Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
If you are an aging Baby Boomer like myself, or perhaps a bit older, you probably remember an obnoxious song entitled, “The Name Game,” by Shirley Ellis. For some reason it was a huge hit. The song would take any name and wring it through a little chant that goes like this, “Shirley Shirley, Bo Birley, Banana Fanna Fo Firley, Fee Fie Mo Mirley, Shirley!”
As a boy I recall visiting my younger cousins Debbie and Jim and finding they had learned this song and had been carefully honing their ability to put any name through its paces. Thus I had no sooner entered their home in Danville, California, than I was greeted with a welcoming chorus of “Steven Steven, Bo Beven, Banana Fanna Fo Feven...” I was very irritated. Yes, I knew it was just a game, that my cousins meant me no offense, and that every name they came across received the same treatment. It still felt wrong to me. My name was being taken too lightly. In some way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, I was violated by that stupid song.
The Third Commandment focuses on the violation of God by the misuse of His Name. That unpleasant feeling you get when someone makes fun of your name is a clue to what the thrust and importance of this commandment is. In misusing the Name of God we give offense to the person of God. He finds it no more pleasant than you or I do when His Name is used in a frivolous or disrespectful way.
Historically, therefore, both Christian and Jewish people have been very careful about the way we use names of God. They are never to be taken lightly. If you read on in Matthew 21 after the Palm Sunday text, you find in verses 15 and 16 that the Pharisees were indignant because the children were praising Jesus with the word “Hosanna” and calling Him “the Son of David.” The word and the name were being misused by the children and they wanted Jesus to stop the sacrilege. Praise which properly belonged only to the Name of God was being shouted in the street for a carpenter from the country.
However, most Bible scholars will tell you that this commandment is not first concerned with the kind of thing the Pharisees were worried about, nor what we normally take it to be. This was not a direction to avoid making fun of God’s Name. Nor was it a rule against “swearing” in our sense of profanity or vulgar speech that uses God’s Name. To put it bluntly, it was not about saying “God damn it!” It was a command against falsely swearing in the literal sense of taking an oath. The King James Version language for it, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” points us toward the original understanding of what was forbidden. To “take” the Name of God meant to take it in an oath.
In Matthew 5:34, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus seems to have forbidden taking any oaths at all. But in the Old Testament, oath taking was expected and was viewed very seriously. To swear, particularly in the Name of God, was a high and holy matter. And it was a risky thing. To break an oath sworn in God’s Name meant to invoke all the wrath and judgment of God on oneself.
That is why in the book of Judges when Jephthah makes a vow to the Lord which ultimately demands the death of his daughter, his only child, Jephthah keeps his vow. He is too frightened of the consequences if he does not. Remember that the Jews stood at a mountain pouring forth fire and smoke as this commandment was given. They had seen what God did to the Egyptians. They understood for a long time afterward that swearing in the Name of the Lord was to call down an awesome and terrible power. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that invocation.
Therefore, today’s commandment is first and foremost about any use of the Name of God to lie or do that which is wrong. It is about the breaking of holy vows and promises made in the Name of the Lord. The priests and pastors who have recently been in the news for their acts of child molestation are not just guilty of sexual sin. Because they took ordination vows before God, they have broken the Third Commandment as well. They have abused not just children, but God Himself, in whose Name they took their vows to care for the people in their congregations.
Marriage vows are covered here as well. Adultery has a commandment all to itself, but when people have covenanted in marriage “before God and these witnesses,” their sins against each other are also sins against the Name of God. By naming God in a wedding, then failing to live up to the vows made there, the Third Commandment is broken.
Some great sins of the past are fundamentally violations of this command against misusing God’s Name. Whenever the name of God is used to justify evil, the commandment is being broken. In the middle ages, Christian crusaders warring in the name of Christ looted fellow Christians in Constantinople. In nineteenth century America, slavery was justified by interpretations of the Bible which saw God as commanding it. In the twentieth century, German Nazis hung pictures of Hitler in their churches and stitched the words Gott mit Uns, “God with Us,” on their uniforms. In the short course of this century, terrorists have killed thousands of Americans and others in the Name of God. Misuse of God’s name is linked to some of the ugliest chapters in human history.
For us in America, great corporate sins in the Name of God are less likely at present, though we must be careful how we tie God to the war we have begun. But we have grown accustomed to another way to misuse of God’s Name. We are unlikely to invoke the power of the Lord’s Name for some evil purpose, because we have quit living as if there is any real power in that Name. We haven’t quite reached the point of “God, God, Bo Bod, Banana Fanna Fo Fod,” but we have made the Name of God so insignificant that it has almost lost any power for us.
The Jews developed a great tradition which kept its grasp on the power of the Name of the Lord. In time, the mysterious Name which God entrusted to Moses, “Yahweh,” was no longer spoken aloud. Only its consonants, YHWH, were written down. The Name became a secret treasure of God’s people. As the scribes copied the Scriptures, when they came to God’s Name they would stop, take a ceremonial bath, and then come back to write the Name with a fresh pen. They approached the Name with fear and awe.
You and I have nothing like Jewish respect for the Name of the Lord. In the last few decades our society has come to the end of a long process of removing significance from the Name of God. Profanity using His Name has permeated our lives. Little girls have learned to express the most trivial of emotions by saying “Oh my God!” Young men have grown accustomed to using “Jesus Christ” as a curse. And no one, not even Christians, imagine that anything too awful is going to come of it.
We have, you see, not only trivialized the name of God. We have trivialized every name. In the last six hundred years, we have, in philosophical terms, become nominalists. You can hear it happening in Shakespeare as Juliet pleads with Romeo begging him to give up his name, saying “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Until the fourteenth century, almost everyone believed that names meant something, that they pointed to something real. When you spoke a name, you spoke of an essence. The name of a thing or a person referred not just to some object in the world, but to the idea in the mind of God by which it was created and which makes it what it is. Names had power because they were intimately connected with the foundations of reality.
Then along came William of Ockham and the nominalists and they taught us to believe that Juliet is right. Names are just labels, arbitrarily pasted on things like little yellow Post-It notes. There is no permanent connection. You can peel a name off and change it any time you like. We were surprised when Cassius Clay became Mohammed Ali and Lou Alcindor became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Now it seems like sports figures and entertainers change their names as often as their socks. The final victory of nominalism probably occurred with Prince Rogers Nelson, who performed simply as Prince, then changed his name to The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, then to a symbol which could not be pronounced, and finally back to Prince.
It all makes sense if Juliet is right and names don’t really matter, if the world consists only of things and their labels, with nothing really holding the two together. Then it really doesn’t matter what you call a thing, or how you use a name. It’s only a name.
However, all is not quite lost for our time. We are pretty far gone in nominalism. Except for trademarks, names mean very little to us. But there remains a vague sense that God’s Name has something to it that other names do not. God’s Name is still used for cursing because its power is still being felt. If it were truly just a word like any other word, no one would bother with it. You can only profane that which is holy. By the sheer act of profanity, you prove the holiness of what you speak about.
You can also see the power of God’s Name acknowledged in political practices of diversity. The very fact that people want to exclude mention of God from schools and public places is an admission that His Name has power. No one is campaigning to prevent teachers from talking about Odin or Krishna or Mother Earth. That’s because no one really believes, whether it’s admitted or not, that there is anything real behind those names. But let no public educator dare mention the God and Father of Jesus Christ, because almost everyone realizes, again whether it’s admitted or not, that there is power in that Name.
So there is hope for us to come again to grasp the significance of God’s Name. If there is a God who created the world and gave it to Adam and Eve to name; if there is a God who knows each one of us and writes our names in His book; if there is a God who gave His own holy Name to Moses; if there is God who came to us in human flesh and took upon Himself the human name of Jesus; if there is a God like that, then names do mean something and God’s Name means most of all.
Which all means that we cannot behave like nominalists with the Name of God. It is not just a convenient term which we may use or abuse as we please. To do so is to invite upon ourselves all kinds of trouble we may not even comprehend. There is a scene in National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation,” where Chevy Chase’s character Clark Griswold has smothered the house in a million Christmas lights. They are all connected by a huge web of extension cords hooked by multiple plugs into one outlet. What no one realizes is that a single switch on the back porch controls it all. When Griswold’s mother-in-law goes out and flips the switch the lights all come on to the strains of “Joy to the World.” A moment later when she steps back in and hits the switch again it all goes dark. She is oblivious to what is happening when she uses the switch.
Without a proper appreciation of God’s name, we are oblivious to what is happening when we use it. Whether we pray with His Name, joke with His Name or curse with His Name we are hooked into a source of tremendous power. We are connecting to the reality upon which all reality is based.
That is why the Third Commandment, like the Second, comes with a warning. “The Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses His name.” It sounds like a dire warning of punishment falling from the heavens. The associate pastor at the church I grew up in certainly thought it was. One evening in a sermon he told of getting on an elevator with some other people and having the door stick and the elevator move very slowly. One of the others, a man in a hurry, roundly cursed the thing: “God damn this elevator!”
Our pastor told how he asked the man if knew what he was saying. “What if God did what you asked and really did damn this elevator? Wouldn’t it stop completely, and maybe fall and kill us all? Is that what you want?” But that isn’t the way things work is it? The elevator didn’t fall. The man didn’t have a heart attack. He cursed and then went about his business as normal. God warned us not to misuse His Name, but He doesn’t seem to be actively punishing those who do. So what does the warning mean?
There’s a hint in the Gospel lesson for today. Even in the first century, there was a bit of nominalism. That shout the children gave to Jesus had a meaning, but no one then really understood it. It was a Hebrew phrase which meant “O save us!” but by then it was simply a word you shouted in praise. It had a poignant and ironic significance when it was used on Palm Sunday, because “hosanna” was a word calling for Jesus to do just what He had come for, to save them, and to save us.
Jesus rode donkey-back into Jerusalem that Sunday morning in order to die. He deliberately went there to be arrested, tried, and sentenced to die on the Cross. It was God’s plan to save the human race. We’ve broken all the commandments. There is not one of us without sin, without guilt. And because of that we all face God’s punishment.
There’s a Clint Eastwood film on Tuesday evening, “The Unforgiven.” One of Clint’s more memorable lines comes in that movie when a man is shot and another character says, “He had it comin’.” Clint replies, “We all have it comin’.” As the great Episcopal preacher Fleming Rutledge says, Clint was right. Because of our very own sins and guilt we do all have it coming. We deserve whatever punishment we receive.
But Jesus came and died on the Cross on Good Friday. He died to take on Himself what we had coming. All our guilt was heaped on Him, so that we could face God without sin, as if we were guiltless. On Easter God raised Him from the dead to confirm the fact that our sins are forgiven, that our guilt is gone forever, and that by the absolutely free grace of God we have been given a new start, a new life in Him. Just as the crowd on Palm Sunday requested, Jesus saves us.
That gift of grace and that new life, however, has a condition. That condition is not good works or any gift that one might offer to God. It is just that Jesus cannot save you unless you put yourself into His hands. He cannot save you unless you ask. And to ask the Lord to save you, you have to use His Name.
When the Lord threatens to hold no one guiltless who misuses His name, it is in reality a warning against self-destruction. By misusing the Name of the Lord who saves, we cut ourselves off from salvation. We are all guilty. The only hope of being found guiltless is in the grace of Jesus Christ our Lord. But if we misuse and trivialize His Name to the point where it no longer has meaning, then we have squandered our only hope. Unless we honor the Name of Jesus, God cannot hold us guiltless.
That is why it would be a very good thing if we would purge our speech of all those little, trivial misuses of His Name. For our sake let there be an end for Christians to the “My God!”s and the “Jesus Christ!”s which punctuate our daily conversations. Let us save the Name of God to be used as He meant it to be used, to call on Him in praise, and most of all to call on Him for salvation.
As you all know, however, it is hard to eliminate a habit deeply ingrained in us. Even as well-known and respected a Christian as Stanley Hauerwas who visited us for our Church & Culture Conference two years ago, retains, as some of you heard, the habit of trivial profanity using the Name of God. This is a man who has written a book on the Ten Commandments. Jon Stock tells me that lately Stanley has been convicted and has struggled to stop his profanity. But old habits die very hard.
That is why it is good to have something to put in the place of a bad habit. Therefore, I offer to you the “Jesus Prayer.” Eastern Orthodox Christians have long had the habit of praying a very simple prayer centered on the Name of Jesus. It is a prayer which uses His Name in the very best way, a prayer for mercy on guilty sinner. They pray, often over and over, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.”
As Peter Toon explains, the Jesus Prayer captures much of the depth of God’s Name and ties together the names of God in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament. “Lord” is the word which now translates “Yahweh,” acknowledging Jesus as one with the God of the Israelites. “Jesus” is the name assigned to Him by an angel, and it means “God saves.” “Christ” is the Greek word for Messiah, the One sent from God as promised by the prophets. And “Son of God” points to the complete Name of God as Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, by reminding us that Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity.[1]
It is in the richness of that name, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, that we may truly and correctly ask for the mercy we need to save us. This week as we approach Easter by first remembering the Cross, I invite you to pray the Jesus Prayer at least once a day. Honor the Lord’s Name by using it in the best way possible. Let all the profanity and triviality of the world’s use of His Name fade away, as you call on Him in true honor of His Name. And He will hear and answer, meet you wherever you are, and save you.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj