Meditation for the Octave Day of Christmas
“His name was called JESUS”
Christmas is more than a three-day or even a nine-day wonder. There are the proverbial twelve days of Christmas, an octave and a half, as it were. Only so, it seems, can we begin to unpack the mystery of the Incarnation and its radical meaning of human redemption. The blood of the Holy Innocents on Monday past anticipates and participates in the blood of this day. The Octave Day of Christmas locates the story of Jesus and his sacred humanity concretely within the cultic and cultural realities of ancient Judaism. The Octave marks the Circumcision of Christ, the first blood-letting of Christ in the Christian understanding, circumcision is the Old Testament ritual that has its Christian counterpart in baptism.
We are apt to be squeamish about such a direct and emphatic insistence on the physical reality of the body and that of a male, to boot. But it belongs to the logic of the Incarnation itself that Christ is “made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law” as Paul in Galatians puts it. Only so might we receive the adoption of sons, our being made partakers of God through God’s Word and Son made man. Circumcision was the ritual of Jewish identity signifying a bond with the God who is beyond all nature as its principle and signifying that in the most particular aspects of the human male. Yet such is the logic of redemption. “Christ was man born of woman to redeem both sexes,” as John Hackett (17th c.) wonderfully notes.
The readings for the Octave focus on a further signifier in this ritual, the idea of naming. In Christian contexts, baptism is sometimes called Christening. It has entirely to do with our being incorporated individually into the body of Christ. More significantly, Christian baptism has to do with our being named individually in the giving of God’s own name as Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Here on the Octave Day of Christmas, the theme of naming is emphasized by way of Isaiah and Luke. Isaiah in a lovely passage which highlights the various titles or names of the expected one who comes as child and son and whose “name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, the everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” All of these connect to Luke’s Gospel reading where Jesus at his circumcision “was called JESUS”. The name Jesus is all in capital letters, thus screaming out to us the meaning of Jesus as saviour, on the one hand, and then reminding us, on the other hand, that he was “so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” He is JESUS from eternity. This name conveyed by God to the Angels is conveyed in turn to Joseph who “called his name JESUS,” as Matthew notes.
