1st January 2008THE NAMING OF JESUS

Fr David Cherry

Numbers  6  :  22 - 27   ; Galatians  4  :  4 - 7 ;  Luke  2  :  15 – 21

“As many as received him he gave power to become the children of God; who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” 

The Naming of Jesus reveals the creative act of the Father who calls and, by calling creates. 

Here we are on the 8th day of Christmas, a People of a New Covenant celebrating the feast of that day by which Jesus is made a member of the Old; an uncircumcised people celebrating the circumcision of the Son of God.   

Jesus, in fulfilment of the Law, undergoes the very cultural and religious requirements of the Covenant that he will draw to an end.  Some commentators speculate that the sacrificing of this little bit of flesh is a ‘left-over’ from human, blood-letting sacrifice from which humanity is being weaned. The non-sacrifice of Isaac marks the beginning of the end of the religion of human sacrifice.  And the Circumcision of Jesus presages the ultimate sacrifice made present in the Mass: that of the cross, by which Jesus in himself as Priest and Victim, brings to an end all violent sacrifice to God.   Jesus now, offers himself to the Father and we are offered by and in him.

And we celebrate that this God is made available to you and me as beneficiaries of a new religion coming into bloom, a religion and culture in which, as St Paul tells us, we are adopted, grafted in, made fellow heirs with Christ as his Brothers and Sisters; together with him adored by the Father as first born heirs; a religion in which, as the baptismal creed of Galatians tells us, there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free; no more blood sacrifice, no more circumcision required because of the full-flowering of that relationship which God intended from the foundation of the world – and which is now ours.

The Naming of Jesus reveals the creative act of the Father who calls and, by calling creates.  He calls creation into being by uttering names and, behold, they are.  “At his voice Creation, sprang at once to sight / All the angel faces, all the hosts of light”

He creates by calling and naming.  And all creation is called to respond to the call of God.  Cor ad cor loquitur – Heart speaks to heart (Cardinal Newman’s motto)

And this Child is named Jesus.  In Hebrew “Yeshua”, meaning ‘Yahweh rescues’, God saves.  To be named is to come into being through one’s conditioning, to be formed and be given one’s vocation.  God doesn’t create, then name and then find some role for you to fulfil.  Your vocation is to be where you are, what you are, and who you are.

And this loving call into Being is just there from the beginning to each and everyone.  “The Lord called me from the womb,” writes Isaiah (49:1b) “from the body of my mother he named my name.”

Rowan Williams in a chapter on Vocation [Open to Judgement], writes: “…to talk about God as your creator means to recognise at each moment that it is his desire for you to be, and so his desire for you to be there as the person you are.  It means he is calling you by your name, at each and every moment, wanting you to be you.”

Crises in life are those realisations where one realises that one has lost one’s way, become un-real, less oneself, forgetting who we are, not remembering the call of our name.  

WH Auden talks of the memory of the stable where :

“Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection…”    
 (FOR THE TIME BEING)


Rowan Williams goes on:  “God asks for his Word to be answered, he asks for response.  To exist really is to exist as responding-response to God, to mirror God in unique ways, to show God what he is like, so to speak, from innumerable new and different standpoints.   So one clue to our identity is this, the idea of mirroring God: we have to find what is our particular way of playing back God his self-sharing, self-losing care and compassion, the love because of which he speaks and calls in the first place.”

Here at his circumcision and Naming, Jesus, of his own people, their language and race, is fully human and fully Divine : Himself; already the victim of an old order being transformed as God calls and creates anew by speaking in this Child, the Word made flesh; who, throughout his life, will hear his name called by the Father and continue his Father’s creative work of calling and naming you and me into Being.  

So here we are, rejoicing, responding, that we may become that which we were created to be : “…children of God; who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”