THE HOLY NAME OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

Sunday, January 1, 2023

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Exodus 34:1-8

Philippians 2:9-13

Luke 2:15-21

 

“And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”

 

Since the seventh or eighth century, the Church has commemorated the Circumcision of Christ on January 1st, reckoned as the eighth day after his birth if we count December 25th as the first day. The calendar in successive editions of the Book of Common Prayer kept this designation from 1549 up through 1928. The Roman Catholic Church kept it until 1960; and the Eastern Orthodox Church still keeps it today.

 

The naming of a son was an integral part of the circumcision ceremony, and remains so in contemporary Judaism. For this reason, the compilers of the 1979 Prayer Book thought it appropriate to rename January 1st the Feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. 

 

The Church of England’s Book of Common Worship, published in 2000, splits the difference and calls this day “the Naming and Circumcision of our Lord Jesus Christ.” All these variations seem to me entirely defensible in that they simply emphasize different dimensions of the same event that, following the Jewish Law, took place on the eighth day after our Lord’s birth.

 

Apart from the Circumcision, devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus has an interesting history all its own. Its inspiration clearly comes from such New Testament passages as today’s Epistle, where St. Paul hails the Name of Jesus as “above every Name” so that “at the Name of Jesus every knee should bow … and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (By the way, on the basis of this text, many of us were taught to bow our heads whenever the Holy Name is spoken, as a gesture of respect and of reparation for its misuse. I commend this practice highly.)

 

As early as the fifth or sixth century, the Desert Fathers adopted the devotion known as the Jesus Prayer, which consisted of simple repetition over and over again of the Name of Jesus in some such form as: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” The Jesus Prayer remains a staple of Eastern Orthodox spirituality. And, again, it’s a prayer technique that I highly recommend.

 

In the late middle ages, the Franciscan and Dominican orders of friars began to promote devotion to the Holy Name focused on the image of the Sacred Monogram, consisting of the first three Greek letters of the Lord’s name—Iota, Eta, Sigma; in English they look like “IHS”—displayed in a disc surrounded by the sun’s rays and surmounted by a cross. Beginning about the fifteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church kept a feast of the Holy Name on the second Sunday after the Epiphany; it was suppressed in 1969, and later re-introduced as an optional commemoration on January 3rd.

 

But why this emphasis on our Lord’s Name? Well, a distinctive feature of Christianity is that we worship a God who actually has a Name. That is, we don’t worship some nameless, ineffable, and unknowable divine Absolute: what C.S. Lewis characterized as many people’s picture of God, an “oblong blur” or a vast tapioca pudding. 

 

It's often said in the contemporary Church that because the transcendent God is beyond all words and images, any language we use to describe God must necessarily be arbitrary and ultimately inadequate. That would be true, except that God has spoken; and in so speaking God has revealed himself, giving us knowledge of his being, nature, and character that we could never have come up with ourselves. As the twentieth-century Swiss theologian Emil Brunner put it: “by God alone can God be known.” And one of the principal ways in which God makes himself known is by disclosing his Name.

 

In the biblical thought-world, one’s name conveys one’s identity, character, and purpose. To be told someone’s name is not only to learn something of who that person is, but also to enter into a new relationship with that person. In the Old Testament, God reveals his name to Moses at the burning bush: “I am that I am.” That name was considered so holy that it was pronounced only once a year, by the High Priest, in the Holy of Holies, on the Day of Atonement. 

 

So, today’s Feast invites us to reflect on the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. When my sons were born, Elizabeth and I gave them names that we’d chosen ahead of time, as is the case with most people born today. But the name Jesus is not something that Mary and Joseph come up with by themselves. Instead, the angel gives the Name both to Mary at the Annunciation and to Joseph in his dream, with strict instructions that this is what the child is to be called. The name is revealed by God. 

 

While the name Jesus—in Greek Iēsous, in Hebrew Joshua, and in Aramaic Yeshua—was fairly common in New Testament times, it nonetheless bears a special significance in relation to who Jesus is, and what he’s come into the world to do. Etymologically, it means something like, “God is salvation,” or “God saves.” It discloses that Jesus is the Savior. As the angel says to Joseph in his dream, “You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

 

But why do we need a Savior? From what do we need to be saved? The biblical narrative teaches, and experience confirms, that we human beings have collectively turned away from God, our Creator, making bad choices that lead inexorably to death and destruction. (G. K. Chesterton remarked that Original Sin is the one empirically verifiable Christian doctrine.) Left to our own devices, we cannot save ourselves. We need a Savior: someone to rescue us and bring us back into the way of God’s light and life.

 

The name Jesus signifies that he’s the Savior sent to reconcile us to God and one another. The Fathers of the early Church emphasized the significance of his Name in relation to his circumcision. Remember, his name points to salvation, and he receives this name on the first occasion of the shedding of his blood. His circumcision thus anticipates the shedding of his blood upon the cross that will bring about the salvation of the world. 

 

On this first day of January, then, the Church invites us to dedicate the coming year to the Holy Name of Jesus. We have the opportunity today to make a New Year’s resolution to do everything to God’s glory in Jesus’ Name—every thought we think, every word we speak, every deed we perform. And in the weeks and months to come, the Church calendar’s seasons, feasts, and fasts will take us once again on our annual journey through the course of his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and return, by which he brings us God’s salvation and so fulfills the meaning of his Holy Name.