Ex. 19:2-8a Ps.100
Rom.5:6-11 Matt. 9:35-10:15
Lectionary Link
To have a name means that one has been wanted and designated as having a unique place within a group of people, most notably, one's family.
In our time, our identity is most often associated with numbers, our social security numbers and driver license numbers. We get assigned different numbers in all kinds of transactions. Having a number as our identities can leave us seeming to be impersonal administrative cogs getting lost as mere statistics within a system.
Numbers can be offered in combinations so as to be individually unique, while if one's name is John or Jane, there are many other Johns and Janes.
But the point of having a name like John or Jane, is that John or Jane are someone's John or someone's Jane, in the sense of belonging.
Today's Gospel lists the twelve disciples of Jesus by name. The existence of the Gospels is proof that the Jesus Movement attained some success as a social movement and with success of any movement there comes the organizational changes to become efficient in administrating larger numbers of people as well as adopting deliberate strategies to present the originating ideals to a greater number of people.
The originating ideal of the Jesus Movement was discovered and manifest in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. I don't think that Jesus tried to revolutionary; he just had this great gut feeling that many, many people were missing the obvious. He did not think that people should be alienated from the obvious, because the obvious belongs to everyone.
We know that food, water, and air are obvious needs for the lives of everyone and knowing that, the human task is to make sure that everyone has knowledge about and supply for what is obvious for the sustaining of physical life.
But what was the great personal and human relationship obvious thing which was being missed by people in the time of Jesus? The obvious for Jesus is that he knew himself to be a Son of God, and because he knew this, he also knew that everyone else too was a son or daughter of God. But the social conditions in the setting of Jesus did not allow people to know the obvious. The many other human roles of society dominated and crowded out the ability for people to know themselves as children of God.
God's realm or kingdom was a personal realm, a realm where each person was to know oneself as God's child. This knowing oneself as a child of God is exemplified in the baptism of Jesus when he is declared to be the son of God, but not just a son but one who was delightfully pleasing to his heavenly parent.
For Jesus to know himself as a son of God and one who had the interior sense that his very being delightfully pleased the heavenly parent, well.......he believed that this is what every person should realize in their lives.
This was the good news of the obvious which Jesus shared. And he called his friends and let them know about this obvious primary dynamic: James, John, Peter, Andrew, Matthew, Philip, Bartholomew, James, son of Alphaeus,Thomas, Judas, Simon, and Thaddaeus.
The disciple had names because they were known to Jesus, they belonged in the company of Jesus, they belonged in the family of God, as God's children. And if these friends of Jesus could know this obvious reality of being God's children, then they too would want to share the obvious with as many people as they could.
So the Gospel message of being children of God, made in God's image as the primary affirming identity of life is what the evangelical mission was about. Our Gospel lesson presents some strategies in spreading this basic message within the environs of Palestine.
The heart of the Gospel is that God's children have names because they are known by God as God's beloved children, and they are known to have personal names within the community of the people of this world.
It is very easy for people to lose their personal value within community. People can be reduced to their function and their roles, their titles, the amount of wealth, education or their positions within society.
The obvious message of Jesus was this: First, each person is a child of God and to be treated with the dignity and respect of such an identity. Yes, we have many other callings, roles, and functions within our social setting, but Jesus came to remind us about our primary identity as children of God.
The mission of Jesus was to convince his friends that they were children of God and then get them to convince other people about their basic membership within the family of God.
The disciples are listed by their names because they belonged to God and to each other. Let us discover the baptismal meaning of our names today, namely that we are God's children, and it is our mission to discover this, and to help other people discover this too with as many strategies as love can devise.
In our highly populated world, people can easily get lost by being an administrative number or a member of a statistical category. We in the church, the local church are to be like the proverbial bar, Cheers, where everyone knows our name, because we celebrate belonging to God and to each other. Amen.
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