Skip to main content

Whats in a Name?

Oban, Scotland, June 2009

Last night, by way of an evening service, Murray Broome led us in a piece of Bibliodrama. That is, the 25 or so of us who were there at the time acted out a selected piece of scripture; in this case, the story of Jesus' conversation with the disciples in Matthew 16:13-19. What struck me, as we lived out this familiar old passage, was the whole business of names, which I have written about before. I realised again, that names don't so much define the thing or the person being named; rather, they define us who are doing the naming. Jesus asks his disciples "who do you say that I am?" If I call Jesus "quack" or "charlattan" or "prophet" or "Son of The Living God" it defines me as the sort of person who will look at a specific set of information -ie the available data on Jesus life - and come up with that particular evaluation of it; an evaluation which may or may not tell others something about Jesus but which will certainly tell them a whole lot about me. This is the point about Jesus' teaching in The Sermon On The Mount about calling someone a fool. This is the point about Jesus' many teachings on forgiveness and on loving enemies.

If I name someone an enemy, they are not affected in the slightest. They are unlikely to be changed by my opinion; they will probably not even notice or care what I think of them. But the naming of them as enemy lays out in broad daylight, for everyone to see, the hurts and anxieties I have harboured concerning that person. Hold onto the name "enemy" and I hold onto the hurt and I am shaped by it. I hold it and am harmed by it; note: me, not them. If I do as Jesus suggests and rename them as "beloved", they may similarly be not much affected, but I shall be free.

I noticed also that immediately after Peter names Jesus "Messiah", Jesus in his turn names Peter as "the Rock on which I will build my church". What occured to me last night was that when that piece of name calling occured, unpredictable Peter was the least solid, least rock-like person you could ever wish to encounter. It was as he heard Jesus' name for him and as he began to rename himself that his character changed.

"Who do you say I am?" asked Jesus. His naming of Peter invites Peter to ask "Who do I say I am?". The answer to both questions can have powerful effect.

Comments

Anonymous said…
"in my Father's house there are many mansions." - but I must say I do rather like the idea of some comfortablel hotels (well stocked with Islay whisky bottles behind the bar) instead....Jo
Jules said…
Dear Ven. Kelvin,

So true. Great insights.

Equanimity meditation practice, or loving-kindness mediation is, I think in essence, quite similar to this.

However the Anglican way of meditation, the desert father's teachings, Christian saint's teachings/writings, and Christ's teachings work best for me on a personal level, regarding this issue.

Thanks for putting this contemplation in such a succinct and helpful Christian way!
Easy to understand when expressed clearly, yet hard to put into practice! :)

"Hold onto the name "enemy" and I hold onto the hurt and I am shaped by it. I hold it and am harmed by it; note: me, not them. If I do as Jesus suggests and rename them as "beloved", they may similarly be not much affected, but I shall be free."

Thank you.
Yours in Christ,

Julian

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old