shirt #2: I look better naked.

Title: I look better naked.

Design: multi-coloured slogan on black

Make: David & Goliath

Hypocrisy, shame, nudity and freedom

Like the previous T-shirt (‘theologian’) I have to admit I don’t tend to wear this T-shirt out much. I do wear it in bed though, as it’s very comfortable, and also then very few people see it. (And, yes I see the irony about owning clothing that proclaims I look better without it.)

The interesting thing about nakedness in the Bible is that is closely allied to shame. Adam and Eve’s first realisation when they could distinguish between good and evil was that they were naked, and, in shame, they hid. Noah drank himself unconscious and was shamed by one of his sons for passing out naked in his tent. Throughout the ‘prophetic’ books “nakedness” is used to symbolise how God will bring low the enemies of Israel and put them to shame.

And then there’s our own experience. Have you ever had one of those mortifying dreams where you discover you’re in school, or work, or church, and you suddenly realise that you’re naked? Even worse, have you ever had an embarrassing experience of being naked in public?

I’m not going to ask you to share the details of your public nudity, but I’ll tell you one of my embarrassing stories. When I was about 12, some family friends came to stay and their 9-year old girl thought the most hilarious thing in the world was pulling down boy’s trousers. She’d done it to her brother numerous times. Then during the weekend she did it to me. I was so embarrassed. My face was flushed. I felt angry. I felt shame.

Strangely, about six years later I met her again and she couldn’t talk to me or even make eye contact. She was that embarrassed about what she’d done. It was strange, but my nakedness caused her to feel ashamed. I’m not quite sure why.

But why should we be so ashamed of nakedness? I used to have a badge that said 'Underneath my clothes, I'm a nudist'. But so is everyone. True, some of us are hairier (and in my case flabbier) than others, but when we're naked, we’re all basically the same.

Is it because we’re vulnerable when we’re naked? People can see us how we really are – and so can we if we look in a mirror. When we put on clothes, we look different. If you want to look thinner, or accentuate your cleavage, you can. In fact, it’s so common to do it, we don’t even think to consider it fakery.

And if we do it with clothes, how much more do we ‘dress up’ and hide who we really are inside? According to surveys, pornography is a secret vice for up to 50% of Christians, but very few will publicly admit they struggle with it. We can easily be the upstanding, moral, spiritual, principled man or woman of God and keep our addictions hidden. That’s not being judgmental. I only know how easy it is, because I did it.

The same goes for ‘doubt’. If we’re willing to sing along as if nothing is wrong in church, then we can fool anyone that we’re full of faith, when inside we doubt whether God exists, and whether we even care. But we put on our Sunday best clothes and our Sunday best pious face and we use the right words, and no one is the wiser.

Incidentally, once I preached about how I was lacking faith, and afterwards someone approached me and asked me to mentor them. It’s the only time that’s ever happened to me. He didn’t want spiritual; he wanted honest.

Admitting who you really are is hard. What if people reject you? Or condemn you? (What if they just point and laugh?) It’s scary to be honest and to be emotionally naked in front of people, even just on a blog – I really wasn’t sure whether to disclose what I wrote earlier about porn. But I decided to be honest, even though shedding the respectable clothes of churchianity, that we’re expected to wear, is a risk.

But the alternative to being honest is to be a hypocrite. And, given the choice, Jesus seemed to prefer the company of sinners rather than hypocrites. The word ‘hypocrite’ itself is interesting. It’s entered the English language almost directly from the Greek, through the Bible. A ‘hypocrite’ was an actor, with a specific technical meaning of a person who wore a mask to disguise their true identity.

When Jesus called the ultra-religious, super-spiritual Pharisees ‘hypocrites’, he was calling them actors, at a time when actors were considered the epitome of immorality. It’s not just some Christians who disengage with everything cultural because they think it’s wicked and sinful – the Pharisees did it too. Today, calling the Pharisees ‘hypocrites’ would be the equivalent of telling the best-known Christian pastors that ‘You’re all fakers, like porn stars pretending to enjoy sex’. That is how powerful an insult it was.

And Jesus even made fun of their clothes. The Pharisees wore white robes to symbolise their purity. Jesus said they looked like whitewashed tombs. They looked nice on the outside, but they were full of the stench of death…

So, really, compared to being like that, maybe Jesus would agree that I do look better ‘naked’.