“What’s in a name?” Juliet asks in Shakespeare’s play.
She goes on to say:
“….That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet…”
Juliet is suggesting that a name is just a word, only a label. Names, she believes, don’t change the essential nature of the things or the people to which they are attached. That wasn’t the way people thought about names in the time of Jesus. They believed that names signified important things, and they also believed that names could be transformative.
John the Baptist features prominently in today’s Gospel. We are told in Luke’s Gospel that his name was not his parents’ choice. An angel told his father Zechariah to name him John, and John means “God is gracious”. In today’s Gospel there’s a lot of naming and one example of renaming. John the Baptist twice names Jesus as “the Lamb of God”. Two un-named disciples name Jesus as “Rabbi”. Andrew names Jesus as “the Messiah” and then Jesus gives Simon a new name – Cephas or, in Greek, Petros which might colloquially be translated as “Rocky” though Sylvester Stallone would not be my first choice for the role of St Peter in a Biblical epic.
“Rocky” sounds like a nickname, but I don’t think it was. Jesus did use nicknames. He called James and John “the Sons of Thunder” – perhaps they were unusually loud, or maybe they both had a short fuse. In their cases the nickname almost certainly arose out of their personalities. Yet their discipleship was transformative. James became a steadfast witness to the Resurrection and the first of the twelve apostles to be martyred. John is now honoured as the writer of the fourth Gospel, a theologically subtle and carefully structured work.
In the case of Simon son of Jonah, the new name that Jesus gave him was not about his current personality but rather about what he would become by the Grace of God through following Jesus. Archbishop William Temple put it well in his Readings in St John’s Gospel. He imagined Jesus thinking about Peter like this:
“You are the man we know well; and what we know is that you are eager, impulsive, generous, loyal and essentially unreliable. But that is going to be altered. One day you shall be called by a name that no-one would give you now – Rock-man.”
Jesus was starting something by renaming Simon in this way. There’s no evidence of anyone being called Petros before the time of Christ, and the name only became widespread in the third century AD through the spread of Christianity in the Roman world, a movement in which St Peter played an important part.
So our Gospel suggests that there are two kinds of naming. There’s naming that is about recognizing who a person is, about their character and their role. The disciples recognise Jesus as a teacher, Andrew recognises him as the Messiah and John the Baptist recognises him as the Lamb of God. He, too, was starting something. You won’t find that phrase anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, though there are plenty of references to lambs as sacrificial offerings.
Recognition is, of course, the great theme of Epiphany. Our sequence of Epiphany Gospels began with the Magi recognising that the infant Jesus was very special. Next week we’ll read about Peter, James and John responding to Jesus’ call to follow him because they have recognised his authority. On Candlemas we’ll recall those wonderful words of recognition spoken by the elderly Simeon when the infant Jesus was presented in the Temple:
“My eyes have seen your salvation”
In today’s Gospel, Andrew recognises Jesus as the Messiah. He then brings his brother Simon to Jesus, and it is Jesus who recognises in Simon the possibility of transformation and renames him.
So what did the name Simon mean? There are two possibilities. In Greek it meant “flat-nosed” and I suppose it’s possible, bearing in mind that Simon’s brother Andrew had a Greek forename, that Jonas knew some Greek and spotted that the new-born baby was unusually snub-nosed. But there’s more mileage in the Hebrew meaning, for Simon was the most popular name for male Jewish babies in Roman times and Simon means “listening” or “hearing”.
There’s an important clue there about why Jesus saw huge potential in Simon, despite the flaws in his character. Simon lived up to his given name. He was a listener and by listening to Jesus he was transformed into an eloquent and courageous apostle. It was not a smooth or an easy process. At times his faith faltered. In a crisis, he denied knowing Jesus. Yet the transformation happened and the world was changed.
Week by week we are listeners. We listen to the Gospel and by listening we open ourselves to being transformed by it. We are all in need of transformation, but for each of us the transformation will be individual and personal. The transformation is possible because God is gracious and because, as John the Baptist recognised, Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.