Rock
Today, I've been working in Mark 3, looking at the translation of the disciples' names. According to NRSV, Jesus renamed Simon to Peter, but the Greek is uncompromising. He called him Rock. Until Rock, Cephas; that is, Peter,1 was not a proper name in Jesus' society. Names serve two functions in our society, and this applied in the time of Jesus, too. Sometimes, a name is just a label. When you say Andrea it is merely to signify that you are talking to me, or about me, rather than Fred. Andrea had a meaning, once. It meant manly, derived from the Greek aner, which is a bit ironic in my case. But mostly we have forgotten that. Andrea is just an identifier.
But there are also times when a name is loaded with meaning. In our Australian society, this is particularly clear in nicknames. In the generation before mine, to mention Blue was to reference a particular person, but the name always carried within it the fact that their hair was red, and maybe it also had a local hint of racial disparagement, because most red-haired people were of Irish stock.
There were nicknames on our school bus. The bus was a microcosm of the school, which was one of the district's social constructors, where we all learned our place in local society, and the cost of not fitting into the slot which had been designated for us. High school, whatever else it gave us, was five years of the moulding of square pegs into round holes higher or lower on the social ladder, often with undisguised violence.
Some of us would escape to university or teacher's college, which was for me a profound release from sustained low level abuse. The times were difficult, and the government had established a rural employment scheme for younger folk which resulted in footpaths and fences, and a filtration plant in the local swimming pool, all of which would not otherwise have materialised for years, if ever. We even weeded the local cemetery. I applied for employment by the scheme for the few months between the end of school and the beginning of university. One neighbour's son, well older than me, and already farming, was employed as well. On the first day, he exclaimed with delight, "Aha! Dropped out from Uni already, hey?" delighted to put me back in my place. It was my pleasure to say I hadn't even left yet. There was often little love lost between neighbours.
From the bus I remember two nicknames in particular. My own was an unsubtle sexual slur which caused me much grief, and now sometimes amuses me because, without knowing what they were talking about, the other kids had unerringly identified my point of difference. We always know each other, even when we don't. The other name was Dobber. I guess that somewhere in his past he had owned up to being one of a group of miscreants and never been forgiven, or perhaps he had not been silent about the infractions of some other kids. He was way higher in the pecking order than me, but every time we used his name, it pulled him down into his place. Was the alpha male—one of his cousins, and the originator of my nickname—even aware of the mechanism? He knew; we all knew. If ever Neil got one up on his cousin, Dobber put him back in his place, with just a small inflection in the naming. I learned late in high school that I had "unknowingly" inflicted my own violence on some of these kids; a sort of superiority and judgement which injured some of them deeply.
In the irony of life, the Methodist minister's kid, Year 12 like the rest of us, decided to navigate the S-bend just north of the town at 70mph. He was a skilled driver, but in the second loop of the S, the car literally jumped out into the outside lane, chastening the crowd of boys on board. Not much later, Neil was in the middle of the back seat, the safest seat in the car, one Saturday night, and it all came unstuck on another S-bend. Neil was the only one thrown out of the car. It killed him. At church, the next night, Geoff Boyce helped us mourn.
I have never forgotten Neil. With the passing of time I see he was a nice kid. And I see the pain that he carried onto the bus each day. At the time, I had no language to process and see what I was seeing. And the kid who crowed the day I first turned up at the Council yard for work? Pastoral experience has allowed me to discern from numbers of childhood observations that his life had some horrible hard edges, too.
Which is all not such long way from Simon, nicknamed Rock. A rock like the rocky ground in Chapter 4 of Mark? A well planted rock who denies his Lord? As much obdurate as inspired at the end of Chapter 8? I hope that as an older man he could see beyond the smirks of those who saw the irony of his name, and feel the compliment that it also contained.
We Christians have too long treated the Pharisees as our moral scapegoats, feeling superior because we would never behave like them. And failing to see that in the striving for a fuller humanity, they were at the apex of human refinement. Their rules and strictures carefully limited and controlled our endemic violence. Yet even they failed, deciding in the face of the destabilising influence of Jesus that they must resort to his murder in order to limit the damage to society. (Mark 4:6) The Gospels read us: Do we seriously think that we are better than they? If we look down on them, the Book knows that we have not learned the basics of the faith.
So too, Rock (and the Sons of Thunder.) Rock was so named by Jesus because he was a grounded, stable point among Jesus' followers, brave beyond what I will ever be. How can I look down upon him because of his failures? To do so is again to be read by the Book and seen to be still in the grip of empire's myth of redemptive violence, with little appreciation of God's Basileia.
Andrea Prior
(February 2025)
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1. Petros, from which we obtain Peter means Rock in Greek. In Aramaic, this is Kephas, which is probably the language/word used by Jesus.
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