Some of you may know that my lovely wife, Mandy, is a twin. These past few days have been rough; Mandy’s twin brother, Mickey, passed away last Sunday. We both got to spend some time in Phoenix this week while my sister ably cared for the kids. It was good to be present as a family during this most difficult time. Mandy wanted to say something at the funeral, so I wrote a poem with her. She read it and did great. It was concise, honest, and uplifting. Here it is:
We refer to most everyone in the New Testament with a single name. It was common, however, to have descriptors attached to names for clarity. This would not have been like a surname is to us today, but rather distinctions that separated one similarly named individual from another. A common descriptor is the hometown descriptor. We call Paul, Paul of Tarsus, or Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth. Another option would be a descriptor that defined societal or cultural associations. We have Simon the leper and Simon the Zealot. A very Jewish descriptor, though, was to associate the person with their father by the use of “son of.” In Hebrew this is done by attaching “Bar” to the beginning of the name. So we have Bartimaeus (son of Timaeus), Bartholomew (son of Tolmai), Barsabas (son of the Sabbath), and Barnabas (son of encouragement) listed in the Bible. But there is a more notorious son.
Due to a sweet turn of events, I was able to attend my first game at Invesco Field at Mile High in Denver, Colorado on Sunday. I have been a Broncos fan since about the time I arrived on earth and seeing a home game was quite a treat. The in-conference rivalry between the Broncos and the San Diego Chargers was no secret to the 76,000 attendees. What was a secret was the drastic collapse of the temperature after halftime and the arrival of an incessant, freezing rain. The most surprising thing was the absolute beat-down that the Broncos suffered through. The game ended with a score of 41-3 in favor of the Super Chargers. No one likes to see their team lose — literally. In the second half, when the freezing rain drops fell as did the hopes of a home team victory, people started filing out of the stadium. The consensus was that if the weather had not taken such a drastic turn more people would have stayed. Or if the Broncos had been winning, the fans would have endured the moisture. It was both a literal and figurative picture of fair-weather fans.
Some of the things we read about are meant to be symbolic. Some things have intentional literary meaning: crafted by the author to display a not-so-obvious reality. Other stories are more poetic: written to be linguistically beautiful. There are still other things we may read that are simply an accurate description of what happened. When we read a novel, most of us probably do not pore over a certain phrase asking, “Why did the author put this phrase here?” Or, “Why did the author use that word?” This is precisely how commentators treat the Bible, though. If we believe that the Bible really holds life-changing concepts that could affect our eternal state, it is a good idea to truly understand what it says. There is much to be learned, however, from taking a closer look at what we read in the Bible.
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