The Hebrew name, Shi-mon, means “hearkening” or “listening”, a quality that serves the Papacy well in every age whether it be attendance to the voice of the Lord or a hearkening to the needs of the sheep that have been entrusted to his care (cf. Could the number 12 be symbolic of anything? Anyway, these Simons are starkly different from each other, but their overarching presence in the pages of Scripture forms a sort of composite profile of the papal office and its duty of pastoral leadership. Matthew 13:55 Mark 6:3), there are twelve Simons sprinkled throughout the Bible from Genesis to Acts. If we count Simon Peter and the Simon who is the cousin of Jesus (we know nothing about him but his name, cf. Matthew 16:18-20), and if we look at that incident more closely we might imagine the larger Peter portrait as a mosaic of many smaller Simon images. Jesus changed the fisherman’s name to Peter when He conferred the keys of the Kingdom upon him at Caesarea Philippi ( cf. The amazing irony here is that we would be hard-pressed to find a name that appears with greater frequency in Scripture than the name of Simon. There is only one man in the Bible named Peter, but as we know, his given name was Simon. I was reminded of that poster the day I noticed something about the name of our first Pope. The artist who had the idea to create a portrait of Jesus using so many other smaller images was a true genius. Each little face was unique, and I understood the message of “One in Christ” without having to read the caption. The image was a mosaic containing the recognizable faces of people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King as well as those of many other anonymous people, male and female, young and old. From a distance, it looked like an image of the holy face of Jesus, but as I drew closer I could see that the face was actually a composite of tiny faces that made up the contours and complexion of the whole. Some years ago I walked into a Christian bookstore and a fascinating poster caught my eye.
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