Sermon – The Feast of the Holy Name, January 1, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Do you know the story of your name? Many of us do. Maybe like my five-year-old Murray, you were named for a grandparent whose birthday was the day you were due. Maybe like me, you were given one of the few boys’ names with a nickname that you could keep forever, so that there would never be a day when, as every Timmy becomes a Tim and every Jimmy becomes a Jim, I would have to switch from Greggy to Greg. Maybe it was part of a trend—maybe you were a girl born in the year 1960 and so your name had to be Debbie, Deborah, or Deb; maybe you were a boy born in 2018, when Aiden, Caden, Jayden, and Braden all made the top 20.
Or maybe it was something more normal than that. Maybe an angel of the Lord appeared to each of your parents individually as they planned for their wedding day and told them that they were to name you Jesus, (Luke 1:31, Matthew 1:21) “for [you would] save [your] people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21) And so you were “called Jesus, the name given by the angel before [you were] conceived in the womb.” (Luke 2:21) Or something like that.
Today we celebrate a holiday that falls on January 1 every year. Not New Year’s Day, although many of us may also be celebrating that, but a rather less popular one: the Feast of the Holy Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. On the eighth day of Jesus’ life, we join the Holy Family for his bris, for the ritual of circumcision and naming that had been a part of the life of the people of God since the earliest days, since the times of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
A name is an important thing. Most people carry it with them their whole lives. And in our culture, the meaning of a name itself is often somewhat obscure; it’s the sort of thing you look up in a book. But that’s only because English is a pirate language, full of words stolen from other languages. And in those languages, names mean something. “Gregory” is Greek for “watchful.” “Dorothy” is Greek for “the Gift of God.” “Jane” is the Anglicization of Jeanne, which is the French form of Joanna, which is the medieval Latin feminine form of Johannes, which is the Greek form of Yochanan, which means, in Hebrew, “the Lord is gracious.”
And “Jesus” means, “the Lord is help.” And Jesus means, “Salvation.”
“Jesus,” like many of these names, has gone through a bit of a transformation. “Jesus” is that Latin version of the Greek version of the Hebrew and Aramaic name Yeshua, which is itself a contraction of the older Hebrew name Yehoshua. You can almost hear how “Yehoshua” would become “Joshua,” just like “Yehochanan” became “Yohanan” became “Johan” or “John,” and “Yehonatan” became “Yonatan” became “Jonathan.” “Yeho” in each of these names is the name of God: not the generic term “God” but the specific name of a specific God, the four-letter name YHWH, considered too holy by observant Jews to be spoken aloud. This is the name that you’ll see translated sometimes in the Old Testament with the words, “the LORD,” with LORD in those funny small-caps.
But Jesus’ name is a bit of a pun. Because while “Yehoshua” means “God is salvation,” “Yeshua”—its contraction—sounds an awful lot like the Hebrew word meaning “salvation.” It’s literally the difference between יְשׁוּעָה and יֵשׁוּעַ, and if you can hear or understand that distinction then God just may be calling you to a deeper study of Proto-North-West-Semitic philology.
So “Jesus” means “God is salvation.” And Jesus also means “salvation.” Which means, in a sense, that Jesus, who is salvation, is God, who is salvation.
This isn’t, strictly speaking, the way logic works. But it is the way symbolism works. And it explains the enigmatic comment that the angel makes to Joseph: you will call him Jesus, “for he will save his people from their sins.” You will call him “Salvation,” because he will save them. And it’s possible that even the word “save” isn’t quite right here; it’s probably something closer to “help.” The most respected Hebrew lexicon I have glosses the name “Yehoshua” as “The Lord is help.” Jesus is not just “salvation,” in an abstract or theological sense. Jesus is help. And maybe this connects with you more. Because while you may not always feel like you are in need of salvation, you probably sometimes feel like you need some help.
Believe it or not, there’s much more that I could say about the name “Jesus” or “Yehoshua”—about the great prophet Joshua, lieutenant of Moses, who finally led his people out of their wanderings in the wilderness and into the Promised Land; about the great high priest Joshua, the anointed one who rebuilt the Temple and whom the prophet Zechariah depicts as a semi-messianic figure being accused by Satan—but I regret to say that I’m going to leave it here, instead, with a simple questions.
Where in your life do you need help this year? And how can Jesus be a “help” to you? On January 1, many of us are making resolutions and setting goals in a new year. Does it help to know that there is a God who has sent the Holy Spirit to comfort and guide you as you struggle along the way? Many of us are trying to leave behind the patterns of the past, and start off fresh. Does it help you to know that there is a God who will forgive you more easily than you’ll forgive yourself for all your failings? Many of us are cold or tired or sick, trying to make it through one more day, one more week, one more month. And God has been there; in the Jesus whose birth we still celebrate during these twelve days of Christmas, we know that God has been there, and is there, right alongside us; that the God whose name is “Help” has helped us and he helps us still, because he walked among us and he lives among us even now in the one who “was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”