Recently I have been having a lot of conversations about guilt – my own and other peoples’. Much of the time, I find that we wrap guilt and shame up in the same basket. The dictionary definition of guilt is “the fact of having committed a specified or implied offense or crime.” Guilt is a fact. Shame is a feeling. The dictionary tells us that shame is “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.” Guilt is the prosecutor, shame is the executioner. 
If you search for the word “guilt” in the ESV, you find that there are 109 references to that exact word, and that the last one occurs in Acts 13:28. (“GuiltY,” by the way, is a different story, it shows up only three times but shows up in Paul’s writings and in the books of James.) But the last mention of guilt goes like this: “And though they found in [Jesus] no guilt worthy of death, they asked Pilate to have him executed.”
I suppose it is possible to read too much into things like the last mention of a specific word in the New Testament. But I think there is something to this one. The last mention of guilt in the New Testament shows guilt crucified for us in Christ. Jesus didn’t have any guilt worthy of death, but then why execute Him? Easy. Because without realizing it, the “sons of the family of Abraham” were sending guilt to the Cross – in the Body of the only man who ever lived without a reason to feel it. The “facts” of our failure, impotence, wickedness, and other family members of the “Sin” clan become history in Christ’s death. Perhaps we still remember them, but they are put in the past tense along with His death on the Cross.
The last mention of shame comes much later in the New Testament. It shows up in John’s Revelation. It shows up in Jesus’ letter to the Church of Laodecia, the last letter that serves as a prologue to what John witnesses as the coming Resurrection. It says, “I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see.” (Revelation 3:18). Like in so many conversations I’ve had, sometimes it is easy to accept the forgiveness of sin as fact, but to hold on emotionally to the shame….even right up to when Jesus comes back it seems.
But Jesus’ goal isn’t that you accept forgiveness but still feel the shame. He doesn’t want you to somehow believe that your sins are in the past but live with them as present emotions. He counsels you to buy stuff to cover up your shame. And what are you buying this with? Well, the passage seems to make you out to be naked, so it’s doubtful you have much in your non-existent pockets. Instead, you’re buying on credit. Not your own, but His. That credit deposited for you on the Cross is yours for the taking, not just for your guilt, but for your shame as well. May you live today and this week putting guilt and shame in their proper place – the Cross.