What’s in a Name? 1st January 2025

 

In the liturgical calendar, 1st January is the called The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus. What a strange thing for us to celebrate on New Year's Day, or at least, the latter part of the Feast/Day!

Saint Joseph with the Infant Jesus, Guido Reni, c 1635 

Wikicommons, public domain

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Joseph_with_the_Infant_Jesus_by_Guido_Reni,_c_1635.jpg

 

The significance of the circumcision of Jesus can be variously understood, not least, in Christian thought, that it means that God chose, when entering the world in the Incarnation, to do so as a Jew and as a male and to submit Godself to Jewish customs and traditions. This, of course, is a mystery. We can speculate and theologise but we cannot know why God chose it to be so. We cannot know the mind of the Divine but Christians accept this, God's choice. We accept it in faith and in light of the conviction based on the authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason (the so-called ‘Anglican Tripod’) or Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience (the ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’) that Jesus Christ was indeed, God walking on the earth. 

That the infant Jesus, like other male Jewish children of his time and place, was taken to the Temple to undergo the religious tradition of being named and circumcised,  means that he was no other-worldly being, impervious to human life and suffering, but rather he was from the outset grounded in the nitty-gritty reality of human experience, including pain. Unlike the imagined gods of the Ancient Near East, which were typically perceived as distant, vindictive, vengeful and malign, in Jesus and the Incarnation, God was showing Godself to be – as is implicit in the meaning of one of the names for Christ, ‘Immaunel’ – with us. God in Christian understanding and as revealed in Jesus, is ‘God with us’ – with us in every experience and every aspect of human experience, the good, the bad and the ugly, “yet without sin”, as the writer to the Hebrew Christians puts it, that is, without ‘messing up’:  

“Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” (Hebrews 4: 14-16)

In his earthly life, Jesus would show that, contrary to human fears old and new, God is not ‘out to get us’, not distant, vindictive, vengeful and malign, but dependable, with us and for us, full of love and grace, love and truth. Significantly, in his death on a cross, God in Christ would show that, he is also the God who has suffered and knows suffering. 

Christian thinkers have debated and written on the subject of ‘the suffering God’ at length, sometimes from a personal and devotional perspective (see, e.g., Henri Nouwen, in https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/jesus-is-god-who-suffers-with-us-2/#:~:text=It%20means%20that%20God%20wanted,%2Dsuffers%2Dwith%2Dus), other times from a more academic theological perspective, and with the intent of defending classical Christian doctrine. (See, for example, Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, published 2000, University of Notre Dame Press).

The 20^th century German Lutheran pastor, neo-orthodox theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote in 1944 in a letter from his prison cell and a position of devastating personal suffering, the frequently quoted words, “Only the suffering God can help”, sometimes paraphrased ‘Only the suffering God will do.’  Bonhoeffer pointed to God having voluntarily taken on Godself powerlessness and suffering, in the Incarnation and Cross, in order to help and rescue humanity, people like us. 

These are weighty matters to contemplate at the end of the Christmas and New Year break, and perhaps ultimately we are trying to fathom the unfathomable. Nevertheless, on the Day that is in it, The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus, it is worth, like Mary the Mother of Jesus, pondering these things to do with the Saviour, and treasuring them in our hearts, at least between now and the Feast of the Epiphany, up next in the Church calendar! The Collect of the Day can helps us do so: 

 

Collect of the Day

Almighty God, 
whose blessed Son was circumcised 
in obedience to the law for our sake 
and given the Name that declares your saving love: 
Give us grace faithfully to bear his Name, 
to worship him in the freedom of the Spirit, 
and to proclaim him as the Saviour of the world; 
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, 
one God, now and for ever.