Holy Name

Propers: The Holy Name of Jesus, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Names are important. More than mere labels, they establish a relationship, a personal and intimate knowledge. When a young man spots a beautiful and alluring woman from across the room, what’s the first thing he’s certain to ask? Her name! If we know another’s name, we can call upon them, speak to them, get to know them. We cease to be strangers and begin our acquaintance. A world of possibilities opens up like the petals of a rose in bloom.

Every name has meaning. We forget this sometimes. We may pick our children’s names to honor friends or family, or simply because we’re enamored of the sound. But each name began as a descriptor, a title, a prophecy or a blessing. It tells us something about who people truly are.

I’ve become somewhat superstitious about names of late. Of our three children, each one seems to have grown into their name, unknowingly shaping their lives to fit their inheritance. One we named for a brilliant but brooding philosopher; another for the Resurrection; and the third after a much beloved saint. Lo and behold, what did we receive? A philosopher, a daredevil devoid of fear, and one rather more saintly than the rest of us. The act of naming someone, it seems, may still contain a touch of destiny.

The Bible calls God by many names: God, Lord, Almighty, Most High, Everlasting. But the real kicker, at least in the Old Testament, is the Name that God gave to Moses. This is the Name so sacred that observant Jews to this day will not pronounce it, instead calling it simply HaShem, “the Name.” When the 10 Commandments forbid using the Name of the Lord your God in vain, this is the Name they’re talking about, the Name given to Moses so that God’s people Israel might know who and what this God of theirs truly is. And that Name is Yahweh.

Yahweh means “I Am.” Of course it also means “I Was” and “I Will Be,” leading some to translate it as “Eternal” and still others to point out that this Name itself is Three in One. Yahweh is the Name God gave to Moses so that His people could call upon their God, could know Him and love Him and have a true relationship with Him. And it is astoundingly profound in its simplicity. It tells us more than one might expect.

God is a not a being within the universe. He is not like the various pantheons of pagan gods, who were born of nature and have all-too-human limitations. God is Being itself. He’s the reason that anything and everything exist at all. God was not born of the universe; He created the universe, and heaven knows how many others. The only reason we’re here, that anything’s here—that there is something instead of nothing—is because God creates and continues to uphold all things in every moment of their existence.

We have being because God is Being, and He gives of Himself so that we might be real and really exist. We have a word for that, for giving of yourself for the benefit of another: it’s called love. That is the definition of love. You, your family, the pews on which we sit, the sun in the sky and sand on the beach and galaxies swirling through space, even the bizarrely mystical particles that make up the smallest divisions of reality as we know it—all these things exist only and always because God loves them. If God ever stopped loving something, that thing would cease to exist.

We are because He is. Or in His own words, “I Am.”

Now it should be noted that Moses is not the only person to have pointed out this understanding of God. Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, certain schools of Buddhism and even the higher classical paganisms all point to the One, the Source, God with a capital G. The experience of God is universal. But it was to the Hebrews that God gave His Name. They were for Him a special possession, a priestly nation set apart, that by blessing them God would bless all the peoples of the earth. And that blessing came to fruition in Jesus Christ.

Christ is God made flesh, God made one of us. And He comes to restore the harmony of Creation lost in our Fall from grace. See, just as we were made in love, so we were also made to love—to love God, to love one another, and to love all that God has made. We screwed that up when we chose to love ourselves instead. And when love goes wrong, nothing goes right. We broke the world, folks.

But Jesus is God’s supreme endeavor to set love right. No longer does He send prophets or angels; no longer does He entrust salvation to intermediaries or messengers. No, in Jesus Christ, God comes down Himself, down into the mud and the blood. Jesus is both truly God and now truly Man. And in Him, humanity itself is set right. In Jesus, a human being finally loves God the way that human beings were created to love God. And because of this, He is the first true human since Adam and Eve. He is what we were all meant to be, what we once were and, God willing, will be again.

“This is why God became man—to offer himself to God in a perfect act of love, and thus to set everything else right … [At Christmas], a very small human being, nestled in his mother’s arms, begins the long and painful process of returning the human race to a properly ordered love. When love goes right, everything else falls into place.”*

Today we celebrate the Name that is above all other names, the Name at which every knee at last shall bow: the Holy Name of Jesus. Jesus is a latinate form of Yeshua, which literally means, “Yahweh Saves.” Jesus does not replace the Name of God from the Old Testament, but completes it, fulfills it. Yahweh tells us who God is, what God is: “I Am.” But Jesus tells us what God does, who God is for us: “Yahweh Saves.”

This is not merely some title or descriptor. This is who Jesus is at the deepest and most foundational level. This is who God is: Yahweh Saves! It is His nature, His desire, His very Being, to save us—to save all of us—from ourselves, from the devil, from the world that’s gone so wrong. To know God like this, to know His sweet and Holy Name, is to have faith that God is love, that every moment of our lives, every breath, every heartbeat, is upheld in love. And the aim of that love is to save us, to fight for us, to win us body and soul, forever and ever, world without end!

God can seem so distant sometimes. So unknowable. So unfathomable. We wonder if He hears, if He cares, if He could ever love someone like us—let alone forgive us, save us. We who are so small, who have gone so far astray. We who are weary and broken and longing, and still very much in sin. But that is why He has given us His Name, so that there is no question as to who God is, no question as to the relationship we have with Him. We exist because of love. We are here because of love. And that love will save us, will rescue us, kicking and screaming, from ourselves and all the hordes of devils that surround us.

We call to Him, and He hears. We cry to Him, and He answers. For His Name is who and what He is: “I Am. And I Save.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

*The words of Fr Patrick Henry Reardon from the St James Daily Devotional Guide, Winter 2016-2017.