Worthy of the Name She Gave Me

He is named for a great-uncle who was a catechist in a village nobody in this family has seen for sixty years, and his mother told him the story roughly nine hundred times.

The man walked. That was the whole of it and it was the whole of the story: he walked from village to village, for decades, teaching children, and he was poor and he was cheerful and when he died people came from three days away. And his mother would finish it the same way every time, with her hand flat on the table: and that is who you are named for.

The night before his wedding, in his mother's front room, with her crying and pretending not to, he told God that he would raise his children in what she had given him. He did not make a speech about it. He said it once, quietly, and she heard him say it and put her hand on his head.

His oldest is nineteen.

None of them go. He does not go, except at Christmas and when somebody dies. There was no decision anywhere. There were night shifts for eleven years, and there was a period when his wife was ill, and there was the simple fact that it is very hard to start something in a house where nobody is expecting it, and by the time he looked up his children were teenagers with opinions.

His mother died four years ago. And he was at that funeral, standing at the front, being told by person after person that he has her face and her uncle's name.

Here is what he has decided, and he has never said it to a living soul: he will come back when he can look at that name without flinching. When he has become, in some measurable degree, the sort of man that story is about. He is not asking to be a catechist. He is asking to be worth the name at the level of an ordinary man.

And then he will come.

You may be waiting to be worth something before you come. A name, a family, a reputation somebody had before you. And you may have made your own worthiness the entry requirement, so quietly that you have never once examined whether God requires it.

Two men, and only one of them left justified

There is a parable Jesus tells that is about exactly this, and everybody knows it and almost nobody applies it to themselves, because we all identify with the wrong man on purpose.

Two men go up to the temple. One of them is a genuinely good man. I want to say that clearly, because we have flattened him into a villain and he was not one: he fasted, he gave, he was not a cheat, he was not a thief, and every single thing he said about himself was true.

The other one is a tax collector, which in that world meant a collaborator who took money from his own people, and he stands a long way off and will not lift his eyes.

And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.Luke 18:13-14

You are justified by a mercy you asked for and not by a worthiness you achieved. Luke 18:14 sends a man home settled that day before he had improved by any measurable degree, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you on that road for four years.

What he did not bring

Look at what the second man does not do.

He does not promise. He does not offer a plan. He does not point at anything about himself, not one thing, not even his sorrow, and this is worth noticing because sorrow is the last thing a man in that position tries to bring: at least I feel it properly. He does not even bring that. He brings a request for mercy and nothing else.

And Jesus says he went home justified. Which is a legal word. It means his standing was settled, that day, before he had improved by any measurable degree at all.

You are justified by a mercy you asked for and not by a worthiness you achieved. Luke 18:14 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a temple courtyard and stands it in a mother's front room the night before a wedding.

Now let me be careful about the good man, because I am not going to make this into a lesson about how it is better to be bad. That is not what the parable says and it would insult your intelligence.

The good man's error was not that he was good. It was that he arrived holding his own record and expecting it to count for something at the door. And here is the thing that should land on you like a hand on the shoulder: you have his exact problem, from the opposite side. He arrived with a good record and expected it to admit him. You have a record you consider poor and have concluded it excludes you.

Both of you are doing the same arithmetic. Both of you believe the record is what gets a man in.

You have been doing the same sum as the man who was not justified, only with a minus sign in front of it. Scripture puts the two men side by side to end that arithmetic entirely, and His Spirit is the one who has been drawing you toward that temple for four years while you calculated.

The condition comes off and nothing goes on

And now, precisely, so nothing gets put back.

I am not going to take worthiness off you and give you a smaller version of it. I am not going to say the real entry requirement is humility, and that if you can be as broken as that man you will qualify. That is the parable turned back into a machine, and it is the commonest way this passage gets preached, and it puts a new bar exactly where the old one stood.

The condition comes off. Nothing goes on.

You are held inside on His terms this evening, and His terms were met in full a long way from this room. That is the whole meaning of the word justified in that sentence, and the Spirit of God has been holding that true for you through all of it.

The name is still a good name. Your great-uncle still walked. And your children are nineteen and seventeen and fourteen and they are not a verdict on you, and whatever happens about them now happens from inside a house you are already standing in.