Names matter. “What's in a name?” Shakespeare’s heroine Juliet famously asks, musing that, “that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.” It wouldn’t, however, cause you to wind up dead in a tomb next to your suicidal boyfriend. Indeed, at about the same time Shakespeare was writing his history cycle on the Wars of the Roses, proving that whether a flower is red or white, and whether a name is York or Lancaster, can matter a great deal.
Names matter. “What’s my name?” Muhammad Ali repeatedly shouted while pounding Ernie Terrell, an opponent who had refused to recognize Ali’s conversion to the Nation of Islam and insisted on using the boxer’s “slave name,” Cassius Clay.
Names matter. The New York Times reports that expectant parents almost immediately Google prospective monikers to make sure they don’t dub their babies anything too common, too weird, or too redolent of a stripper, a loser, or a serial killer. An iPhone app called “kick to pick” lets mom and dad narrow it down to the top two, then hold the phone over the womb as each name alternates on the screen. The device locks in whichever title is up when the infant kicks.
Names matter. God claims the right to change “Abram” to “Abraham” and “Sarai” to “Sarah.” There’s not a lot of difference there. The family didn’t even have to get new monograms on its hand towels. It boils down to going from Will to William or Brittney to Britney. The point is not the name but the Namer: God asserts relationship and enacts a new era. Abraham and Sarah both crack up, and their fit of the giggles indicates their amusement at the notion that a switch in titles could reverse the march of time: That which we call a geriatric couple/By any other name would still be way past this sort of thing.
But names matter. Our words describe, but God’s words create. When fully owned by the Almighty, Abraham and Sarah become conduits for the Lord’s truth. “He that hath an ear,” declares the Lord in Revelation 2.17, “let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.”
The new name Christ offers means that our Lenten sojourn never lasts past our spiritual prime, and that the promise of Easter means we can laugh our heads off at the absurdity of the truth: That our God makes all things new.
Be Named and Claimed,
Doug
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