The Birth of John the Baptist

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Bob Geldof, Gary Barrlow, Elvis Presley, Her Majesty the Queen, Pope Bendict XVI, Wayne Ronney. As I read out this list of names I am sure that most of you could recognize them and put as it were a mental image of what they looked like. Names mean a lot to us for they define who we are and what we are. This is especially true in the times of Jesus. There would have been an expectation that Elizabeth and Zechariah would have chosen a family name and yet they chose John a name meaning “God’s precious gift.” A significant name when you remember that Elizabeth was barren. John this precious gift was to for tell the coming of the Messiah and this story of John we focus on in Advent.

So what does this story tell us about ourselves and our own journey? The first question that our parents are asked at our baptism is “What name do you give your child?” It is through this name that God knows us. We become his and part of his community.  We are named and taken into God’s loving community for just afterwards we are claimed by Christ by the making a sign of the cross on our forehead.

We are, all of us, absolutely known by God by name and at the end of our earthly lives he again calls us by name to be with him in heaven. How do we know we are known by God? We only have to listen to Jeremiah “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” He knows us and loves us into being. We are his. We need only to accept and even if we don’t him, he waits for us patiently like the Father in the story of the Prodigal son.

We as people of God need to take responsibility with people’s names. For we can both build people up by using their names and also destroy by how we use it in the sight of other people. We have seen from God that to know a person’s name is very important. Let us use other’s names for affirmation rather than destruction and realise that each of us are born and known by God and therefore important.  

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