Thirty five years ago in July, our son was born. We named him Matthew, which means “gift from God.”
In 1990, there were four babies born in our church congregation in short order. All of them were boys, and they were named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The parents of these children, including my wife and me, had no idea the other parents were having boys or what they planned to name them. Even more amazing, the boys were born in “Gospel” order, which required Luke to be born prematurely.
What are the odds that four babies would be born in the same congregation, and that they would be named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and born in order, with no girls or boys with other names born in between? The math is quite complicated.
Of course, if you knew the child would be male and had to be named either Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, then the math can be relatively easy and simple enough. It’s four factorial, or twenty-four different possible combinations, which equates to roughly a four percent probability that given the option of only four names to choose from, the likelihood that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John would be chosen in that exact order versus let’s say Mark, Matthew, John, and Luke, for example.
But how do we calculate the odds that no other children named Alvin or Sally or Mary (or Mohammed) would be born in the congregation during that same time? I suppose it could be calculated, in theory–we’d have to find out how many families were in the congregation at that time, and of that number, calculate how many of them were of “child-bearing” age. Difficult, but it probably can be done.
However, then we’d also have to compute all the different possible male and female names that could have been chosen instead of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and what started out as a fun little exercise begins to suspiciously look like a lot of hard work, and sucks all the joy right out of the experience. Who wants to work that hard the week before Christmas? Not me. Life is too short to be wasted on silly efforts that have no potential reward for a lot of hard work. Hours and hours of hard work, in fact.
While it’s probably nothing in comparison to the sheer improbability of this universe being created from nothing or the origin of life from inanimate matter, upon reflection it seems safe to assume that God might have been up to something more than having fun with the names of four children born in the congregation at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in 1990. There must be a reason those four children were given the names they were given and born in the order they were born.
The funny thing is that I chose the name Matthew only because I liked it, not because there was a Gospel named Matthew. I also liked Simon, but my grandfather said the name sounded too Jewish. Matthew wasn’t a family name; my grandfather and I are both named John.
It might also be interesting to note this was during my somewhat apathetic agnostic phase where I wasn’t even sure that God exists. It wasn’t until several years later that I had the intense personal experience which forever changed my life. But now, back to the past…
Matthew was born in July, so he wasn’t what my wife calls an “itty bitty” baby when in November, the pastor of our church called and asked my wife and me to dress up as Mary and Joseph for the upcoming Christmas special event the church had planned. Pastor Tom wanted us to carry our son up to the altar and put him into a makeshift manger for just a couple of minutes, and we didn’t have to say anything other than to serve as a visual reminder of the newborn King and his parents.
The problem was that Matthew got extremely sick with pneumonia less than a week before the event was scheduled and when he was sick, he was fussy and cried a lot. I worried that I would have to call Pastor Tom and ask if he could find a last minute substitute. However, the truth was the antibiotics helped our son heal quickly and he was no longer too ill to fulfill the obligation. I had no excuse except that I expected our young son to misbehave at the worst possible moment just as he’s supposed to be playing the role of baby Jesus in front of the whole church. Matthew was exhausted and probably still felt bad and that made him cranky. Quite frankly, I expected him to start screaming at the top of his lungs at any minute.
But then I witnessed a Christmas miracle…Matthew magically transformed from a hysterically crying baby into a QUIET sweet angel at that exact moment we entered the church. It really was remarkable. It was as if a director yelled “Action!” and our son immediately went to work, hamming it up for the audience. Pastor Tom had planned to read an excerpt from Scripture and say a brief prayer. My wife and I were there to serve as live props, a supporting cast for the star of the show: nothing to say and only one task to perform–put our baby in the manger for a minute or two.
My wife gently put our son into the manger/crib and we both hoped for the best.
But Matthew’s behavior wasn’t just good, it was literally perfect–as if he was a seasoned actor following his script to the letter. It was magical. As if on cue, he reached out with his tiny baby hand from under his blanket and grasped my wife’s finger, prompting a few members of the congregation to weep tears of joy and appreciation, they were so moved. For a brief moment in time, the magic of Hollywood had been replicated in the suburbs of Atlanta, and on a shoestring budget.
I remember joking about it with my wife immediately afterward because it really felt as if our son had been an actor born to play that role, and he’d played it to perfection.
Many years later, I’m not so sure. Frankly, I don’t think anybody is that good of an actor. I think the Holy Spirit may have smiled on my baby boy and put him on his best behavior.
As I remember the past, I recall that when Pastor Tom originally told me about the four boys named after the four Gospels thing I didn’t realize it was a bigger deal than I realized. I mean, I thought it was rare and unusual, but it never occurred to me that divine inspiration could have been at play. Now that I do think about it more, it occurs to me if I read this story somewhere else, I probably wouldn’t believe it–that four boys would be born in the same church congregation and that they would be named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, in the same order as the four Gospels?
Even if you showed me evidence (four birth certificates would work just fine to convince me if I hadn’t been part of the story) I still wouldn’t believe the parents hadn’t secretly collaborated somehow for the four births to come in proper order because of my natural cynicism. The so-called “laws” of statistics would suggest such an improbability was so extraordinarily unlikely that it could not happen in reality.
Except I know it did happen. I’m the father of one of those four boys, and I know for a fact I didn’t collude with anybody else besides my wife when it came to naming my son. We didn’t even make a final decision on Matthew’s name until about a month before his birth, and then we didn’t tell anybody besides our parents. The unusual naming of the four children must have been due to luck so grotesquely improbable that it would be absurd to believe it could even be possible, except the only other explanation would be divine influence (God did it!). The most likely or best explanation–that we deliberately chose those four names for whatever reason due to secret colluding and negotiations–isn’t the right explanation.
I know better. I know the truth. And I don’t believe luck had anything to do with it.
What does this story mean? I wish I knew. I wish I could tell you. Heck, I don’t know why I suddenly remembered this story more than three decades after it happened, but suddenly it came back to mind as if these details happened yesterday. I’m a writer, so I wrote about it.
Life is short. Every day is a gift from God. I didn’t necessarily believe that way back when Matthew played Jesus in the Christmas pageant, but now I’m quite sure that Jesus is Lord and God raised Him from the dead. Several years after the events described took place, I had my intense personal experience with the risen Lord that forever changed my life.
I think perhaps this ancient anecdote popped into my head because it’s about improbability and unlikelihood, which is an important theme in my book. We only have two basic options: either the origin of the universe was planned, or it was unplanned. An unplanned universe creates many more problems than it solves, but the planned universe is easily solved with the introduction of an intelligent Planner.
You can say that it was just a fluke that four boys were born in the same church and christened Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and my reply would be that I don’t think you understand statistics and improbability as well as you might like to believe. Giving four boys the “right” names in the correct order is actually somewhat comparable to fine-tuning four of the six cosmological factors for creating the universe kind of improbable–not quite the same, but in the same ballpark of improbability.
Of course this isn’t “proof” God exists, but proof itself doesn’t exist outside courtrooms and math theorems, so there’s that. I probably wouldn’t even call this direct evidence that God exists because even to this day, I’ve never spoken to any of the other parents to ask them how they came to choose their son’s name or how they managed to time their births to arrive in perfect order, assuming that naming our sons in honor of the four Gospels had always been part of the plan.
So, what was the plan? Even today, I don’t know. Matthew did not grow up to become a great preacher or evangelist. Nor did he become a tax collector. Now he’s an adult, and a salesman for a technology company. I don’t know what happened to Mark, Luke, or John, either. Not all of the families remained at Prince of Peace beyond having their sons baptized.
It’s not like the church publicized the births or notified the national media seeking attention. We never even did an internal photo op for the church newsletter, probably because we didn’t have a church newsletter. Life simply went on, and nearly a quarter century later I wrote The God Conclusion.
If I didn’t know better, I might think the naming of my son and his role as the baby Jesus had nothing to do with my writing of The God Conclusion, but I strongly suspect otherwise. The supreme irony is that I am a harsh critic of evolution theory because it isn’t logical in a planned universe. It can only be an attribute of an unplanned and undirected universe. The irony is if evolution is true, every living thing…every plant and animal on Earth is literally related because of sexual reproduction.
Is it easier to believe an unplanned universe could create life as we know it by descent with modifications, or that my son’s name was influenced by some unseen form of superior intelligence?
In my opinion, this little anecdote is evidence that God has a terrific sense of humor. We could have had a Peter, Andrew, James, Phillip, or Sally, Theresa, Anne, or Phoebe, but instead we got Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John if for no other reason, to give us an interesting story to share thirty-five years after the fact.
Merry Christmas!
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