One of the wonderful things about the liturgical tradition is that we get to say ‘Happy New Year’ twice
a year. The church new year began a little over a month ago on the first Sunday of Advent, and now
we join with most of the world in marking the beginning of a new era in human history with the birth of
Jesus Christ.
You’ve probably noticed that it’s now become the cultural norm to refer to all the years since Christ’s
birth with the letters CE, which stands for ‘Common Era.’ This has replaced the letters A.D., short for
Anno Domini, or ‘Year of Our Lord,’ which apparently was deemed to be ethnocentric, or religiously
imperialistic or something. I hope you’ll forgive me for declining to use the ‘new and improved’
version, and holding to tradition instead. I guess I’m just old school on that. So, Happy New Year,
and welcome to The Year of Our Lord, 2012.
Which reminds me, I hope by now you’ve all prayed the new, informal collect for the New Year’s Day
Devotion for this morning. It goes like this: “Dear Lord, So far this year I've done well. I haven't
gossiped, I haven't lost my temper, I haven't been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or overindulgent.
For that I give thanks. But, Lord, in a few minutes I'm going to get out of bed, and from then on I'm
probably going to need a little help. Amen.” May we start each day of this new year by invoking God’
s help.
Well, today is not only New Year’s Day, but it’s also the Feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus
Christ. This is a relatively recent feast day, dating from the 1500’s, first to the Franciscans and later
to the broader church. If having a feast day in honor of the name of Jesus seems curious to you, you’
re probably not alone. After all, what really is in a name? Why is a word so important? I was a bit
curious myself, and the more I investigated it in reference sources, the less I seemed to know.
So I decided that I’d start off this new year by focusing briefly on what the scriptures say about the
name of Jesus. And if you want to boil it down to two general facets of why the Holy Name is
important to us, these have to do with issues of identity and of authority. The first thing I’d like to
point out is that what we’re talking about this morning is the name of Jesus, not his titles. There are
literally dozens of titles that have been applied to Jesus including King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Root
of Jesse, Son of David, Son of Man, Son of God, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Prince of Peace, and so
forth. Even the familiar word Christ, of course, isn’t Jesus’ last name. It’s a title meaning ‘Messiah’, or
Anointed One. Jesus’ name might be best rendered as ‘Jesus the Christ.’
But what I want to turn our attention to is the name (or names) that were assigned to our Lord at the
beginning of his Incarnation among us. I’d first like to look at that name ‘Emmanuel’. In Isaiah’s
messianic prophecy he says this: “The Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman (or
‘virgin’) is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him ‘Immanuel’.” Now, it might reasonably
be asked what this has to do with the price of eggs since Jesus was named ‘Jesus’, and not
Immanuel. Moreover, Matthew is the only Gospel writer to seize on this prophecy, quoting the
prophet and explaining that Emmanuel means ‘God with us.’
But Matthew confidently sees Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophecy, and isn’t shy about
proclaiming this. And of course he’s quite clear on the name thing, as, two verses earlier, he writes
of the angel telling Joseph, “[Mary] will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus…” In Luke’s
Gospel the archangel Gabriel tells Mary the same thing.
What Matthew’s doing here is saying that Jesus’ name could just as correctly be called ‘Emmanuel’
since he not only fulfills the prophecy of the redeemer being born of a virgin’s womb, but that he
truly is ‘God with us.’ He’s God incarnate—the Son of God who has coexisted in one substance with
the Father since before creation. Several of the early Church Fathers, including St. Irenaeus, St.
Epiphanius, and St. John Chrysostom, agreed that the name ‘Emmanuel’ is basically Matthew
proclaiming the Incarnation.
Yet our Lord was named ‘Jesus.’ You probably know that ‘Jesus’ is the English rendering of the
Greek name Iesus or Iesu, which is their way of saying the Hebrew name Joshua, or Yeshua. The
important thing is what the name means. It means “the Lord saves.” This is the very key to Jesus’
identity. The angel directed Mary and Joseph to name their son Jesus because that single name
captures the most important role he would have in being incarnate among the human race. The full
sentence delivered by the angel to Joseph was this: “Mary will bear a son, and you are to name him
Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
You who’ve heard sermons from this pulpit will know that I sometimes put a fair bit of emphasis on
this whole ‘sin’ thing. And at the risk of sounding defensive I want to assure you that this is neither
an archaic concept nor some kind of strange psychological obsession for me. Rather, I make a
pretty big deal of it because Jesus himself, along with the New Testament writers, makes a pretty big
deal of it. He plainly sees it as the fundamental human problem. It separates us from God, and it
separates us from each other. It’s a big problem. Because Paul says “the wages of sin is death.”
But in the rest of his sentence comes the clincher: “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of
God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” It’s through faith in Jesus’ work on the Cross to
remove our sin, and his resurrection to achieve victory over death, and his gift of the Holy Spirit to
give us new life, that his name takes on its wonder. It is indeed because of the unfathomable love of
God the Father that “the Lord saves.” So, Jesus’ name shows that it was all in the plan.
The second facet of the holy Name of Jesus has to do with Jesus’ authority. What’s in a name?
In the case of Jesus it’s the power to judge, the power to heal, and the power to save. If it weren’t
clear enough from his status as the coeternal second person of the Holy Trinity, the scriptures leave
no doubt. St. Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians:
“God highly exalted [Jesus] and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of
Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue
should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” And when Paul says that
Jesus is Lord, he uses the word kyrie, which is the Greek word that’s applied to the one creator God.
There can be no doubt of Jesus’ authority. In his name there’s rightful judgment.
In his name there’s the power to heal. In the Acts of the Apostles Peter prayed and commanded a
crippled beggar to stand up and walk, and he did. In response to the onlookers’ astonishment, Peter
said, “By faith in [Jesus’] name, his name itself has made this man strong.” There are a number of
people in this room who’ve seen the power of Jesus’ name in healing. A mangled hand was healed
and restored. An arm blackened by a circulatory problem was healed in 20 minutes in front of a
faithful (and astonished!) group of pray-ers. Cancer has been healed overnight.
Jesus himself said, “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the
Son.” Now, this phrase ‘in Jesus’ name’ isn’t just some kind of incantation we invoke to guarantee
that the magic ‘takes’. It’s a bit more involved than that. This formula actually has to do with praying
in accordance with the Lord’s will in the first place, harmonizing with both his power and his
intentions, and bearing fruit in consonance with his plan. In the same Gospel Jesus says, “You did
not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that
the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.” By the power of his name, Jesus still
heals.
Finally, the authority of Jesus’ name is the authority through which we’re saved. In the opening
words of his Gospel John tries to lay before his readers the cosmic significance of the person, work,
and name of Jesus. John says, “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power
to become children of God.” And Paul says we’ve become “joint heirs with Christ” of the kingdom of
God. For the mere price of belief we literally join Jesus as heirs, as children inheriting the kingdom,
of the most high God. Shortly before His ascension into heaven Jesus himself said, “Thus it is
written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance
and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
Repentance and forgiveness are proclaimed through Jesus’ holy name. Are you hearing the
significance of that? The war that Satan and the fallen angels have waged against God’s most
precious creation—the human race—stands in utter defeat because of a type of power they couldn’t
even begin to understand—the power of love, the power of forgiveness. There’s an old Catholic
saying: “When Jesus was named, Satan was disarmed.” Satan has been disarmed. The work has
been done, and now the main thing for us to do is to proclaim God’s victory to the world, and invite
people everywhere to invest their faith in the One whose gift will save all who believe, for all time and
beyond.
Why the Feast of the Holy Name? What’s in a name? Well, I hope that, like me, you now have a little
clearer idea of why this so important for us and for all the human race.
May we never forget that the name, the identity, the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ is unique and
supreme in all of human history. For in him alone lies our hope and our salvation. Amen.
a year. The church new year began a little over a month ago on the first Sunday of Advent, and now
we join with most of the world in marking the beginning of a new era in human history with the birth of
Jesus Christ.
You’ve probably noticed that it’s now become the cultural norm to refer to all the years since Christ’s
birth with the letters CE, which stands for ‘Common Era.’ This has replaced the letters A.D., short for
Anno Domini, or ‘Year of Our Lord,’ which apparently was deemed to be ethnocentric, or religiously
imperialistic or something. I hope you’ll forgive me for declining to use the ‘new and improved’
version, and holding to tradition instead. I guess I’m just old school on that. So, Happy New Year,
and welcome to The Year of Our Lord, 2012.
Which reminds me, I hope by now you’ve all prayed the new, informal collect for the New Year’s Day
Devotion for this morning. It goes like this: “Dear Lord, So far this year I've done well. I haven't
gossiped, I haven't lost my temper, I haven't been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or overindulgent.
For that I give thanks. But, Lord, in a few minutes I'm going to get out of bed, and from then on I'm
probably going to need a little help. Amen.” May we start each day of this new year by invoking God’
s help.
Well, today is not only New Year’s Day, but it’s also the Feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus
Christ. This is a relatively recent feast day, dating from the 1500’s, first to the Franciscans and later
to the broader church. If having a feast day in honor of the name of Jesus seems curious to you, you’
re probably not alone. After all, what really is in a name? Why is a word so important? I was a bit
curious myself, and the more I investigated it in reference sources, the less I seemed to know.
So I decided that I’d start off this new year by focusing briefly on what the scriptures say about the
name of Jesus. And if you want to boil it down to two general facets of why the Holy Name is
important to us, these have to do with issues of identity and of authority. The first thing I’d like to
point out is that what we’re talking about this morning is the name of Jesus, not his titles. There are
literally dozens of titles that have been applied to Jesus including King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Root
of Jesse, Son of David, Son of Man, Son of God, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Prince of Peace, and so
forth. Even the familiar word Christ, of course, isn’t Jesus’ last name. It’s a title meaning ‘Messiah’, or
Anointed One. Jesus’ name might be best rendered as ‘Jesus the Christ.’
But what I want to turn our attention to is the name (or names) that were assigned to our Lord at the
beginning of his Incarnation among us. I’d first like to look at that name ‘Emmanuel’. In Isaiah’s
messianic prophecy he says this: “The Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman (or
‘virgin’) is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him ‘Immanuel’.” Now, it might reasonably
be asked what this has to do with the price of eggs since Jesus was named ‘Jesus’, and not
Immanuel. Moreover, Matthew is the only Gospel writer to seize on this prophecy, quoting the
prophet and explaining that Emmanuel means ‘God with us.’
But Matthew confidently sees Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophecy, and isn’t shy about
proclaiming this. And of course he’s quite clear on the name thing, as, two verses earlier, he writes
of the angel telling Joseph, “[Mary] will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus…” In Luke’s
Gospel the archangel Gabriel tells Mary the same thing.
What Matthew’s doing here is saying that Jesus’ name could just as correctly be called ‘Emmanuel’
since he not only fulfills the prophecy of the redeemer being born of a virgin’s womb, but that he
truly is ‘God with us.’ He’s God incarnate—the Son of God who has coexisted in one substance with
the Father since before creation. Several of the early Church Fathers, including St. Irenaeus, St.
Epiphanius, and St. John Chrysostom, agreed that the name ‘Emmanuel’ is basically Matthew
proclaiming the Incarnation.
Yet our Lord was named ‘Jesus.’ You probably know that ‘Jesus’ is the English rendering of the
Greek name Iesus or Iesu, which is their way of saying the Hebrew name Joshua, or Yeshua. The
important thing is what the name means. It means “the Lord saves.” This is the very key to Jesus’
identity. The angel directed Mary and Joseph to name their son Jesus because that single name
captures the most important role he would have in being incarnate among the human race. The full
sentence delivered by the angel to Joseph was this: “Mary will bear a son, and you are to name him
Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
You who’ve heard sermons from this pulpit will know that I sometimes put a fair bit of emphasis on
this whole ‘sin’ thing. And at the risk of sounding defensive I want to assure you that this is neither
an archaic concept nor some kind of strange psychological obsession for me. Rather, I make a
pretty big deal of it because Jesus himself, along with the New Testament writers, makes a pretty big
deal of it. He plainly sees it as the fundamental human problem. It separates us from God, and it
separates us from each other. It’s a big problem. Because Paul says “the wages of sin is death.”
But in the rest of his sentence comes the clincher: “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of
God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” It’s through faith in Jesus’ work on the Cross to
remove our sin, and his resurrection to achieve victory over death, and his gift of the Holy Spirit to
give us new life, that his name takes on its wonder. It is indeed because of the unfathomable love of
God the Father that “the Lord saves.” So, Jesus’ name shows that it was all in the plan.
The second facet of the holy Name of Jesus has to do with Jesus’ authority. What’s in a name?
In the case of Jesus it’s the power to judge, the power to heal, and the power to save. If it weren’t
clear enough from his status as the coeternal second person of the Holy Trinity, the scriptures leave
no doubt. St. Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians:
“God highly exalted [Jesus] and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of
Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue
should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” And when Paul says that
Jesus is Lord, he uses the word kyrie, which is the Greek word that’s applied to the one creator God.
There can be no doubt of Jesus’ authority. In his name there’s rightful judgment.
In his name there’s the power to heal. In the Acts of the Apostles Peter prayed and commanded a
crippled beggar to stand up and walk, and he did. In response to the onlookers’ astonishment, Peter
said, “By faith in [Jesus’] name, his name itself has made this man strong.” There are a number of
people in this room who’ve seen the power of Jesus’ name in healing. A mangled hand was healed
and restored. An arm blackened by a circulatory problem was healed in 20 minutes in front of a
faithful (and astonished!) group of pray-ers. Cancer has been healed overnight.
Jesus himself said, “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the
Son.” Now, this phrase ‘in Jesus’ name’ isn’t just some kind of incantation we invoke to guarantee
that the magic ‘takes’. It’s a bit more involved than that. This formula actually has to do with praying
in accordance with the Lord’s will in the first place, harmonizing with both his power and his
intentions, and bearing fruit in consonance with his plan. In the same Gospel Jesus says, “You did
not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that
the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.” By the power of his name, Jesus still
heals.
Finally, the authority of Jesus’ name is the authority through which we’re saved. In the opening
words of his Gospel John tries to lay before his readers the cosmic significance of the person, work,
and name of Jesus. John says, “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power
to become children of God.” And Paul says we’ve become “joint heirs with Christ” of the kingdom of
God. For the mere price of belief we literally join Jesus as heirs, as children inheriting the kingdom,
of the most high God. Shortly before His ascension into heaven Jesus himself said, “Thus it is
written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance
and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
Repentance and forgiveness are proclaimed through Jesus’ holy name. Are you hearing the
significance of that? The war that Satan and the fallen angels have waged against God’s most
precious creation—the human race—stands in utter defeat because of a type of power they couldn’t
even begin to understand—the power of love, the power of forgiveness. There’s an old Catholic
saying: “When Jesus was named, Satan was disarmed.” Satan has been disarmed. The work has
been done, and now the main thing for us to do is to proclaim God’s victory to the world, and invite
people everywhere to invest their faith in the One whose gift will save all who believe, for all time and
beyond.
Why the Feast of the Holy Name? What’s in a name? Well, I hope that, like me, you now have a little
clearer idea of why this so important for us and for all the human race.
May we never forget that the name, the identity, the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ is unique and
supreme in all of human history. For in him alone lies our hope and our salvation. Amen.
January 1, 2012
Fr. Dan Tuton
Fr. Dan Tuton
What's In A Name?
Feast of the Holy Name
Feast of the Holy Name
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