Saturday, May 17, 2014
IV Easter April 29, 2012
IV Easter
April 29, 2012
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
There is no other Name under
heaven by which we must be saved.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
“Name”
and “saved”. The thread running through today's propers is the idea of the "name",
which Peter links to “salvation”. This can cause unnecessary trouble. These two
words, need to be unpacked.
·
The Collect describes the good Shepherd as the one
who "calls us each by name,"
and prays that we may "follow where He leads".
·
The religious authorities, having arrested Peter, ask
him by what "name" he has done what he has done (openly proclaiming
the Resurrection, and healing a cripple).
·
Everybody's favorite Psalm, arguably the world's
best-known poem, sings about leading us in the right path for the sake of His Name.
·
The Epistle tells us this "… this is His
commandment, that we should believe in the Name
of His Son Jesus Christ and love one another…"
·
And finally, in the Gospel, our Lord speaks of
knowing His sheep and the sheep knowing Him, echoing what He said earlier, in a
part of this passage that we did not read, where He describes the Good Shepherd
as the One Who : "… calls His own sheep by name and leads them…"
Which
brings us right back to the Collect. If we are the Good Shepherd’s sheep, He knows
our names — our personal names. That means he knows everything about us. That
is the significance of the word, "name". It is shorthand for a person's
identity, especially public identity — how the person is known in public, the
person's reputation.
The
same is true of the Name of Jesus. It is shorthand for everything that is known
about Him — and maybe everything that is not known, as well.
·
All the stories that were circulating about His healings and exorcisms,
·
His teaching about love and forgiveness, His condemnation of mercilessness
and moral hypocrisy and the love of money,
·
His solicitude for the poor and
the despised, and above all,
·
His defeat of death by His own self-sacrifice on Calvary: all of these
mighty acts are contained in His Name, which, Peter says, "saves" us.
But
there is more: because His Name refers to His whole Identity, the Holy Name of
Jesus also refers to Emmanuel, God-with-us. In other words, it refers
to him to that which we can never know, but only adore: the perfect union of
infinite divinity with finite humanity, in one single Person, named Jesus — Yeshayahu — which means, literally, "God
saves."
In
our course reading of the Acts of the Apostles, we didn't hear the first part
of the story, in which Peter had healed a disabled man. That is, Peter had
restored him to health, made him whole. When he says to the court of temple officials
that
"there is no other Name under heaven by which we must be saved"
he is talking about healing. The root meaning
of "salvation" is "healing". We are used to the convention
that "salvation in the Name of Jesus” means that the Name of Jesus is our
ticket to heaven after we die. But, as Peter's explanation of the healing
miracle suggests, it really means that health and wholeness is found in the
Name of Jesus. We hope and trust that this new wholeness includes our personal
survival of biological death, but the Name is neither a magic formula, which,
if uttered, will cure the sick, nor a password to get us into heaven. The Name
of Jesus is His reputation, His story, His "narrative", as it is currently
fashionable to say. The word, Jesus, means “God saves”. That Is Jesus’ identity: God's
saving act, and that means healing. The restoration of wholeness. We are so
used to thinking of "being saved" as being rescued from something
unpleasant (such as being fried eternally in the flames of hell) that this root
meaning of salvation as perfect health can be obscure.
The
religious authorities ask Peter to explain how he was able to restore the disabled
man to wholeness, by what authority, by what name. His answer is: "in the
Name of Jesus". When he says that the only name given under heaven by
which we must be saved is the Name
of Jesus, it is in the context of this question about healing. As the disabled man was "saved" by the Holy
Name, so are we. We too are healed, made a whole. Now, the first-person plural
— we — is a little bit ambiguous here.
It can mean every one of us severally, as individuals, but it can also mean all
of us together, which is what I believe it actually does mean. The healing of
that man in Jerusalem was a sign of collective healing. "The Name by which
we must be saved" is the Name
that saves us all, together. Salvation is corporate, not individual. We are
saved as individuals by being cured of our individuality. Salvation — wholeness — is communal. Salvation is
moving out of individual life into inter-personal life; salvation is
Participation in the Community of salvation, which is to say Communion with the
Inter-personal Deity.
By
itself, the fact of the fortunate man's restoration to individual wholeness in
his own body, is not of much importance, except to himself — probably not
important enough to attract the attention of the religious authorities. It
would have been a curiosity, but not an occasion for a summit conference. Perhaps
the fact that they did take an
interest signifies that healing (salvation) has ramifications for the whole
society. They noticed healing because it was publicly linked to the Name of
Jesus. The Name of Jesus displays the power of God making all creation whole —healing
all that ails the community of God's creatures.
God certainly can repair the disfiguration of the disabled individual.
But that restoration to wholeness — that salvation — is really significant as a
microcosm of the salvation of the whole disfigured creation, our restoration to
the common life intended by God in the first place: communal salvation in the
Name of the only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ. The Church is the beginning of that
common life, and it is the Church that proclaims the Name and live in the Name.
In
the Epistle, the beloved disciple John tells us that God's commandment is "…
that we should believe in the Name of
His Son Jesus Christ and love one another…" To believe in the Name of
Jesus is to trust the Church's story about Jesus, as summarized by Peter. To do
anything in His Name, means to act on
the basis of that story. To live in His
Name is to make that story the center of our own personal consciousness.
This
But it doesn't end there, because life in
His Name is life together.
Salvation in the Name of Jesus is the healing of our separation from one
another, growing out of the illusion
that there is such a thing as "individual life", and the growing into the sense that we are all beloved
members of one Cosmic Organism, which we call His Body. In short, to believe in
— to live in — the Name of Jesus, is to love one another.
The
Good Shepherd knows each of us as individuals, and calls us by our individual
name. He calls us by our names. By myself, I have no name. I get my name from
others. My name is how others know me. My name is a sign of relationship — of
personhood, as opposed to individuality. The Good Shepherd not only calls us by
our name, but also, for the sake of His
Name, He leads us in the right paths.
He leads us as a flock, not as individuals. In fact, He leads us, by
our personal names, away from our
natural condition of individual separation from one another and into the
"right Path" of communal being, beside the still waters of trust in His
Name , making us to lie down in the green pastures of love for one another —
love for all the other name-bearers, whose names are know him to Him, Who also
prepares for us a table — the Eucharistic table — in defiance of death, Who
anoints us with healing oil and our cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy
shall follow us all the days of our life, as He leads us — together —
to dwell — also together — in the House of the Lord, forever.
Alleluia! Christ is risen from the
dead, tramplingdown death by death,and giving life to all in the tombs.
Alleluia!
