The Only Name By Which We Are Saved

I have an old joke printout entitled History Of The World According To Student Bloopers which brings together a pastiche of actual statements taken from various student exams and papers.

Picking favorite lines from it is difficult, there being so many good ones to choose from. That said, I think my favorite might be the claim that "The Iliad was written not by Homer, but by another man of the same name."

As they say, the best way to kill a good joke is to explain it carefully, however here I intend to do just that. The thing that makes this statement funny is the fact that literally nothing is known about the author Homer. It's not even certain that Homer was his actual name.

In short, reassigning the name of Homer to a purported "other man" isn't going to change anything we know about that man.

I am going somewhere with this, but there's one more pit stop en route.

As I reflected on our friend Homer, I was reminded of Shakespeare's assertion that a rose "by any other name would smell as sweet."

You can rename the rose, but its essence will remain with it regardless.

[BTW, elsewhere in that bloopers history we learn that Shakespeare didn't make much money and "is only known because of his plays."]

These thoughts have been tumbling in my mind recently because I've been reflecting on my Christian faith — and the alternatives.

It must be said that in some Christian circles it's not very popular to talk about Christian faith as anything more than the only truth — something beyond discussion or considerations to the contrary.

I can understand the strong feelings on this topic, however I find it helpful to look at it from another angle.

When I hope and pray for a non-Christian to come to Jesus, I want them to abandon their current beliefs and plunge into a new life with Jesus Christ at the center of it. That's a pretty important decision! It would be a meaningless one if not taken after some kind of careful thought.

So I am, in essence, asking outsiders of the Christian faith to do comparison shopping — with the hope that they will change products.

How can I in good conscience ask others to do what I refuse to do myself?

That said, I too find it unpleasant to engage in this same exercise. It's a bit like shopping around romantically after you're married. After all, I have made a commitment to Jesus. How can I think about a life without him?

And so it goes. Back and forth.

When it's all said and done, however, I feel that my faith in Christ is the stronger for the process, because it's not blind. It's a decision.

Any decision based on a historical personage will involve a certain amount of faith, because we are forced to meet that person through intermediated stories about them. And by the time you're my age, you've hopefully realized that humans and their histories are more than a little fallible.

So what does this have to do with Homer and roses? Two scriptures suffice.

Acts 4:12
Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.

Yes, we could rename Jesus, but one conclusion I've come to is this: if there were another salvation... another way to God... I'm pretty sure this alternative route would be Jesus by another name.

I never have doubts about the reality of God. Jesus, however, lived 2,000 years ago, and what I know about him has been mediated through four histories written by fallible men.

Even so. I've read other histories. I've done the shopping.

I know about Mohammed, and I've read his Quran. No, thanks. Jesus calls us to take up our crosses and serve. Mohammed calls the faithful to take up their arms and conquer. There is a difference, the faithful do take note of it, and the results are plain for all to see.

[For instance? Just read the news. Some of the first Westerners to contract the Ebola virus were Christian missionaries serving in African hospitals. Meanwhile, in other African news, yesterday an Islamic terrorist group evacuated a bus in Kenya and murdered the 28 people on it who could not (or would not) recite a Quranic verse.]

Or how about this one from last week's Economist. "The Mormon church admitted that its 19th-century founder, Joseph Smith, married up to 40 wives. Polygamy it said, was 'difficult for all involved'. For Smith’s first wife, Emma, it was an 'excruciating ordeal'."

Yes, we can shop. We can look around. Not all religions have such dubious characters for founders. Buddhism and Confucius strike closer to the mark.

But not close enough. All that is good in Buddhism and Confucianism is present in Christianity, but the reverse is not the case.

Both Buddhism and Confucianism deprive me of a personal God to love and worship, and (lacking God) they also have literally no foundations for a moral framework in which the words good and evil have real meaning.

Minor flaws?

Jesus, however, holds up just fine. Better than fine. He is perfect. He is the perfect representation of this very God I seek to know.

And he leads me in paths that are good.

Oh. And about the rose?

2 Corinthians 2:15
For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.

All my alternatives to Jesus would involve another man of the same name.

And by any other name this Jesus would, for me, still smell as sweet.

You-biquitous

As a child, I enjoyed a storybook fable about three men with stupendous eyesight. They could see for miles — and even through solid objects.

These men arrogantly challenged all comers to try to slip anything by them, and for quite some time no one succeeded in doing so.

Each day, however, a young boy arrived among the mix of people trying to fool these three men. And each day the three sharp-sighted men spotted and counted every bricks the child had laid in his wheelbarrow.

The story ends with the surprising revelation that the child had, after all, outwitted the three men. He had slipped a large number of wheelbarrows under their noses, all of them quite unnoticed.

I was reminded of that story when I read a thoughtful review of Psalm 119 which remarks on its many references to God's law.

That Psalm 119 expresses affection for God's law was not news to me.

How often it does this, however, was indeed news. The reviewer notes that (out of 176 verses) there are only four verses that do not contain a specific reference to God's law by means of one of eight Hebrew words.

These eight words are all present at least once in the first 11 verses.

Psalm 119:1-11
1 Blessed are those whose ways are blameless,
    who walk according to the law of the Lord.
2 Blessed are those who keep his statutes
    and seek him with all their heart—
3 they do no wrong
    but follow his ways.
4 You have laid down precepts
    that are to be fully obeyed.
5 Oh, that my ways were steadfast
    in obeying your decrees!
6 Then I would not be put to shame
    when I consider all your commands.
7 I will praise you with an upright heart
    as I learn your righteous laws.
8 I will obey your decrees;
    do not utterly forsake me.
9 How can a young person stay on the path of purity?
    By living according to your word.
10 I seek you with all my heart;
    do not let me stray from your commands.
11 I have hidden your word in my heart
    that I might not sin against you.

(Yes, verse 3 is one of those four verses that lack a "law" reference, though I wonder if the Psalmist intended the word "ways" to serve this purpose.)

After reading this review I went through Psalm 119 and underlined, in each verse, the reference to God's law. Holy cow! They were everywhere!

You might think that I am now going to compare the many references to God's law as the wheelbarrow that had been slipped under my eye.

Not so. We cannot help but notice the bricks in this Psalm, and more than a few of us are prone to tiring of the repetition.

No, I might not have realized how very many bricks there were, but only the blind could have missed this Psalmist's affection for God's law. References to God's law are not the wheelbarrow, but rather the bricks.

The wheelbarrow? Here's where things got interesting for me. Upon reflection, we find that this Psalmist quite trumps the little boy's feat.

How? Well, let's do a little bit of math, starting with the boy.

The boy slipped 100 wheelbarrows by while the three men were counting the thousands of bricks inside them.

Psalm 119 does this trick one better. Yes, it does have 172 references to God's law, however Psalm 119 also slips in an even greater number of wheelbarrows — Some 240 of them!

It's as if the psalmist slipped in three wheelbarrows for every two bricks.

Did you miss those wheelbarrows too?

Enough suspense! What are we talking about? What wheelbarrows?

Here's what our reviewer notes:

But there is something else that occurs even more often.
...more than 225 times in the 176 verses.
The suffix cha – the 2nd person masculine singular pronoun.
In English, “you.”
And in every instance, [it] refers to Yahweh.
In English, “you” refers to Yahweh 240 times in this Psalm.

So the psalmist loves God's law to an extreme, but (if word-counts were the measure) he loves God even more.

For this psalmist, God's law is a means to an end. And that end is Yahweh.

This is a wonderful reminder. Let us not tire of Psalm 119's repetition. Rather, let us emulate the psalmist's tireless affection for God himself.

And this brings us to one final, pleasant, thought. In Jesus we find both the bricks and the wheelbarrows. He is both the final, perfected, fulfillment of God's law and, as St. Paul notes, "the image of the invisible God."

Jesus represents both God's law and God himself.

If we were to replace all references to God or God's law in Psalm 119 with Jesus? It wouldn't read as well, but he'd show up more than 400 times.

Not bad for one Psalm.