Nobody Knows My Name Anymore

There are four apostle lists in the New Testament.

Matthew has one. Mark has one. Luke has one. And Luke writes it out again at the start of Acts, after the crucifixion, when they’re all sitting in an upstairs room waiting for something to happen.

Three of the names on those lists have nothing attached to them.

No sermon. No question, with one exception we’ll get to. No miracle, no rebuke, no moment, no death we can verify, no scene, nothing. They walk with him for three years and the record keeps their names and almost nothing else.

I want to spend this chapter with those three, because I have a suspicion about you.

I think you could survive the chapters about failure. You’ve made your peace with being a man who did some damage. What you have not made your peace with is being a man that nobody has needed for a long time.

James, son of Alphaeus.

That’s it. That’s everything we have. He’s on all four lists and he is nowhere else, by any clear reading.

No trade. No hometown. No line of dialogue. There’s an old guess that he might be the James whose mother was at the cross, and it’s a reasonable guess and it is not more than that.

A man walked beside Jesus for three years and what came down to us is a name and a father’s name.

Thaddaeus.

Here’s where it gets worse, and I mean that affectionately.

Matthew and Mark call him Thaddaeus. Luke calls him Judas son of James. Almost certainly the same man, and the church has never fully settled it.

They could not keep his name straight.

And when he finally speaks, John has to stop the narrative and tell the reader which one he is. Then Judas, not Judas Iscariot, said to him...

He is introduced in scripture by who he isn’t.

Simon the Zealot.

Called the Zealot, or the Cananaean, which comes from a word for zeal. Whether he belonged to the political movement or was just an intense man, nobody can prove. He says nothing anywhere. He does nothing anywhere. He is a name and an adjective.

Now let me tell you what we do know about the three of them, because it isn’t nothing and nobody ever puts it together.

They were chosen after Jesus prayed all night.

Luke says he went out to a mountainside and spent the whole night praying, and when morning came he called his disciples and picked twelve.

Whatever that night was, these three came out of it. They were not the leftovers after the good ones were taken. They were selected, by name, on the morning after the only all-night prayer anybody wrote down.

They were given exactly the same authority as the others.

When he sent the twelve out, he gave them authority over unclean spirits and to heal every disease. Not the famous ones. The twelve.

Whatever Peter was handed, James son of Alphaeus was handed. Nobody got a lesser commission.

They were in the room at the last supper, which means when he got up and took off his outer garment and washed feet, he washed theirs.

He knelt down in front of a man whose name the church would never manage to write down the same way twice.

And they were still there afterward. When Luke lists who was in that upstairs room after everything fell apart, all three names are on it. They didn’t leave. They had every reason to. The ones with the big roles were the ones with something to stay for, and these three stayed anyway, and they were praying when the thing they’d waited for arrived.

Thaddaeus does speak once. I’ve saved it.

It’s at the last supper, and Jesus has just said something about showing himself to his followers and not to the world. And this man, who says nothing else in the entire Bible, asks:

But, Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?

That’s a good question. That’s a genuinely good question, and it isn’t about him. He isn’t asking for a seat like the sons of thunder. He’s asking about everybody else.

And Jesus answers him. Not briefly. He gives him a real answer, several sentences long, about love and obedience and the Father making a home with a person.

The man with one line in scripture asked one question and got a full response.

Nobody said not now, Thaddaeus. Nobody talked over him. The quietest man at the table asked the thing on his mind and was answered at length by the person he asked.

Here’s the one that I think should stop you where you’re sitting.

At the end of the Bible, John is shown a city. And he describes the wall.

The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

Twelve foundations. Twelve names.

Which means one of the stones under that city has a name on it that we, down here, could not keep straight for two thousand years.

History lost the name. The foundation has it.

I don’t know what to do with that except tell it to you plainly and let it sit there. The record we have is not the record that counts. Ours is patchy and inconsistent and has three men in it we know nothing about. The other one has them holding up a city.

So let me say the thing this chapter is actually about.

You have not been needed in a long time.

The calls stopped. The phone that used to ring at eleven at night doesn’t. Somebody else has your job, and they’re doing it fine, which was the worst part. The people you poured twenty years into have their own lives and it’s right that they do and it still leaves you sitting in a quiet house.

And underneath that is a sentence you’ve probably never said out loud, so let me say it for you.

I think my part is over.

Not your life. Your part. The stretch where you mattered to something, where your presence changed a room, where there was a reason for you to be somewhere on a Tuesday.

I’ve watched a lot of people arrive at that sentence around sixty. It doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as tiredness, or as not going places, or as an unwillingness to start anything, because why start.

Here’s what those three men have to say to that, and it’s the only thing in this book I’d carve into something.

The record’s silence is not God’s verdict.

Three men in that group have nothing written next to their names. Not because they did nothing, but because nobody wrote it down. They spent three years in the middle of the most important thing that ever happened and their contribution is entirely invisible to us.

It was not invisible to him. He picked them off a mountain after praying all night, gave them everything the loud ones got, washed their feet, answered their questions, and put their names in the foundations of a city.

Being unrecorded and being unimportant are two different things, and you have been treating them as one thing for years.

And for some of you it is not that you stopped being needed. It is the opposite, and it is worse.

You are needed constantly and none of it counts.

Fifteen hours a week that nobody writes down. The pharmacy. The second call to the insurance company about the same thing. Sitting in a waiting room for two hours so somebody does not have to sit there alone. Your son at eleven at night, again. The thing you rearranged your whole month around that nobody but you will ever know you rearranged.

There is no title for it and no record of it and no performance review, and if you disappeared tomorrow the only evidence would be everything quietly falling apart.

That is the same shape as those three men. Not idle. Not absent. Working the entire time, in a place the record does not reach.

Your season of being visible may well be over. I’m not going to lie to you about that at sixty-one and tell you the phone’s about to start ringing.

Your season of mattering is a completely separate question and it is not on the same schedule.

Here’s your move, and it’s the smallest one in the book.

This week, do one useful thing that nobody will ever know about.

Truly nobody. Not your spouse, not the person you did it for if you can manage it. No credit, no mention, no story about it later.

Pay for somebody’s thing. Fix something at the church you don’t attend. Show up somewhere early and set up chairs and leave before anybody arrives. Send the money anonymously. Take care of the widow’s driveway before the snow sets.

Then don’t tell a soul. Not one. Including me, and including yourself the next time you’re lying there taking inventory.

It’ll feel pointless. That’s the exercise. You are going to find out what you actually believe about whether a thing counts when there’s no record of it.

Because that’s the question underneath everything in this chapter, and it isn’t about James son of Alphaeus.

Three men gave their whole lives to something and the only evidence is a name on a list.

And a wall, at the end of everything, with their names cut into the stone.