He Named Him Jesus

Propers: The Fourth Sunday in Advent, A.D. 2019 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

The Christmas Story as we know it is an amalgam of many witnesses. The Gospel according to St Matthew focuses on Joseph’s side of the story, and assumes a largely Jewish audience; while the Gospel according to St Luke puts Mary front and center, and speaks more broadly to the various peoples of the Roman Empire.

Then you’ve got Mark’s Gospel, which cuts right to the chase, opening with the adult ministries of Jesus and John the Baptist; while John takes a markedly cosmic perspective, beginning from eternity and the creation of the world: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

There’s even a sort of Christmas story in the Revelation of St John, with a woman robed in the sun, standing upon the moon, who gives birth to a Child pursued by a dragon. I have some friends who like to put red dragons in their Nativity scenes to remind us of this rather evocative part of the tale.

The tradition that Christ was born at midnight comes to us from the book of Wisdom, in the Greek Old Testament, which you will find in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but not in many Protestant editions.

And then there are some details—like the very pregnant Virgin Mary riding to Bethlehem upon a donkey—which don’t appear in the biblical narrative at all, but come down to us from later popular works, such as the Proto-Gospel of James.

Put them all together, and you have a wonderful story for one of our favorite festivals.

Now, the Matthean account of Christmas, from which we read this morning, seems particularly concerned with naming. Names are always important, especially in the Bible. Names tell us who someone is and how to call out to them. To know a name is to know a relationship, for indeed, that’s the first thing we ask of anyone: “What is your name?” We have a hard time accepting anything as real until we’ve named it. And so as Matthew tells his side of the story, he pays close attention to the names of our God. For the Name is who He truly is.

Matthew begins, “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.” Note that in the Greek, it’s actually the “genesis” of Jesus, not only recalling the creation of the world at the beginning of time, but also signaling a New Creation now begun in Christ Jesus, the New Adam, the new human being.

We have, of course, Mary and Joseph, Joseph being named for that famous dreamer in the Old Testament, who received revealed truths from God in his sleep. Thus we should not be surprised when this new Joseph also dreams up visions of angels. Joseph is engaged to Mary, a young woman by all accounts, whose name is also significant. Have you ever noticed that every other woman in the New Testament seems to be named Mary? Did they not have more than one baby name for girls?

Well, there’s a reason for that. And it has to do with Herod, the false king of Israel, who married, and then murdered, the last princess of the previous dynasty. Her name was Miriam, or Mary, named for the sister of Moses. And so the people of Israel, grumbling under the Roman yoke of Herod the Great, protested by naming their daughters Mary—that the false king would never forget the woman he loved and killed. We begin to see, then, the hostility, the volatility, of the world into which Jesus is born. Herod will brook no rivals to his throne.

Alas, while engaged to Mary, Joseph discovers that she is pregnant, and he knows quite well that it cannot be his own. By rights, by law, he could have been quite harsh. Stoning was a common punishment for adulterers in the Middle East. But he wished Mary neither harm nor humiliation. He sought to dismiss her quietly, safely. He had, as he thought, been betrayed, yet sought no retribution. He responded with gentleness and mercy. And this is, I think, greatly to his credit, especially in a culture driven by honor and by shame.

Yet then the angel of the Lord shows up and tells him, “There’s a lot more going on here than you realize. Take Mary as your wife, for the child within her comes not from the seed of man but from God’s own Spirit. And you shall name Him Jesus.”

Now, in the Roman Empire, when a child was born, it would be placed at the feet of the paterfamilias, the legal head of the family. And if the paterfamilias acknowledged the child as his own, then it was recognized as such, taken in and raised in the household. But if he didn’t recognize it—if he didn’t name it—then that child was abandoned and disposed of. The paterfamilias possessed power of life and of death.

So when Joseph names Jesus, he adopts Him, he claims Him as his own. And even that name Jesus, Yeshua, it means “Yahweh saves,” Yahweh being the holy Name of God revealed to Moses, the great I AM. And then—this little passage has a lot in it—Matthew goes on to quote the prophet Isaiah, who writes, “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, of course, “God-With-Us.”

So this same Jesus, this “Yahweh Saves,” is also the God who comes into our world, the God who is with us, beside us, who will put His Spirit in us, who will live the same life that we live and die the same death that we die and rise immortal with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train. Yes, the Christmas tree foreshadows the Cross, but it also proclaims the life evergreen.

This Nativity is, on one hand, a very humble story before the eyes of the world: a poor newlywed couple with an unexpected Child. And of course we all know that the birth takes place in a cave, amongst animals, so that the newborn is laid in a manger.

But there is also this underlying current in the Gospels of what we can’t see, and that is indeed the coming of the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Christ; who does not arrive to cast out the Romans and return to Israel political freedom and military might—which is what we all expected, quite frankly. Rather, this Messiah comes to make war on evil and sin and death and hell.

And in that He will conquer! Not just evil people, mind you, but the evil within our own hearts. He will cut out of us all that is not properly human, all that is not properly you. And He will make us at last what we were always meant to be, who we were always meant to be: beloved and known and saved by God forever. Christmas is the inbreaking of eternity into time, the Creator entering the Creation. For this is how God elects to give of Himself, to pour Himself out, for His Creation, to save us from ourselves, from our sins, and to raise us up in Him forever.

The birth of Jesus is the beachhead of Heaven breaking into this enemy-occupied world. And though He comes quietly, humbly, almost anonymously, born vulnerable and fragile and weak as any babe, born through the guts of a girl; nevertheless, we shall see, as this Child grows in wisdom and strength, proclaiming the Kingdom and raising the dead—and eventually sacrificing Himself at our hands and for our sake—that Satan, ultimately, does not have a prayer.

This is the Advent of our God. This is the arrival of the Messiah whom we have expected for a thousand years, and for whom we have longed since the beginning of time, from our very first Fall. Thanks be to God that our wait is nearly done. Christ comes to us in history, in mystery, and someday soon in majesty. He comes to us in Christmas. And I very much look forward to sharing that with you all.

May Jesus be born in us today, as once He was born in Mary; so that we may bear the Christchild anew in our own generation, in our own broken world; where He will just as assuredly save us all.

And he named Him Jesus.

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