“His name was called Jesus”
What’s in a name? Everything. Something of the wonder and the mystery of words and names is startlingly before us on this Octave Day of Christmas. It is concentrated for us in Bethlehem. Strong words and names are proclaimed in the Scripture readings. Bethlehem is the place of words and names that speak beyond the confines of a stable and a manger. Bethlehem is the place where the Word made flesh is named and signified as Jesus. Such is the wonder and the mystery of this day.
The idea of the Word made flesh, it seems to me, challenges the all-too-easy nominalism and relativism of our culture, as if names were merely of our choosing and at our convenience and as if names and words convey no real meaning beyond what meaning we choose to give to them; in short, that words and names signify no reality. We are really only talking to ourselves.
Bethlehem shows us something more. It makes visible the astounding wonder of the unity of creation with the Creator and the unity of the whole of our humanity. Bethlehem speaks to the deep desires of human hearts and to the form of those desires in their contemporary complexity. What are our environmental concerns about except a yearning and a longing for some sort of connection with the world from which we have alienated ourselves by our technocratic exuberance and arrogance? What are our social and political concerns about except a yearning and a longing for peace and harmony, for true unity and respect for all the peoples of the world?
Does not Bethlehem speak to such hopes and aspirations? Does not the spectacle of the Word made flesh in the lowliness and humility of Bethlehem speak to our desires? “Rich and poor, high and low, one with another”, shepherds and the Magi-Kings, the poor of the earth and the angels of heaven, humans and animals, men and women, and, the God made man, are all one in the wonder and worship of the child of Bethlehem. Here words and names begin to find their meaning.
“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem”, the shepherds say, “and see this thing which is come to pass”. What is this thing? This thing is the Word made flesh, the child “wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger” which “shall be a sign unto you”, the angel had said. This thing is literally “that which is spoken” (το ρημα), which has literally happened (το γεγονος), which “is come to pass”, come to reality, as it were. “Hoc verbum, quod factum est”, as the Latin Vulgate puts it, thereby making inescapable the connection to the great Christmas gospel, “and the Word was made flesh”, “et verbum caro factum est”. Words illuminating words through the illumination of the Word who is Light and Son, the Light and Son of God. “This thing which is come to pass”, the shepherds say, is that “which the Lord has made known unto us”.
Something divine, something heavenly, is made known in the earthly and human realities of Bethlehem. God’s Word redeems the words of our human discourse, the words of our life together with God and with one another. The American poet and farmer, Wendell Berry, observes, in a collection of essays entitled Standing by Words, that the two great diseases of contemporary culture are the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of individuals. He makes the important point that both forms of disintegration relate to the disintegration of language. Bethlehem is the place of the beginnings of the reintegration of language, of word and meaning, of names and things, the place of the reintegration of souls and communities of souls precisely through the great reaching-down of God’s Word to us, the Word made flesh taking shape in us, recalling us to the greater unities of our lives together. At the heart of that reintegration is the meaning and the purpose of the Church signified as the Body of Christ at Bethlehem.
The naming of the child belongs to the reality of the Word made flesh. Names are the great signifiers of purpose and identity. Word, Light, and Son are the great critical images for our understanding of the wonder of God with us, itself captured in a name that conveys that meaning, Emmanuel. Isaiah, too, prophesies that “his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace”. We may wonder what kind of names these are. It would be wonderful, indeed, to examine the vast scope of scriptural references and allusions that these terms evoke. But in the context of the Octave Day of Christmas, it is enough to note that this is the name-day of the child of Bethlehem, and that in his being named Jesus, he enters at once into the history of “the hopes and fears” of Israel as well as “the hopes and fears of all the years” of everyone.
There can be no stronger cultural signifier of purpose and identity with the God who covenants with Israel than the rite of circumcision, the marking in the very particularity of males a sign that identifies one with the God who is beyond the finite world. It is in that very particular context that the child is named. And yet, it speaks beyond that context to signal the idea of redemption. It is, of course, simply part and parcel of the scandal of particularity, the scandal of the Incarnation through which human redemption is accomplished. There is blood in Bethlehem. It is the blood of the child, the blood that connects him, humanly speaking, to the whole pageant of the redemption of God’s people in the witness of the Scriptures; in short, his blood is for us.
The wonder of this day lies in the unity of heaven and earth in the naming of the child. He is named Jesus. It means, of course, Saviour. It is his name from the eternity of heaven, “so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb”. It is the name bestowed by Joseph, the humble spouse of Mary, the protector of the child of God, upon angelic direction. It is the name given by Mary, too, at the direction of the angel Gabriel at her annunciation. It is the name before which all heaven and earth must bow, in wonder and delight and in prayer and praise; it is the name given for us.
We cannot think that name without realizing the need for salvation, the need for something more beyond the divisions of our hearts and our world that wreak such havoc individually and collectively. But are there not many other names for God? Yes, but not as a smorgasbord of names and words from which we choose on the basis of our own whims and fancies, as if they were all equally indifferent, all without any real content and significance. No-name religion, I hasten to remind you, is no religion.
The wonder of the name Jesus redeems the vast array of names and terms, giving them meaning and truth. Jesus is the holy name that signals redemption, the unity of God and man, the unity of the created order, the name that is everything.
“And his name was called Jesus”.
Fr. David Curry,
Christ Church, Windsor
January 1st, 2010