“Fear not, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name and you are mine.” In the Common Worship Daily Office, this verse from Isaiah 43 is recited three times on Thursdays. It was written for the community of Hebrew exiles in Babylon at a time of much fear, when some were losing faith and wondering if there could really be a single creator God. This was a silly ideal to their sensible neighbours in Babylon, to whom it was obvious there were many gods. There seems of have been growing apostasy from Judaism and assimilation into the cosmopolitan mass.
Therefore, God reminds them here that he has not forgotten them in their long exile, but remembers each individual by their name.
Names are powerful statements in Scripture. After winning an all-night wrestling bout with a mysterious angel, Jacob is renamed Israel, meaning, “I have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” But the successful contest has come at a cost – Israel’s hip has been dislocated in the struggle, and he will presumably spend the rest of his life walking with a limp.
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The walls of the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem are lined with black binders, each containing hundreds of pages bearing witness to those who died in the Holocaust. Stacked neatly on shelves, they stretch along the walls of the circular chamber like the rings of an alien planet. Decades of research means that by now 4.8 million names of roughly 6 million Shoah victims are now known and memorialised in those binders. With the passage of time, the identities of most of the remaining million or so will soon be lost to history – but not to God, who remembers His children by name forever.
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There is an average of one case a week of ‘Jerusalem Fever’ serious enough to leave the afflicted in mental hospital in the city, at least for a night or two. The malady affects Christian, Jewish, and Muslim pilgrims alike, who sometimes find themselves overwhelmed by the Old City’s intense atmosphere and rendered temporarily mad.
A man with a North American accent and a milder, but still obvious, case approached me at dawn one morning in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I agreed to pray the Rosary with him and afterwards he asked me for my blessing, despite insisting that as an Anglican I couldn’t be a real priest. On asking him for his name so I could pray for him, he offered me a choice of his baptismal or confirmation names; but before telling me either of them, his mood suddenly changed, and he said that he didn’t get on with those names, and asked if I instead could think of him as Mario, because of his devotion to Mary.
Whomever Mario is, he is known to and loved by God.
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In a crisis-laden world of teeming billions, we can feel powerless in the face of the challenges facing humanity. The story of wrestling Jacob, however, teaches us that God knows each individual by name. The infinite worth of the one is the key to the understanding the value of humankind. So fear not, for God calls you by His name and you are His, and so are those whom you love and serve in your daily life in ways that often seem so small.
This article originally appeared in the December 2022 edition of the St John’s, Devizes, parish magazine.
