And he named him Jesus.
The Feast of the Holy Name is one of those Christian feast days (sort of like Easter) that was added to the calendar and commandeered from those pesky secular feast days. Holy Name was to counteract the pagan commemorations of the New Year. Commandeered or not, the Feast of the Holy Name is a legitimate day and celebration, and one I’m glad comes today.
In ancient Jewish culture, baby boys were circumcised and named eight days after birth. Because we celebrate Jesus’ birth December 25, today, eight days later, we celebrate his naming. On December 25, we celebrate God’s incarnation as a human. Today, we celebrate the rites and rituals of that human life, since this would have been the first such ritual performed on the God-child, and his receiving a name.
Thinking about the incarnate God, even contained in an infant, I am awed by the vastness of the idea that God was in a child. There’s something oddly constraining about the naming of that child, that I’d never thought about. The God-child sounds immense, and all-powerful. Because we have ascribed God-child status to the name Jesus, it also invokes the same ideas - immense and all-powerful. Maybe that’s because we’ve gotten inoculated to the name. It’s become normalized into a much bigger thing than just a male name.
But what if they’d named him William? Not that William was a common name at the time, but substitute one of the top boy names from 2019 for Jesus, I’m not sure what I think about a God-child named Billy. Celebrating the naming of Jesus celebrates the normalizing of the God-child into our mortal life. God incarnate wasn’t given a spectacularly holy name of Jesus. God incarnate was given a normal boy name of the time.
But now, thousands of years later, we invoke that spectacularly normal boy name to invoke God. The Holy Name of Bill or Jimmy.
The Holy Name of Jesus is about God incarnate being made normal, and mortal, and constrained by a name. Or conversely, the Holy Name of Jesus is making Holy and immortal and unconstrained the mere mortal normalcy of the name Jesus, or Billy or James. By Holy God incarnate becoming a named human baby, the Holy Name of Jesus is making Holy the normal babies and named things in our world. Jesus wasn’t a holy name until God made it a holy name by becoming a normal, named baby.
This morning, I’m thinking about God’s choice to become human, to be circumcised, and to receive a normal baby name. I’m grateful God elected to succumb to all the normal things I go through, and by being named, elected to make holy all the normal named things I encounter in my mortal world.
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