What's in a name?

3 May 2017 • Articles

Labels can be very useful – if you don’t know what switch does what; if you don’t know what lead goes where; if you’re not sure which pigeon hole is yours.
But we don’t just use labels for ‘things’. We use them for ourselves. We start putting ourselves into categories – what’s your personality type, or your learning style? Are you introvert or ex­trovert?
There are reasons we use labels – usually to bring some kind of clarifica­tion, to make an identification. A loose label can sometimes help us, aid our understanding of ourselves – but if it becomes a strait­jacket, it can do more harm than good. Labels have a downside. They can put us into boxes, try and pigeon-hole who we are, even attempt to justify discrim­ina­tion against others. Labels can be dehumanising. Labels can divide.
How many labels have been stuck to you over the years? Were they welcome? Are there some you wish weren’t so sticky, so difficult to shake off? Do you act in a certain way because that’s how you have been labelled? It’s a frightening thought.
We try and differentiate aspects of ourselves. After a while, we become an assortment of parts kept in different boxes. But our lives as individuals, and as church, cannot be boxed up in this way. We are called to love God with all our mind and soul and heart and strength. Our discipleship is ‘whole-life’ discipleship – not disparate pieces. Paul tells us that in Christ there is no male or female, no slave or free (Galatians 3:28).
Our differences don’t matter in the light of this bigger identity – that we are in Christ. This is the only name that matters. There may be labels we wish we could lose. There may be labels we are a little too proud of. Whatever people call us, whatever we call ourselves, these labels don’t sum up who we are. They can’t. We find our identity in Christ. full of shadows and sketches of what was to come. The new covenant is the astonishing coming-into-being of God’s law written on our hearts, of God’s spirit poured out on all people. All this made possible by suffering, made possible by the death of the one who was before all things.
The Easter story is a glorious shout in the face of what seem like impossible odds. Life is stacked up against death. But life wins. It reasserts itself, even when all seems hopeless. And this is new life, resurrection life, life with an X factor. Mary doesn’t recognise Jesus, at first. She thinks he is the gardener, confined to this point in time. Only when he says her name does she respond, ‘Master!’
But what happened through Jesus’ death and resurrection breaks the barriers of place and time and stretches to us today. Now we, when Jesus speaks to us by name, can recognise him as both friend and Lord.