When my wife became pregnant we decided that we wanted to wait until the baby was born to find out whether it was a boy or a girl. So we had asked the ultrasound technician to keep whatever she could determine to herself. For a variety of reasons, we decided to forgo amniocentesis completely. Nevertheless, in the final weeks it seemed like everywhere we went we were accosted by practitioners of the science of determining the sex of a fetus by the shape of the woman carrying it. They all seemed to agree it was a boy and they all insisted that they were never mistaken. Whether for that reason or some other, we came to the onset of labor with a name all picked for the baby should it turn out to be a boy. But our choice of girl’s names was still stuck at the final three.
As it turned out, within five minutes or so after our daughter was born, Meg and I both, independently of each other, decided on the same one of those three names as the right one. “Risa”, like Lisa but with an “R”, was one that Meg had found in a book of baby names and put on our master list. When we each agreed to select our top ten, Meg had placed it on her list, and when we met in conference to compare and merge, “Risa” made it into the final round. It means “laugh” or “laughter” in Latin, and also in Spanish, and somehow when we finally met our baby girl in person, we knew it was the name for her.
Looking back, I wonder if some deeper wisdom had guided us to wait. Maybe, by some intuition, we knew that we would have a girl and that we needed to see her before we gave her her name. Because a name is important. When we give a child a name we are giving her the cornerstone of their identity in the family and society. We are giving her the currency to present themselves to the world as a person, as a free and complete human being, with a unique history and personality, and a destiny all her own. To name a child is to say to him, “You exist, on a par with everyone else who has or who has ever had a name.” It is to invest that child with a true and lasting significance.
If a name really carries with it this deeper kind of meaning, then it is something to be treated with respect. And if that is true of your name and my name, it is the more true of the name of God. In the Hebrew tradition, God’s name holds something of the power and mystery of Godself. In the book of Numbers, Moses instructs the priests of Israel, to bless the people in with a repeated invocation of that name. It is the same name that God revealed to Moses at the burning bush, the same name whose wrongful use is forbidden in the commandments of Mt. Sinai. Our Church translation preserves the custom of Jewish piety, when it uses a euphemism— “the LORD”. Just as it is forbidden to depict the form of God in a created image, so it is not proper to speak God’s name.
We’d be hard put to say that a similar kind of reverence has carried over onto the name of Jesus. Generally speaking, the vernacular English I grew up with was one in which “Jesus Christ” in all its countless and creative variations served as a general purpose expletive for those occasions when you didn’t want to, or didn’t feel the need to, use something really profane. At the other end of the same stick is popular Christian culture with its mass-marketing the name of Jesus on bumper stickers and t-shirts and AM radio.
So what’s different about the way we’re talking about the name of Jesus here this morning? By way of an answer, I’d begin by pointing out that when we sing, as we did this morning, of “the Name of names for us he bore,” we are not praising a particular combination of phonetic sounds. We are not praising the name, but the person it communicates to us. Jesus’ name is not a magic formula—it is not a switch, tapping into some current of supernatural force for our benefit. Rather it is the person, the total consecration of his life to God and to others, that the name makes present.
That is why Luke’s story of the birth of the Messiah is not complete until the child has received his name. The name Mary gives him is the one that God ordained for him through the angel. It means “God saves.” But it is also the name of a folk hero, of Joshua, the successor of Moses. It is a common name, a traditional name that any Hebrew woman might have given her son. The child may have been conceived by divine agency for a unique sacred purpose, but he is born into the traditions of a human family and a human culture.
Luke reminds us that, as it would have been for every male child of his time and place, the naming of Jesus is a cultural and ritual process. It is linked to his initiation into the tribal identity of his people through the practice of circumcision. The holy child of God, the Savior of all humankind, is also a child of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and bears in his body, as in his name, the indelible imprint of his cultural and religious heritage. This paradox is not accidental—it represents in a nutshell the New Testament’s transformation of the Hebrew tradition, a transformation which began in the imagination of Jesus and continues to be available to the world in his name.
In our modern bureaucratic society the legal and ceremonial act of naming has been reduced to signing a form and receiving an official Certificate of Live Birth from the civil authorities. There is a kind of vision of universal humanity implied here. But it is one that ultimately reduces individuals to anonymity—that’s why this act, like all the really important initiations of the modern state, also requires a number.
Yet our collective memory still holds traces of a tradition of sacred naming. Our word “christening,” as a synonym both for Baptism and for naming, recalls the time when we received our names—our “Christian” names—at our baptism. According to this traditional worldview, the family continuity implied in the act of naming a child is of a piece with initiation into a new covenant people, made up of people of every tribe, family, language, and nation. The same naming that confers the status of unique individual personhood, also initiates into the shared personhood of the mystical Body of Christ.
To speak the name of Jesus is to repeat the act of a Jewish woman of the first century, naming her first-born son. At one and the same moment it names our hope for the future, a new kind of humanity, known to us most vividly in the man that Mary’s son became. St. Paul sums up that hope in a single word, “adoption”—one of his great metaphors for our transformation in grace. To be adopted, of course, is to receive new parents and a new family, maybe even a new name, and the whole purpose of the incarnation of Jesus, says Paul, is to reveal us to ourselves as children, all of us, children together with him, in one family.
And the sign of our entrance into that new family is that we will learn a new name. Not only for ourselves, or for each other, but also for God. In the place of the old name, the proper name, the dread name that we must not speak, we will learn to call God by the name that Jesus called him—Abba! Daddy! And in that naming we will know ourselves as we have never been known before, as bearing a life and a name that is long in the giving. It is prepared for us and yet withheld with the greatest of tenderness and care, until we are truly and completely ready to claim what was ours from the beginning, the name of Christ.
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