ANONYMOUS

By Nathan Attwood

Pastor, Marianna First United Methodist Church

"When Abraham's servant heard what they said, he bowed to the ground before the Lord." Genesis 24:52.

 The Bible is full of names. All we know about many of the people in the Bible is their names. Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, especially, are full of lists of names of people for whom we know nothing but a name--genealogies, census lists, names of kings and tribal warlords, and more. 

 Imagine going to heaven and meeting someone who made the Bible only in some list:

 "Good to meet you! My name is Deuel. By the way, I'm in the Bible." 

 "Really? You're in the Bible? I don't remember a story about you. What did you do?" 

 "Oh, nothing. I'm in Numbers 2. My son Eliasaph was listed as a commander of the tribe of Gad. He's listed as 'Eliasaph son of Deuel.' I'm Deuel. That's it."

 There must be hundreds of people just like that in heaven right now.

 When we get to heaven, many of us will want to meet the big names from the Bible. I know I'm looking forward to asking Paul some questions about his letter to the Romans and finding out the answer to scholarly questions about his authorship of the Pastoral Epistles. I not only want to meet the big name people in the Bible like David, Abraham, Moses, Peter, Isaiah, and the rest. I'm also eager to hear the stories and experiences of Nathaniel, Baruch, Hagar, and so many other less-known but equally important participants in the divine drama.

 I'm also interested in meeting the anonymous Bible characters. The Bible has a whole host of characters whose role in the story is crucial and yet they remain unnamed in the text. Many of them are women. I assume their names failed to make it into the Bible because of the male-centered culture in which the stories were remembered. Although the biblical writers failed to remember their names, the women in God's redemptive story were so important that their witness is impossible to be completely lost. These include the woman with the issue of blood, the woman caught in adultery, the woman at the well, and many more. In one story, a woman anointed Jesus's feet with a costly perfume (a parallel story in John's Gospel says Mary the sister of Lazarus also anointed Jesus, but other similar stories do not name her). Her name has not been preserved, but Jesus says that the story of what she has done for him will be told as a testament of her devotion wherever the Gospel is told, "In memory of her." Jesus's prediction is being fulfilled as you read this column even at this moment!

 I look forward to learning the names of the shepherds who first heard the news of the birth of the Messiah. I look forward to cracking the mystery of who exactly the young man was who fled the Garden of Gethsemane in his birthday suit on the night of Jesus's arrest. Jesus promised the thief on the cross a place in Paradise, so I believe I will meet him one day. Until that day, his name remains a mystery to me.

 Perhaps the most underappreciated character in the Bible is largely unknown only because his name is never mentioned in the text. In Genesis 24, Abraham sends his most trusted servant to go back to Haran, the land of his kin, to find a wife for his son Isaac. Genesis 24 is a very long chapter and the story is extremely detailed. It follows a similar pattern of many biblical stories about important figures finding a wife (usually at a well). Moses and Jacob find their wives exactly this way. In the case of the Isaac story, perhaps the point of the story is that Isaac had the work done for him--he didn't find his own wife, his daddy sent an employee to do the finding on his behalf. 

 Genesis is full of rogues, complicated characters, and compromised protagonists. Abraham's servant is perhaps the first biblical character who is described as fully faithful. He earnestly prays for direction from God. He trusts God in difficulty. He persists in his duty without scheming or twisting the truth, never taking things into his own hands and creating a mess in the process. Abraham's servant is a much more faithful, moral, trustworthy person than Abraham himself. And yet, who ever hears about Abraham's servant? Who ever celebrates him? I wonder: If the text had connected Abraham's servant in Genesis 24 with "Eliezer of Damascus" who Abraham says would have been his heir if Isaac had not been born, would we have preferred Eliezer to be the carrier of the promise? The story sure makes him seem like a more qualified candidate for receiving and transmitting the covenant than the compromised descendants of Abraham whose dysfunction dominated the rest of the tale.

 Perhaps, when we get to heaven, we will be surprised that the anonymous people in the Bible were far more important to God's redemptive story than we realized. Perhaps we will discover that the same is true in the redemptive story that has continued since. Perhaps the real story of how God's Kingdom has thrived is less the work of Martin Luther and John Wesley and the Popes and other names we can find on Wikipedia. Maybe faith in Jesus Christ is the coming of his Kingdom has been transmitted more by grandmothers and Sunday school teachers and normal, average, unheralded people than we could possibly know. 

 Every day, I walk into a church building that houses a congregation I pastor made up of people who discover the abundant life of Jesus through its ministries. There are a few plaques around the place, but, by-and-large, the people who built both the building and the community it houses are unknown to the people who enjoy the results of the labor of love of the forgotten people who came before them. Those good folks didn't care about recognition. They just did what they did to serve Jesus because they were obedient to the call that came from a Savior who loved them well. Like Abraham's servant, their call was never to get their name remembered. They just wanted to serve well and follow God. They didn't mind being anonymous. They just wanted to be fruitful.

 There's a power in being anonymous. Those who serve Christ only to make the name of Jesus great require no heroic capacities except uncompromised devotion to Jesus alone. What they accomplish may be unseen or uncelebrated, but it is precious to God and crucial to his cause.