promise is: “He who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more.“1 Our Lord is like the mother of Wendell Berry’s poem whose forgiveness is “so complete” that “I wonder sometimes if it did not precede my wrong.”2 He purposefully forgets ours sin to extripate our shame. The act is sublime. Feeling himself to be in a spiritual wilderness, Berdyaev imagined a purer Christianity such as Joseph restored: “Christianity alone teaches that the past can be wiped out; it knows the mystery of forgetting and canceling the past. This is the mystery of redemption. . . .The endless threads stretching form the past into the future are cut. Therein lies the mystery of penitence and the remission of sins. . . . It is only in and through Christ that the past can be forgiven and forgotten.”3 ~ Fiona and Terryl Givens, The Christ Who Heals (Deseret Book, 2017), 90-92
