A Divine Identity

 

 

 

Subverting the Honor-and-Shame System

A Divine Identity

Monday, March 16, 2026

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Father Richard describes how the early church followed Jesus’s practice of honoring universal human dignity:

There is a telling phrase used in the Acts of the Apostles to describe this new Jewish sect that is upsetting the old-world order in Thessalonica. Christians there were dragged before the city council and referred to as “the people who have been turning the whole world upside down…. They have broken Caesar’s edicts” (Acts 17:6–7). No one is called before the city council for mere inner beliefs or new attitudes unless they are also upsetting the social order. Almost all of Jesus’s healing and nature miracles were a rearranging of social relationships and therefore of social order. By eating with the underclass, touching the untouchables, healing on the Sabbath, and collaborating with upstarts like John the Baptist down at the river, he turns the traditions of his society upside down.

Jesus refuses to abide by the honor-and-shame system that dominated the Mediterranean culture of his time. He refuses to live up to what is considered honorable and refuses to shame what people consider shameful. This does not gain him many friends. It’s perhaps the thing that most bothers the priests and the elders. In response to his ignoring the debt codes and purity codes, they decide to kill him (see Mark 3:6, 11:18; Matthew 12:14; Luke 19:47; John 11:53). [1]

In an honor-and-shame system, a person’s status, self-image, and meaning are primarily achieved through how others see them. The system around Jesus didn’t ask individuals to think in terms of “Who am I really before God?” (as Jesus did), or “What do I feel about myself?” (as our culture might), but rather, “How does my village see me?” Many cultures to this day are built on some kind of honor-and-shame system. A person’s meaning is almost entirely tied up in how their family and friends see them. It’s a highly effective means of social control.

In New Testament times, shame and honor were in fact moral values that people felt compelled to follow. If a situation called for retaliation, one must retaliate. Not to retaliate would have been considered immoral, because it would have meant abandoning the honor of the individual, their family, and maybe their entire village. For Jesus to say, “Do not retaliate,” was to subvert the whole honor-and-shame system. It is one of the strongest arguments people can make that Jesus taught nonviolence.

Once challenged to live outside their cultural systems, Jesus’s listeners were given a new place to find their identity: in God. Who we are in God is who we are. That’s the end of ups and downs. Our value no longer depends upon whether our family or village likes us, whether we’re good-looking, wealthy, or obedient to the laws. Jesus’s message is incredibly subversive in an honor-and-shame society. Yet, as he takes away their old foundations, he offers a new, more solid one: neither shame-based nor guilt-based, but based in who they—and we—are in God. [2]