The Name of God

On recent Sundays, as I’ve looked out over the congregation, I’ve noticed a sea of small, blue rectangles. On those rectangles, etched in white letters, is the most indispensable piece of information I could have about you: your name. When we pin our name tags on each Sunday morning, we are reminding ourselves and each other who we are. We are willfully erasing the boundaries of anonymity and allowing ourselves to know and be known.

Burning Bush Theotokos and Moses
Icon 16th Century

Consider the depth, then, of Moses’s question to God in this week’s Old Testament reading, Exodus 3:1-15. God speaks to Moses from the midst of a bush-on-fire, declares his intention to deliver his people from slavery in Egypt, and appoints Moses as his representative in this plan of redemption. And at the end of God’s magnificent speech, Moses poses an incredibly simple question:

“If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ What shall I say to them?”

Moses stands in the presence of Almighty God, the Creator of the universe, and the question he asks is, “What is your name?” And God, ever eager to meet us in our simplicity and need, answers him:

“God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’ And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’ God also said to Moses, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.”

If you are confused and silenced by this name, “I am who I am,” you are not alone. St. Augustine wrote, “But what mind can grasp, ‘I am who I am?’” God is being itself, the essence of which is beyond human comprehension. So, what can we learn about God from his name?

God is unchangeable and unchanging. Here’s St. Augustine again: “What does it mean, ‘I am called He is?’ ‘That I abide forever, that I cannot change.’ Things which change are not, because they do not last. What is, abides. But whatever changes was something and will be something; yet you cannot say it is, because it is changeable. So the unchangeableness of God was prepared to suggest itself by this phrase ‘I am who I am.’” God is not subject to whims or flights of fancy. His very nature is to abide, unchanging, regardless of circumstances.

God is not a vague abstraction. Sigmund Freud wrote, “Philosophers…give the name of ‘God’ to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves.” Speaking from the burning bush, God dismantles Freud’s accusation. He does not speak through an intermediary or a dream or a messenger. It is God’s voice which flows from the burning bush, as if to say, “I am not a projection of your religious fervor, I am not a figment of your imagination. I AM—not created, not imagined, but the Creator and Imaginer of all things.”

God desires relationship with his people. After he has proclaimed his name, God tells Moses, “This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.” You and I, members of the generations Moses’s finite mind could not have imagined, also know God’s name. Just as God spoke his name to Moses from the burning bush, so he has spoken his name to us, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the name we utter in our worship services, in our private prayers, and the name the Spirit utters for us when our anguish is too deep for words (Rom. 8:15).

God has given us his name. And in giving us his name, he has erased the boundaries of anonymity that would keep his people ever at an arms-length. In giving us his name, God gives us a glimpse into his deity, his majesty, and his unchanging nature: I AM.

In Christ,

Bree Snow
Minister of Formation and Catechesis