A name with a mission

Wednesday, January 4, 2017 First Reading: 1 Jn 3:7-10 Gospel Reading: Jn 1:35-42

John was standing in Bethabara beyond the Jordan with two of his disciples. As Jesus walked by,John looked at him and said, “There is the Lamb of God.” On hearing this, the two disciples followed Jesus.

He turned and saw them following, and he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They answered, “Rabbi (which means Master), where are you staying?” Jesus said, “Come and see.” So they went and saw where he stayed and spent the rest of that day with him. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.
Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, was one of the two who heard what John had said and followed  Jesus. Early the next morning he found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which means the Christ), and he brought Simon to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon, son of John, but you shall be called Cephas” (which means Rock).

D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the
Assimilated Life
Experience)

The late Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare movement had this practice of giving spiritual names to members of the focolare family. It was in my yearlong stay at the Priests’ School for Asia in Tagaytay run by the Focolare that she visited the Philippines. She did not give me a new name but transformed my nickname “DAN” into a portmanteau. She suggested that DAN should stand for “Dio nell’anima”, D for Dio and AN for Anima. The Italian phrase means God in the soul.

Jesus too had the habit of changing the names of his followers. In today’s Gospel he changed the name of Simon to Cephas (Peter). According to a commentary by St. John Chrysostom, Jesus’ practice of changing names takes us back to the time when God would name a person in accordance with a given mission. He renamed Abram “Abraham”, Sarai “Sarah,” and Jacob “Israel,” (Gn 17,5ff.; 32,29). Others he named from birth such as Isaac, Samson, and Hosea’s children (Is 8,3; Hosea 1:4,6,9).

While Jesus will never have the chance to change our names, we get our names at baptism where we undergo spiritual rebirth. Baptism is a wonderful opportunity to define a child’s direction in life.

Unfortunately, society has squandered the opportunity. Even the names we get hardly define any spiritual mission. Funny but true: a mother insisted at baptism to name her child armalite in memory of her husband who died as a soldier fighting in Mindanao. Thinking that the mother wasn’t serious, the priest quipped: “If so, then she should be baby armalite”.

Take it from Chiara Lubich: there is more to names than meets the eye. Let’s choose those names that define our God-given mission. –(Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., D.M.
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