man looking at right side — Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash

In silence, the Word rang out with the sound of light. Word of words, light of light, Name of names, Name before names, Name without before, before which even angels dare only to reply in Alleluias: the Living Name which cannot rightly be spoken but to whom all in earth and heaven must bend the knee and sing. For all the words in Creation cannot hold that Word which always and already holds them, before and beyond the moments of their utterance. Our names cannot name Him whose Name is beyond every name and which gives all things meaning. Our words cannot define God, but only praise Him.

There have been moments where God has named Himself to mortals; but even then, the Name hides as it reveals. When He met Moses in a blaze of fire, appearing as an angel, the Lord gave not one name, but two, and both barely translatable: two four-letter Hebrew words meaning something like “He who is,” and “I am,” but broadened in temporal scope by the lack of present tense in that Semitic tongue. The Name itself, no pious Jew will utter, even when it is written in Hebrew Scripture, replacing the Name with Adonai, or “Lord.” In common speech today, Jews often call God simply ha Shem, “the Name.” For even the Name God gave to Moses does not exhaust his meaning, as Moses would later learn, when He met God not in the clarity of flame, but cloaked in darkness on Sinai. God reveals Himself as hidden. The Father of lights reflects in our glass darkly. Only when we see the night shine as day, light and dark alike, do we see as He sees (Ps 139.12); only when we know that the Name revealed in fire is the Name clad in shadow.

Hence the fullest revelation of the Name is not in a word, but in a person: the Word, at once revealed in flesh and concealed in it. And at a point in time, the true Name of the Word was made plain. We might think of that time in two ways.

The first is the time of the historian, a straight line drawn from past to present, and punctuated by events: the time of clock and calendar to which we daily (though not without resentment) submit our lives. On this timescale, the Naming and Circumcision of the Lord are an event which happened as Jewish custom dictates eight days after He was born, almost two millennia ago, in the Temple in Jerusalem, and hence by the Western Christian calendar, on New Year’s Day.

But the way we measure time is not how we most naturally experience it, which is not so much a straight line as a circle. Take, for example, the day when someone you love died. Whether it is one year, or ten, or fifty years after, the anniversary of that day brings you closer in time to their death than you were, say, six months before. The psychologist will tell you that our bodies remember traumas, including bereavement, not as distant events on a timeline, but in cyclical return. Likewise at Christmas every year, whatever the line may say, we are closer to the birth of Christ than we were in mid-summer of the same year. We are closer to the Crucifixion every Friday than we were the Monday before, and closer to the Resurrection on Sunday than on the previous Wednesday, which is why the Prayer Book, in common with the tradition of the whole Catholic Church, prescribes fast and feast respectively on those days. It is why Christians have always celebrated the Eucharist on Sundays (and note: it is meant to be a celebration, not a grim or tedious commemoration). Every morning, we are closer to the dawn of time than we were the night before, and every evening, to its close: hence the Church blesses the first and last hours of each day with the Songs of Zachariah and of Simeon. Time as we really know it is circular, cyclical, repetitive, ritual – or as we say in the trade, liturgical. The cycles of the universe are like ripples through the ocean of being, spreading from the Foundation Stone of the Church.

So on the first day of the New Year, as the earth circles the Sun once more, through Holy Church, Our Lord blesses the year with the Feast of His Circumcision and Naming. So, He brings the moment in which He penetrated the line of time into its proper and perpetual revolution. At that moment on the line, a boy received the Circumcision in the Temple, mark of his people’s covenant with God, and with it the name of Abraham and Israel, forefathers of his family, the House of David. The severed flesh of the male child was the first-fruits offering of a particular, priestly nation, through which the rest of His flesh would become the sacrifice of a cosmic priesthood for universal atonement. So from one particular name, given in time to one particular child in one particular place and culture, the True and Universal Name, the Catholic Name, echoes into the universal liturgy. The Name revered in the Temple on High resounds through the earthly Temple as through a conch shell, to the ends of the cosmos.

And “His name was called Jesus.” In linear time, the name is unremarkable, a commonplace among that people, in those days. Bound to the mechanical model of time encouraged in recent centuries by the “working hours” of industry and our addiction to digital devices, we may be tempted to leave it at that: to say that a name is just a name, and that Jesus’ is just a coincidence. To say that names, like time, are just conceptual pointers which we impose onto an essentially nameless reality, helpful social constructs which help us to comprehend the world, but hide the fact that only particulars really exist. That the name of Jesus means “God saves” would then be a happy coincidence, but unnecessary, not essential to his being. He might equally, as Monty Python had it, have been called Brian.

But Scripture does not permit such demythologising tactics here. For while there is nothing to stop God working through coincidence, Jesus’ name was not given to Him by his parents. Rather, He “was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” Mary and Joseph only consented to the Name. Names, to the ancients, were not chosen, but inherited, and replete with meaning. Take Abraham, “father of the nations,” or Israel, “the wrestler with God,” by whose name the Lord called an entire people to redemption: “Fear not, for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by name; thou art mine” (Isa 43.1). As, indeed, He called others, and calls us still. The Word called Peter the Rock on which He would build His Church; by her own name, He called Mary Magdalene to knowledge of the Truth of His; by our baptismal names, He calls us to participate in the spiritual lineage of one or more of His many saints.

So scriptural names betoken a reality, as well they might: for is not the Word who speaks in Scripture the same Word who gave form and life to all creation, and was born in time of Mary? Do not all names derive from the Name? And yet, to understand names as gifts received, rather than as possessions to be deserved or discarded, marks a radical difference between ancient Christian culture and its less than grateful modern heirs. In Scripture, the Word names man and woman; in Baptism, the Word names us among the saints; in the Eucharist, the Word names bread and wine His Body and His Blood. Leave these names open to redefinition, make them matters of mere convention and assent, and we rob them of their meaning. Worse, we leave their doors wide open to theft by the strongest will, whether of people, doctor or despot, or of technocrats and their marketing AIs. Whether it be Ceausescu on state TV proclaiming that rain is falling even as the sun shines outside, academic cabals that women are a social construct and nothing more, Facebook that one more brand or app is your key to happiness, their naming becomes not a recognition of truth, but the exercise of power. Compare the words of Our Lord, that it is not power but truth that sets you free; that He is the Truth; and that He is the Word in which all words pre-inhere, the primal Word and Name of Names, not to be defined, but to be remembered and restored in Him. All that is, and was, and ever shall be is already and always in Him.

The Holy Name is a call for us to return. For on this day, the One who Is reveals Himself as the One who Saves. By the flesh and Name of Jesus, the perfection of being is revealed as salvation. By the flesh and Name of Jesus, the Name completes the circle of perfection, of restoration of all things to their fullness in Him. By the flesh and Name of Jesus, we, His Holy Church, continue on His straight Way to hallow time and space through the offering, at the appointed hour, of His Body and His Blood.

God saves. The Name is non-negotiable. It is not defined by our consent but demands it - in song, and on our knees.

The Name and the Flesh: A Sermon on the…