麻豆社

Good morning. Yesterday Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, attended a ceremony of two minutes silence and prayers to mark a week since the terrible attack on Muslim worshippers-reaching out to them in solidarity. Earlier this week she said she was never going to mention the name of the terrorist. She did this for good practical reasons. She did not want to give him more publicity for his racist views. But what she said was also highly symbolic, and the bible is full of symbolic acts- going into the street dressed in sackcloth and ashes for example, to express sorrow and anger at the injustice of society. And we had a good example a few years ago when Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, said he would not wear his clerical collar so long as Mugabe remained in power in Zimbabwe.

In the Bible too there is a particular importance attached to names. Names of course are important to all of us. When someone uses our name we feel we are known and recognised. When we say hello to someone using their name they know they are recognised. That is why it is embarrassing for some of us when we are getting older and you meet someone you know very well, but their name doesn鈥檛 immediately come to mind. You don鈥檛 want to hurt them by indicating you have forgotten their name, as though they did not matter to you, as though you had blotted them out of your life.

In the Bible names had even more significance, they expressed the very being of the person, and were often meant to indicate their character or role, so Jesus in the original Aramaic means 鈥淕od saves鈥�, and Simon was renamed Peter, or the rock. And it is a very terrible threat if God, says he will blot out a person鈥檚 name, that is, their very being.

William Blake once wrote that 鈥淓ternity is in love with the productions of time鈥�. If that is true, it means we are recognised as the unique person we are. As a Bishop I still occasionally take confirmation services. A moment I really like is just before the actual act of confirmation when I say to the candidate 鈥淛ohn, or Mary or whatever their name is, God has called you by name and made you his own.鈥� I think there are millions of people in other religions who also believe they are known at a very deep level. But even if that is not what we believe our names still matter. And that for me is what makes the New Zealand Prime Minister鈥檚 decision all the more powerful.

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