"What's in a name?
That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet." So said Juliet to Romeo in Shakespeare’s famous play,
but she was wrong. The fact that he was a Montague and she a Capulet, from rival
families, may not have worried her, but it worried others, and the results were
fatal for both of them.
Names matter. They aren’t
just technical reference tags, like your National Insurance number, or the
serial number on a machine. They carry all sorts of other meanings and
associations. That’s why choosing a name for a baby is so difficult, and,
usually, done with great care. What are they going to feel about those names
when they are grown? Is your daughter going to thank you for calling her Fifi,
when she becomes a High Court Judge? But you have to call them something, and
it is the power, and the burden, of parenthood to make that choice.
Names feature in our readings
today. In the Old Testament reading Abram becomes Abraham, and Sarai becomes
Sarah. Commentators argue about whether there is anything really significant
about the old and new names in themselves. Possibly Abram might mean “exalted
ancestor” while Abraham means “ancestor of a multitude”, which is what he
becomes, but no one is really sure, and Sarai and Sarah are two variants of a
word that means “princess”. But small changes matter, and the crucial thing
here is who is giving them these identities, not their tribal ancestors, the
parents who (ninety-nine years ago in Abraham’s case) decided on their name,
but God himself. In naming them, he declares that he’s the one whose family
they truly belong to, above and beyond the old tribal identities that once
shaped them. They are children of God, part of a family that will eventually encompass
a multitude of nations. Back in Genesis chapter 12 God had told Abraham that through
him, “all the families of the earth will be blessed”– God’s work through
Abraham and Sarah won’t be about setting one tribe over another – Montagues
against Capulet - it will be for the whole human race.
Today’s Gospel reading
follows hard on the heels of another significant name change. It comes straight
after the passage in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus tells Simon, the fisherman
from Bethsaida who has become one of his closest followers, that from now on he
will be called Peter, as he is here – from the Greek petros, a rock. He’s
just acclaimed Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the living God, and Jesus responds
that “on this rock I will build my kingdom”. But now Peter seems to be
rocky in a way Jesus didn’t intend. He may have accepted that this carpenter
from Nazareth could be God’s messiah, but he can’t accept that God’s plan for
him could ever include a humiliating and painful death. It doesn’t make sense
to him, and it provokes a gigantic, rocky wobble.
It probably doesn’t make it
any easier for him that this story is happening in the territory of Caesarea
Philippi. We’re told that in the passage before this.Caesarea Philippi was a
town which had been founded, and named, in honour of the Roman Emperors, the Caesars,
by one of King Herod’s sons – the Herod who killed all the babies in Bethlehem.
This particular son, Philip, who ruled this area after his father’s death had
snuck in his own name – that’s the Philippi bit – for good measure. If you are
going to suck up to the big boss in Rome by building a town for him, it never
does any harm to remind him who’s idea it was! It was a strategically important
town, on the lower slopes of Mount Hermon, where the River Jordan rose, which
provided much of the precious water that irrigated Israel. There was a famous
shrine to the Greek god Pan there too. So it was a place which reeked of
secular and religious authority. Everywhere you turned there were reminders of
who was in power – even in the town’s name itself – reminders of who you needed
to swear allegiance to if you wanted to get on, or even just stay alive, in
this dog-eat-dog world.
It was extraordinary that
Peter had affirmed Jesus as the Messiah at all against that backdrop. What was a carpenter from Nazareth compared to
the might of Rome and the splendour of the Herodian dynasty? But as it turned
out Peter had only got halfway to where he needed to be. It wasn’t just who
had power that mattered, but what that power looked like. In the Kingdoms
of Rome and of the Herods, power equalled military force, casual brutality, and
swift and severe retribution for anyone who stepped out of line.
In that sort of society, either
you fit in and do what you are told, no matter whether its right or wrong, or
you stand up against it, and pay the price. It’s a stark choice. As Jesus says,
in trying to save your life physically, you may find you lose it spiritually.
You may get to live, but you have to live with yourself, knowing deep down that
you are a collaborator, an enabler of oppression. Just this last week, a 95
year old man was deported from the US back to Germany, having admitted that he was
a concentration camp guard at a camp near Hamburg during World War 2. He
oversaw some of the deadly forced marches which took place as the war was
drawing to an end. It might look as if he’d got away with it all these years,
but what does it do to you to live with that on your conscience, and now he has
been expelled from the land he called home for the last 60 or so years? What
has it profited him to “gain the whole world” if he has spent his whole
adult life knowing that he was part of that machinery of evil? You don’t have
to believe in eternal punishment, or even life after death, to see what Jesus
was getting at here. We all make choices, and then have to live with the
choices we make.
Jesus, and his followers will
be faced with the choice between a courageous stand against oppression or the
temptation to go with the flow, knowing that it is wrong. When Peter tries to
turn Jesus away from the course of action he knows he must follow, he shows how
deeply his mind has been shaped by the shadow of Rome, Herod and their like, where
success comes adorned with thrones and sycophantic admirers, and anything else
is failure. He has his mind on earthly
things, not divine things, as Jesus puts it. No wonder he can’t cope with the
idea of Jesus being crucified. He can’t
imagine God could be at work through pain, death and humiliation, and he won’t
get his head around it fully until Jesus is raised from death. That’s when he
will really grow into the new name Jesus has given him, when he’ll stop being
rocky, and start being the Rock upon whose faith others can rely.
Today’s readings, then,
invite us to look at our own identity, and where it comes from, the names we
know ourselves by, and who gave them to us, the things that have shaped our
outlook on the world, and whether they lead us to fear, or faith. They call us
to see that, whatever tribes and families we come from, whatever society we
grew up in, our true name and nature come from God, the God who is with us in
failure just as much as success, in weakness just as much as strength, in death
just as much as life.
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