Why We Are Called Known By Name?

ByKBNIsrael

The law in Leviticus says that after childbirth a woman brings a lamb for an offering, and adds a provision for anyone who cannot afford one. She brings two doves or two young pigeons instead (Leviticus 12:6-8).

Luke records what Mary and Joseph brought to the temple in Jerusalem. It was the birds (Luke 2:22-24).

The Messiah entered the temple under the clause written for people who could not pay full price. That detail sets the direction for everything that follows, through the prophets before him, the church after him, and the work we do on these streets now.

The prophets went out to the streets

The city gate in ancient Israel served as courthouse, marketplace and town square at once. Elders sat there. Disputes were settled there. When Amos says they hate the one who reproves in the gate, and then tells them to establish justice in the gate, he means a specific place with a crowd standing in it (Amos 5:10, 5:15).

That is where the prophets worked. Jeremiah was told to stand in the gate of the Lord’s house (Jeremiah 7:1-2), and in the gate of the people, and in all the gates of Jerusalem (Jeremiah 17:19). Amos was a herdsman who tended sycamore figs before God took him from following the flock (Amos 7:14-15). These were public men in public places, and most of them were nobody in particular.

The clearest instruction of all is Jeremiah 5:1. God tells the prophet to run through the streets of Jerusalem, look, take note, search the squares, and see whether he can find one person who does justice and seeks truth. Go out into the streets and look at people one at a time.

What they were sent to say was often about the poor. The law had already built provision into the land: the edges of every field left unharvested, the fallen grapes left in the vineyard, the forgotten sheaf left where it lay, all of it owed to the poor and the foreigner by right (Leviticus 19:9-10, Deuteronomy 24:19-21). Ruth, a foreign widow with no legal claim on anyone, ate because that system worked.

When it broke down the prophets said so. Amos accused Israel of selling the needy for a pair of sandals and trampling the head of the poor into the dust (Amos 2:6-7). Ezekiel’s diagnosis of Sodom was pride, plenty of food and comfortable ease alongside a refusal to help the poor and needy (Ezekiel 16:49).

Isaiah 58 is where it lands. God rejects the fasting of people who keep every observance while ignoring everyone around them, and says what he wants instead: share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into your house, cover the one you see with no clothes (Isaiah 58:6-7). The promise attached is the one we keep coming back to. You will be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in (Isaiah 58:12).

Jeremiah goes furthest. Writing about King Josiah, he says the king judged the cause of the poor and needy, and it went well for him. Then he asks: is this not what it means to know me, says the Lord (Jeremiah 22:15-16). Knowing God is defined there as taking up the case of people at the bottom.

Jesus said the poor were the reason he came

Jesus stood up in the synagogue in Nazareth and was handed the scroll of Isaiah (Luke 4:16-21). He had the whole book available to him, including chapter 53 and its servant despised and rejected. He read from chapter 61:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.

Then he sat down and said the Scripture had been fulfilled that day in their hearing. Of everything he could have claimed, this is what he chose as his opening statement.

He kept returning to it. When John the Baptist sent from prison to ask whether he was the one, the answer was a list that climbs and ends in the same place: the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news preached to them (Luke 7:22). His own circumstances matched it. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head (Luke 9:58). And when he described his return, the question at the separation was about food, water, clothing and welcome, answered with the line that has kept Christians on the street ever since: whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me (Matthew 25:40).

He kept using their names

There is a second thread running through all of this, and it is the reason for our name.

Psalm 147 puts two things side by side. God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds, and God counts the stars and gives every one of them a name (Psalm 147:3-4). Isaiah says it directly: I have called you by name, you are mine (Isaiah 43:1). To the foreigners and the eunuchs, the people cut out of the assembly, God promises a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name that will not be cut off (Isaiah 56:5).

Jesus worked the same way. The good shepherd calls his own sheep by name and leads them out (John 10:3). In a crowd in Jericho he looked up and called a tax collector by name before anyone introduced them (Luke 19:5). Mark records a blind man begging by the road at Jericho and gives both his name and his father’s, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus (Mark 10:46), where most ancient writers would have left a beggar anonymous. On the morning of the resurrection Mary Magdalene took him for the gardener and stayed confused until he said one word, her name (John 20:16).

And in the parable of the rich man and the beggar, Jesus gives the beggar a name, Lazarus, and leaves the rich man without one (Luke 16:19-31). Lazarus is the only character in any of Jesus’ parables given a personal name. The man with the gate, the purple clothes and the daily feasts is remembered as a rich man. The man covered in sores outside is remembered as Lazarus.

That is the whole conviction behind the way we work.

The church that followed

The first Christians took it as an operational matter. In Jerusalem there was no needy person among them, because property was sold and the proceeds distributed as anyone had need (Acts 4:34-35). It did not run smoothly. Acts 6 records a complaint that Greek speaking widows were being overlooked in the daily food distribution, and the apostles appointed seven men to fix it. The first administrative structure the church ever created existed to make sure a food distribution was fair.

When Paul described his agreement with the Jerusalem leaders, only one request had been added to his commission, that he remember the poor, which he says he was already eager to do (Galatians 2:10). James defined religion that God accepts as looking after orphans and widows in their distress (James 1:27).

Known by name, on these streets

We work in the country where all of this happened. The gates Jeremiah stood in are geography here.

The need is documented. The National Insurance Institute’s 2024 poverty report put roughly two million people below the poverty line, 21 percent of the population, including 880,000 children. Around 28 percent of Israelis experienced food insecurity tied to economic hardship. Counting people who sleep outside is harder, and the disagreement over the figures is part of the story. Ministry counts have run in the low thousands while the Association for Civil Rights in Israel has used a figure of 25,000. A person can be sleeping on a street in this country and never appear in an official total.

That is the gap our name is about. Every person we meet is already counted by God and already called by name, whether or not any office in this country has a record of them.

So the work is plain and it repeats. Food is cooked and carried out. People are met where they already are. Names are asked for, remembered, and used the next time. Those who want to get off drugs are walked toward rehabilitation and stayed with while they try, which takes far longer than anyone hopes and often has to begin again.

On any given evening it looks like very little. What the prophets were sent into the streets to say, and what Jesus said he had come to do, is where it gets its meaning.

He was carried into the temple by parents who brought birds because they could not afford a lamb. Everything after that follows from it.

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