ROMEO AND JULIET is the classic tale of an ill-fated romance, a story of two “star-cross’d lovers” whom fate seems determined to keep apart. Their love is forbidden because of the mutual hatred between their families, the Montagues and the Capulets. Spoiler alert for those of you who didn’t read the play in high school: there’s both good news and bad news. The good news is that, by the end of the play, the two families finally decide to end their feud. The bad news, unfortunately, is that it took the senseless deaths of Romeo and Juliet for them to get there.

It was one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays in his day, and is still one his most famous in ours. It’s also the source of memorable lines like “A plague o’ both your houses” (that is, on the Montagues and Capulets) and “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” That latter line is part of a soliloquy by Juliet as she stands on her balcony musing aloud to herself while Romeo eavesdrops secretly below. Why must our families keep us apart? she seems to say. Why should it matter that I’m a Capulet, and Romeo is a Montague? These are just names, and names are just arbitrary labels. A rose would look, feel, and smell the same no matter what you call it.

Is Juliet right? Do names matter? Are they just labels?

Let me ask the question this way. What’s the significance of the way seasonings are labeled in your kitchen cabinet? Juliet’s argument, in essence, is that the contents of a jar labeled “salt” would still taste the same even if it was labeled “sel” in France, or “sal” in Spain — or for that matter, with some completely random nonsense syllable. In that sense, she’s right: the name is arbitrary.

But what she misses is that we sometimes need to rely on the label to tell us what’s in the jar. So, sure: you can call salt anything you want. But you don’t want to mistake it for sugar.

The question, then, is not whether the label is arbitrary, but whether the label on the outside can be counted on to tell you what’s on the inside. This was the problem keeping Romeo and Juliet apart. The Capulets acted as if the only thing that mattered about Romeo was that he was a Montague, and the Montagues did the same with Juliet for being a Capulet. Today, a neuropsychologist might say that this is, in part, the way our lazy brains work. We would rather divide the world up into simple categories than think too hard about what makes individuals unique. And we still do it: sometimes we act as if all we need to know about someone else is whether they’re a Democrat or a Republican, liberal or conservative, Christian or non-Christian, Baptist or Pentecostal.

Now think for a moment about how you named your children, if you have any. Are those names merely random labels? Did you choose a name more for its meaning or for the way it sounds? And if you leaned more toward the meaning of the name, did that meaning say something about what the child meant to you or about who you hoped the child would grow up to be?

In the Bible, names had meanings, and those meanings mattered. In Isaiah 8:1, for example, God instructs the prophet to name his son Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, which roughly translated means “swift to the plunder” said in two different ways. Suffice it to say that God didn’t choose that name for the way it rolls off the tongue (and I have to wonder if the other kids teased the poor boy in middle school). Why such a long, odd name? It was meant to be a prophetic sign of the coming invasion by Assyria.

Or think of Abraham. When he first met God, his name was Abram. But in Genesis 17, God speaks to Abram and changes his name:

As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. (Gen 17:4-5, NIV)

The name “Abram” means “exalted father,” but the name “Abraham” means “father of many.” The name, again, is prophetic; it identifies who Abram already is in God’s eyes, and who he is about to become in God’s story.

Similarly, we might think of the apostle Simon, to whom Jesus gave the name “Peter,” saying:

And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. (Matt 16:18)

“Peter,” of course, means “rock.” True, some of Peter’s behavior may not have seemed particularly rock-like, unless you count his sinking like a stone when he was trying to walk on water. But the point is that the name change was meant to embody what Jesus already saw in Peter and in his future. I can easily imagine that, later, Peter consciously thought about how to live up to his new name as he made decisions.

Biblically, therefore, names matter. And the same is true of the names of God. For the servant Hagar, for example, fleeing the abuse heaped on her by Sarah, God was “the God Who Sees Me.” In the prophecies of Isaiah, the names of the coming Messiah would be “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isa 9:6), as well as “Immanuel” (Isa 7:14; Matt 1:23), or “God with us.” Even the name “Jesus,” which is the Greek version of the Hebrew name “Yeshua” or possibly “Yehoshua,” means “God saves” or “God is salvation,” as the angel’s instructions about Mary to Joseph suggest:

She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. (Matt 1:21)

I say all this because as we come to the second line of the Lord’s Prayer, which we traditionally recite as “hallowed be thy name,” we need to understand that names were significant to the people of Jesus’ time and culture in a way that they may not be to us.

Moreover, contemporary speakers of English only rarely use the word “hallowed,” which is why the Common English Bible translates the line as “uphold the holiness of your name.” In The Message, Eugene Peterson even goes as far as to paraphrase it as “Reveal who you are.” That’s not exactly a “translation” per se, but Peterson has a point: the name of God should represent who God is. And as we’ll see, who God is… is the Holy One.