Noble             [noh-buh l]

I first remember taking notice of the word “noble” when I was 16. At the time, my life revolved around sports the way a hummingbird’s revolves around flowering gardens, basketball being my favorite nectar. I was in the habit of studying any point guard who was older and better than I was and the point guard for the 1971 Washington State Boy’s High School Runner Up Pasco Bulldogs was named Noble Johnson. I always thought that was such a cool name. It sounded so dignified, like a name you had to grow into or earn if you didn’t want to be a running joke for the rest of your life. It sounded the way Frederick Douglass looked.

The word noble means “highborn” or “well born” and locates one as being born into a family whose lineage is long and of high social status. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ genealogy is traced from Abraham to David. Jesus is referred to as “the son of David” as Matthew seeks to indicate clearly and definitively his royal origin.

Another meaning of the word noble is to possess high moral character. It describes something – a noble cause, or someone – she’s a noble woman, who is decent, righteous, virtuous, and honorable.

Many Christians who are baptized do not know that when they were baptized they were baptized as “priest, prophet, and king,” or more inclusively stated and more to the point, as royalty. It has become so perfunctory to identify baptism with the remission of sin that we have nearly lost sight of its power to assure us of the largesse of God’s love, to initiate us into a community of faith, to remind us of our truest identity in Christ, and to inaugurate a way of life as exemplified by the tripartite mission alluded to above. Baptism is the symbolic awakening to and communal celebration of the embrace of grace, our divinely-given nobility, and the ritualized reminder of whose we are and of who we are in God.

The aristocracy throughout human history got one thing right: nobility cannot be earned. It resides in the good fortune of where one comes from. But they got one thing miserably wrong: they don’t go back far enough, back to our divine beginning, back to the only legitimate Source of anyone’s nobility. While it is true nobility is not a human achievement but rather a divine bequest, it is also true that the dignity and integrity of one’s life has something to do with one’s access to the bequest and what one does with it.

At the end of his life, Jesus is crucified with a mocking placard above his head that read “King of the Jews” and coronated not with a crown of bejeweled gold but with a diadem of cut and woven barbed boughs. He was executed, among other reasons, because the blue blooded powers-that-be feared the potency and potential should his revolution of radical love catch the imaginations and hearts of the masses regarding their own God-bestowed and perpetual royalty. Jesus’ ethic of inclusive love, and even more, his recognition and evocation of each person’s belovedness, sabotaged the false premises that supported and justified humanly concocted structures of classism, exploitation, and oppression. Jesus announces and enacts the reign of God which gives no credence to an aristocracy that depends upon a proletariat. There are no commoners in the heart of God. Each and every person, creature, life form birthed from the wildly imaginative, generous, and loving mind of God, is noble. There is no superior or inferior, no inner and outer circle, no elitism, no lower class, no high class, no class at all in the reign of God.

While Matthew emphasizes Jesus’ royal heritage, the gospels do portray Jesus as being a tekton, a manual laborer or artisan (often translated as carpenter), in a small village some 4-5 miles from the nearest big city. Although debated, Jesus was most likely from the lower end of the landless peasant class in a society divided into the haves and the have-nots without a middle-class to speak of. As such, Jesus is the perfect messenger to reveal the hidden, but inviolable divine origins and dignity of those who the dominant culture unapologetically demeans, desacralizes, and pushes to the margins or into the ditch.

Jesus has the desire and the capacity to recognize and evoke the nobility hidden in each and all persons. A fisher of folks the world deemed unworthy, insignificant, and beneath them, Jesus casts his line and reels in the social and religious outcasts of his time with the lure of God’s lavish, particular, and counter-cultural reverence and love. He especially tends to women, children, those tagged as godless, lepers, prostitutes, foreigners, and widows, retrieving from deep within them their royal identity and empowering them to recognize and receive their place in the holy communion of equals that is the royal family of God.

As a spiritual guide one of my intentions is to reflect back to those with whom I am sitting and to whom I have the honor of listening, each person’s God-given nobility, their inestimable worth, and to send them on their way crowned with the awareness that they are the apple of God’s eye, the beloved on whom God’s favor now and forever rests. When we see and behold the nobility of another, it enables them to see it in themselves and compels them to see and behold it in others.

We will know God’s dream has come true “on earth as it is in heaven” when bowing and curtsying to one another is no pro forma protocol reserved for the Queen of England but the natural inclination, holy reverence, and knowing love each God-made person evokes from us. It is a noble thing to do.