I have resisted the idea that the garment of the holy priesthood can meaningfully symbolize Jesus Christ as taught in the current temple recommend interview. At a literal level, it just doesn’t align with my instincts. It’s literally underwear. Underwear sweats. It smells. it stains and slowly turns gray in the wash. It absorbs the less dignified realities of embodied life. Trying to map that onto reverence, purity, or moral cleanliness always felt strained or simply weird. Both my heart and intellect rejected the metaphor.
But writing this out has made me realize that my resistance may have been aimed at the wrong thing. What bothered me was not the body, but the Church’s tendency to pretend the body isn’t what it is. What if the problem isn’t that underwear is too lowly to symbolize Christ, but that we’ve made Christ too pure and holy to belong anywhere near it?
C.S. Lewis once remarked something along the lines that “holiness is dank and bloody.” Christianity, at its core, is not a clean religion. God does not save humanity from a hygienic distance. He enters flesh, sweat, pain, humiliation, and failure. There is always the smell of burning flesh when it comes to the house of Israel. The crucifixion was not elevated or tasteful. It is exposed, degrading, and bodily in the most uncomfortable sense imaginable. Any theology that forgets this begins to drift towards whitewashing the good news.
Underwear is where the body is least presentable. It’s the layer closest to sweat, odor, illness, aging and worse, our glands and private parts - visceral evidence that we are not glorified, resurrected beings. Perhaps that’s precisely where salvation must reach if it is to be real. Not at the level of polished behavior or Sunday presentation, but at the base level of humanity, the places we (and society) would rather keep hidden.
This has led me to wonder whether the garment could carry a meaning the Church itself would never endorse. Not a symbol of purity or worthiness, but of non-abandonment. Not “you are clean,” but “you are not rejected even though you are not clean.” Not exposure, but discretion. Not surveillance, but privacy. Coverage (confidentiality) instead of coverage (publicity).
Much of what we call sin seems less like amoral rebellion and more like inevitability, the byproduct of being embodied, reactive, shaped by fear, ignorance, bad examples, or harm done to us. Sin, in this sense, is as unavoidable as flatulence and defecation. It’s not chosen, not evidence of bad character, not rebellion for its own sake. It’s what happens when finite creatures try to live, love, and survive.
In that sense, the garment might quietly say: don’t worry, I’ve got you. I will keep this private.
This doesn’t excuse harm. There are abusers, predators, and people who delight in cruelty, and I don’t yet have a theology robust enough to account for them. But most human failure does not belong in that category. Most of it is ordinary, private, embarrassing, and deeply human.
Jesus consistently treats it that way. He shields people from public humiliation. He heals before he moralizes. He refuses to let shame be the final word. “Go and sin no more” comes after protection, not before it. Salvation, in this light, is not about deodorizing humanity but about refusing to abandon it.
This is not a metaphor the institutional Church can safely lean into. If sin is ordinary rather than exceptional, private rather than public, relational rather than juridical, then shame loses its leverage. Worthiness interviews lose their force. Control becomes harder to justify. Institutions require sin to be visible and dramatic. Christ seems content for it to be quiet and borne.
I still don’t know whether the garment works for me as a symbol. But I am less certain now that its bodily awkwardness is a defect and not a feature. It may be the point, another unintentional, unchosen reminder that salvation happens where we are least dignified, least polished, least in control.
If Christ is present anywhere, it will not be because we managed to stay clean. It will be because we were not abandoned when we could not.
