The Namer, a devotional thought

One of the things that's always intrigued me about Jesus is the habit he seems to have had of naming people. Take Mark 3:16-17, for example. It says that after he chose the 12, he gave Simon the name "Peter" (Peter is Greek for "the Rock") and he gave James and John the name "The Sons of Thunder."

I've always sort of read this in a sombre way, that Jesus is putting his finger on something truer-than-true about these men. There's probably something to that, but it occurs to me, also, that giving nicknames is actually a profoundly playful thing to do. In the Robin Hood legend, one of the running gags is how Robin Hood renames all the outlaws who join him (Little John, for instance, was John Little before he met Robin). Or remember how Mike Myers kept adding "-meister" and other such playful suffixes to peoples names in Wayne's World? We just watched Big Hero 6, and in that movie, it's Fred, the not-a-care-in-the-world-party-guy who "gives everyone their nicknames." Oh yeah, and in the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, it's Michelangelo (the party dude) who assumes the responsibility of giving all the bad-guys their super-villain handles.

To be clear: No, Jesus is not like Mike Myers or Michelangelo or Robin Hood; except, perhaps, in this: when his followers come to him they find themselves creatively, even playfully, renamed.

In my mind's eye I could almost see the twinkle in the eye as Jesus looks at Peter and says, "from now on we'll call you The Rock." And I can only speculate what earned James and John the handle "Sons of Thunder!" (but it's pretty rewarding speculation). Two intermingled thoughts emerge from this imaginative musing: 1) in coming to Jesus something deep and true and essential about who we really are gets drawn out of us, and this is reflected in the renaming of people we see him doing in the Gospels; but 2) there is something profoundly good-natured and joyful and even playful in the way Jesus goes about drawing this out of us.

May we all discover both these things: the Holy playfulness of Christ and in that play, our truest selves.