Sunday, January 1, 2023
/Holy Name
Numbers 6: 22-27; Psalm 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:15-21
The Rev. James M. L. Grace
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. AMEN.
In addition to today being New Year’s Day – January 1 – the church also celebrates today as the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. Holy Name is a day celebrated eight days after the birth of Jesus (which we celebrated December 25). Eight days after December 25 is January 1 – today.
In the Gospel of Luke this morning we hear in the last verse of the passage that eight days after his birth, Jesus was circumcised, a ritual which marked his acceptance into the community, and which has ties to the very first book of the bible, Genesis. In Genesis 17:12, God instructed Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity with these words: “every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old.” In honoring this tradition, Mary and Joseph followed the expectations and obligations of their community.
Also important on the eighth day after the birth of the child was the conferring of a name. Joseph already was told by the angel Gabriel to name this child Jesus, and the name Yeshus/Jesus/Joshua was conferred on this day. Yeshua (meaning “salvation”) indicates that Jesus will become the Savior for all people, as he does.
Names convey great power – when we choose to name something we are exercising power an authority over it. We define our reality by the names we choose to give to it. For example, when my oldest son chose to name our current dog “Parish,” that meant that would become the name the dog now responds to.
For parents, the naming of a child can be a sacred task, as conferring a name onto the child constructs a certain identity around him or her. My oldest child is named after me, and I am named after my grandfather. My middle son is named after my wife’s maternal grandfather, and by the time of our third child we had run out of people to name kids so we chose the name “Henry” because we liked it.
The veneration of the Holy Name of Jesus, the Nomina Sacra, goes back to early Christianity. We see evidence of this in our reading from Philippians today, which itself is likely the text of an ancient hymn venerating the name of Jesus, as it says in verse 10, “at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
The Holy Name of Jesus is sometimes displayed with three letters called a “trigram.” The letters are IHS, and they are the first three letters from the Greek spelling of the name Jesus. If you were to step behind the altar today, and I encourage you to do so after the service, you will see this trigram, IHS – the name of Jesus put upon the original altar of this church. The Jesuits have made this IHS trigram the emblem of their society, boldly stating that they follow the one whose name is holy – Jesus – not their founder, Ignatius of Loyola.
And by dedicating this Sunday to the name of the one whom we follow, we do the same – honoring the Holy Name Jesus – the most true name in the entire universe. AMEN.