“Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. So the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

It’s always interesting to see which things capture the cultural imagination and which don’t. Sometimes something will happen that seems like it should be shocking only for it not to move the cultural needle at all. Other times, something that feels like it shouldn’t gain any attention because the culture has moved on from it suddenly grabs everyone’s attention for a few days and absolutely will not let go. This second sort of thing happened a few days ago. The chatter about it has finally died down a bit, but for a few days there it was intense. And comical. Let’s chat for a few minutes today about Coldplay concerts and unfaithful spouses.

I’ll admit that as much politics and cultural news as I follow on a regular basis, I don’t pay much attention to pop culture. While it is a good barometer of where the country is on a number of issues, when it comes to the musical aspect of pop culture, it just doesn’t interest me. My tastes tend to run a bit more on indie vibes than that. As a result, when something happens of some kind of cultural significance at an event like a concert of a pop band – even a band I like – I tend not to hear about it at first.

Sometimes, though, the reaction is big enough that it’s hard to miss.

A couple of weeks ago now, the band Coldplay was putting on a concert near Boston, MA. During one of the songs, the venue’s cameras were roving around the arena for the well-known “Kiss Cam” feature. Camera operates search for what appear to be couples, put them up on the jumbotron, and encourage them to share a quick kiss for the crowd. This is a regular feature at most major stadium and arena events nowadays. You about can’t attend a professional or minor league sporting event without a Kiss Cam moment.

In most cases, the cameraman has successfully spotted a real couple, the pair kiss quickly (or, if they’re extroverts, they may put a little more into it), everyone cheers, and the cameras move on to the next couple. Occasionally and to the delight and humor of the crowds, the camera does not get it right, lands on not a couple, and the awkward reactions ensue. One woman finally mouthed, “That’s my brother!”

Whether the reactions are sweet or awkward, though, everyone in attendance understands that it is just a bit of mostly harmless, fairly wholesome fun. Inviting couples to share a kiss in public isn’t all that big of a deal for most folks. Now, I would likely be red as a tomato if I suddenly saw myself on the jumbotron during a segment like that, but I would nonetheless give my wife a kiss for it.

At this particular Coldplay concert, during this particular Kiss Cam moment, though, the camera landed on a couple in one of the luxury boxes. They were both enjoying the music. The man was standing behind the woman with his arms around her in an embrace that clearly implied a romantic relationship between the two. The cameraman thought he had landed on an easy win for the crowd.

Upon seeing each themselves on the jumbotron, however, the couple immediately reacted with shock, split apart, and tried to hide from the camera. She turned her back to the camera with her hands over her face, and he dropped down behind the barrier and started pointing for the camera to go somewhere else. Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin, chuckled a bit and joked that the couple was either having an affair or else they were very shy.

As it turns out, he was right the first time.

In an age of social media and quick-fingered internet sleuths, the identity of the couple was uncovered almost immediately, and yes, they were indeed caught red-handed. Both individuals worked for the same company. He was the CEO, and she was the HR director. Both were married…to other people. And now their extramarital affair was public. Very public. Very, very public. It was all anybody could talk about for days.

Very soon thereafter, the memes started to roll in. And they were funny. Awkwardly, uncomfortably funny, but funny all the same. I won’t post any here, but you don’t have to search hard to find all sorts of them.

Thinking about this whole affair, no pun intended…well, not totally intended…two things jump out at me that seem worth talking about. First, for a country that had supposedly been completely consumed by the sexual revolution, and which has given up pretty much every stitch of faithfulness to any kind of traditional sexual morality, very few folks seemed to have had any trouble recognizing that this couple did something wrong. Part of the creation of so many memes – including the reenactment of the ordeal by the Phillies’ boy and girl mascots, which was undoubtedly my favorite – was the result of this moral judgment the country made against them.

I think this sense of at least mild moral revulsion is more notable of a point than it seems. We live in a culture in which the loosened sexual mores of the sexual revolution and the glorification of extramarital affairs had seemed complete. Consider just how many books, movies, and TV shows have celebrated people having affairs when they find their “true love.” At least two Nicholas Sparks books that have been turned into successful movies (The Notebook and Nights in Rodanthe) were about a woman finding her soulmate and having an affair in spite of being in a committed relationship with someone else.

Had this couple not reacted with such guilt (more on that in a moment), even if their affair had been found out because of the Kiss Cam moment, if they had gone on national television and insisted that they were being stifled in their marriages and had discovered they were soulmates while on a work retreat, the country probably would have celebrated them instead of lampooning them. But instead of acceptance, the couple got judgment. Deserved judgment. They deserve it not only for their actions, but for the chaos they are now putting their families through.

The other thing that jumps out is the initial reaction of the couple themselves. Their first reaction was to hide. They did this in about as cringeworthy and memeable way as they possibly could. Twenty years ago wouldn’t have garnered much in the way of attention, but in a day when cell phones and video snippets dominate the landscape and could potentially capture pretty much every part of everybody’s day, their reaction immediately went viral.

Perhaps the funniest part of the clip of their reaction comes at the very end when the woman standing next to the offending woman who was not publicly engaged in any kind of immoral behavior. She never turned her face from the camera. In fact, she clearly thought the whole thing was hysterical. Now perhaps that’s because she didn’t imagine the moment would go completely viral, but she was laughing so hard at their reaction that she had to bend over on the railing in front of her for support.

More than the amusing nature of their reaction, though, consider what it tells us about them. They knew they were doing wrong and had now been caught in the act. Imagine a different universe with me for a moment in which they didn’t react like they did. Imagine if they had simply smiled, kissed each other, and the Kiss Cam had gone on to the next couple. They will still have been very much morally in the wrong, but no one would have known about it. No one would have videoed their kiss. No one outside of that concert venue would have seen it. As far as everyone there was concerned, they would have been just another cute couple who shared a quick kiss on camera.

But instead of doing that, they reacted with obvious shame and went wildly viral. Well, sin causes shame. It always has. This has been the case since the Garden. After God told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit from the tree in the middle of the Garden and they went and did it anyway at the serpent’s prompting, Moses tells us what they did when the Lord came looking for them to have their usual evening walk together. Now, God already knew what had happened. He’s God. But He called to them anyway to give them a chance to own their actions. You wonder a bit if repentance instead of blameshifting on their part would have affected the outcome at all.

That we’ll never know, but what we do know is this: When God came looking for them, they hid just like this Kiss Cam couple did. “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. So the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.'”

This was now the second time the couple had reacted to their sin by hiding. The first time was just after they ate the fruit. They each took a bite, looked at each other, became intensely aware of their own nakedness, and promptly hid from one another. Then, when God came calling, they hid from Him too.

God made us in His image. The Genesis narrative is abundantly clear on that fact. And as a part of our being created in His image, we bear in our souls a basic sense of His moral nature. The result is that we have an intuitive sense of what is right and what is wrong. Now, yes, that gets shaped by our cultural environment in mostly subtle and not terribly significant ways such that not everybody identifies the exact same set of things as fitting into one category or the other. And, yes, a person can dull that conscience by ignoring it for long enough that they become mostly numb to its nagging on their hearts and minds. But as this episode has pretty clearly demonstrated, there are some big basics of moral behavior on which we still pretty much all agree. One of these is that it’s not right to cheat on your spouse. Ever.

More broadly than that, when we walk a moral path defined by something other than the righteousness of God, this same kind of shame is waiting for us too. If we are living with sin in our life, that sin will eventually be found out. We may be able to keep it hidden for a long time, but the light of God’s righteousness will one day cover the earth, and nothing will remain hidden from it.

Ravi Zacharias was once one of the foremost evangelists and apologists in the world. There were a couple of accusations against him that were pretty unsavory, but everybody (including me) brushed them off as nothing more than someone trying to take down his ministry for notoriety’s sake. Then he died, and after a chorus of well-wishers finished celebrating his life and ministry, the revelations started rolling in that he was a sexual predator of the first order. Now the ministry that once proudly bore his name is gone, and his name only gets mentioned in contexts like this one. He is no doubt now receiving the judgment from God he is due in spite of having successfully avoided the judgment of man during his life.

It is simply better to walk the path of the righteousness of God in Christ. That will lead to better life outcomes every single time. At the very least, it’ll make sure you don’t become a viral sensation thanks to a Kiss Cam video for all the wrong reasons. This couple’s actions were funny, but it’s the kind of humor that is more an expression of moral judgment and relief that our sin didn’t get exposed in the same way than of genuine mirth. Enjoy laughing at the memes, but don’t miss the more serious point.