Someone once mentioned that if you can name it, you can know it. I assume they meant this from a scientific standpoint, or by philosophic measures, but I realize that this also has everything to do with people. Parents frequently name their children long before they're born, whether because they are excited to know their future child or because they already feel that they do, to some extent. When we talk to someone, we often call them by name, giving them intentional focus so that they know we're speaking to them. Names are devices we use to gossip and plead, trick and seduce, admonish and dote, but at the end of the day, we feel we know a measure of a person just by looking forward and saying, "Lilly's my sister. Syble's my friend. Jessie's my roommate. Ethan's my boyfriend. Dana's my professor." Names suggest basic understanding.
Whether or not we actually have that, however, is debatable. Names do not represent anything about who we really are. In a sense, they are just caricatures of identity, placeholders for true, deep comprehension. Have you ever said that someone looks like a Claire? Acts like a Karen? Impressions and assumptions catalogue information within our brain, and names are no exception. They become tools for condensing complex individuals down into more portable portions. We fool ourselves into believing we can grasp a person's self because we know them by name, and yet how much do we really get them? Names start to work against us when they start not just to label, but even to encompass or distract from an identity which has no stability or bounds.
Truly, we don't really need names. They're more personal than "Hey, you!", but we could still function without them. I don't think my boyfriend has ever called me by name. He will run to hug me, catch my attention to speak things he wants to share with me alone, and treat me like a vast individual -- all without breathing the name "Maddie". He just does not want to trick himself into summarizing me into one word. In fact, he doesn't risk considering anyone by the context of their name if he can help it. When I am with him, I am simply me. I am. And he gives that same regard to others by rarely telling people-based stories, never naming unless it functions as a clarifying detail for some necessary tidbit of information, letting it be little more than a signifier for some deeper signification.
In a similar way, this is how we come before God. We know Him as Father, Friend, Creator, but how rarely (if we take into consideration Jehovah, Elohim, Yahweh, etc.) we name Him! Even the Holy Spirit has no real name as we understand it. Imagine calling God a more familiar human name, like Oliver, Louise, Alex, Ali, Harley, or anything else. We'd still love Him and need Him the same, but that just makes it all feel much . . . different. When God calls Himself I Am, it's made clear for us that no name can encapsulate Him. We cannot begin to pretend to understand. So He says to us in affirmation of His identity: "Listen to Me, O Jacob, and Israel, My called; I am He, I am the First, I am also the Last [. . .] Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: I am the Lord your God" (Isaiah 48:12 & 17a, NKJV). What He gives us to call Him by are essentially names, but really, more accurately, are signifiers. They are roles: verbs and adjectives functioning as proper nouns. God simply Is, and there exists none like Him.
Which makes Jesus not just an anomaly amidst the Trinity, but truly an image of how desperate God is for an intimate relationship with us. The Son came willingly down to Earth to live among sinful humanity bearing a name -- and, in fact, changing the entire game of salvation so that anyone can come into God's family for a new identity. He makes it possible for us to know God in a deeper way. Through Jesus's time living as mortal man, he builds significant bonds which make him real to so many, all without sacrificing the incomprehensible identity of God. "Most assuredly, I say to you," he said, "before Abraham was, I Am" (John 8:58, NKJV).. Yet still people think he's nothing holier than a good teacher or a prophet -- could the very name which made him accessible to us be a stumbling point where the obstinate diminish the Son's identity?
I'm not sure what I feel about names yet. They obviously have grave importance that God would change Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Jacob to Israel, and that anyone would speak to us or recognize us by our own. There's a reason why I correct people when they assume that Maddie is short for Madeline or pronounce Knudtson as "Nut-son". A name can be a tender thing or inspire great smallness in someone. How we use them, when we use -- if we use them -- shapes the perception and reception of both ourselves and others. Perhaps I will never feel like either a "Maddie" or a "Madelynn", and perhaps people will always believe certain things about me depending upon which I use, but there's only one thing that matters overall: That my God Is Redeemer and I am His.
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