Luke 2:21
The Name of Jesus - 1 January 2017
Rev. John Derme
Last Sunday, on Christmas Day, we considered the Gospel for Christmas from John chapter 1, which describes Jesus Christ as “the Word.” We talked about what it means for us that Jesus is “the Word.” I gave you a couple of hypothetical examples of how important words are at Christmas to illustrate how important the Word is to Christmas. One was how strange it would be to receive a Christmas card without words. The other was how strange it would be if your favorite Christmas song no longer had words.
Well, this Sunday I have a not-so-hypothetical example for you. After we got home from church and ate our Christmas brunch, my family and I sat down to open a few presents. One of my boys opened a toy for which significant assembly was required. So we grabbed the instructions. There was a nice picture of the assembled toy on the front. But when we opened the directions, there were no words! The pages were completely blank!
Just as a Christmas card without words would be pointless, and a Christmas song without words wouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with Christmas, so the instructions for assembling a Christmas gift without words completely failed. Apparently, words sometimes fail us at Christmas. And words sometimes fail us at New Year’s, too. We often make resolutions at the beginning of the year, saying that we’ll do this, that, or the other thing. And we usually fail to do what we have resolved to do.
In our Gospel for today, we see that we aren’t the only ones who have made resolutions. Even though today’s Gospel is the shortest you’ll ever hear in church – only one verse – it contains two resolutions that Jesus made. But Jesus’ resolutions never fail.
Just as today is the eighth day of Christmas, so our Gospel from Luke chapter 2 takes place on the eighth day of Jesus’ infancy. This was an important day in Jesus’ life. When an Israelite baby boy was eight days old, that was the day he was circumcised and named.
That isn’t how we do it today. Of course, little boys aren’t always circumcised today. But when they are, it happens very soon after they are born. And parents don’t wait very long to name their babies, either. I’m not sure whether this is how it works everywhere, but when my youngest son was born and we didn’t have a name ready to go for him, we were told that he couldn’t leave the hospital until he was named.
The Israelites named and circumcised their boys on the eighth day, because that is exactly the way the Lord told them to do it. The Lord’s command to circumcise went all the way back to the father of the nation: Abraham. The Lord called Abraham to leave his own father’s family, who worshiped false gods. He chose Abraham to be the first in a new nation of people who would worship the true God. Then the Lord gave circumcision to Abraham to be a physical sign of the promises that he had made to Abraham. And the Lord commanded that his descendants also be circumcised, and that they too would receive the benefits of God’s promises.
Why did the Lord choose circumcision, rather than some other procedure? He doesn’t answer that question with as much detail as we might like. Some people think it was a benefit for good hygiene, but God didn’t say that it had anything to do with that. Other people speculate that it was a mark on the reproductive organ, which would be a reminder that the Savior would be Abraham’s descendant. That makes sense, but God didn’t say that, either. From the New Testament, it does seem that it signified the removal of sin that is passed down from father to son. What is absolutely clear is that it was the physical sign of the invisible promises he had made, and that this was the way people would be brought into his family.
The Lord made it clear that circumcision was his will to Abraham. The Lord made circumcision a part of his written ceremonial law through Moses. Male children were to be circumcised when they were eight days old. Although this was a command of God’s law, it wasn’t as though circumcision was a way to earn God’s blessings. The blessings of God, the benefit of his promises, came through faith in the promises, of which circumcision was the sign.
Circumcision and naming went together ever since Abraham’s circumcision, because it was at that time that the Lord changed his name from Abram to Abraham. Perhaps Israelite parents also waited until the eighth day to name their babies because their culture took naming very seriously, and parents wanted to choose the name with just the right meaning.
Mary and Joseph didn’t have to pick a name, of course. God did that for them. The angel had revealed to them that the baby’s name would be Jesus, which means, “the Lord saves,” because “he will save his people from their sins.” This was the most important information that God wanted anybody to know about Jesus. “Jesus” was actually pretty common name in the Old Testament and at Jesus’ time. When parents named their boy “Jesus,” they were confessing their faith that the Lord saves. But only this Jesus would accomplish that salvation.
So it is that in our very short Gospel, two very important things happened to Jesus. Both events showed his purpose for coming and his resolution for what he would accomplish.
Of course, Jesus was only eight days old. He couldn’t even talk. So how could he make resolutions? Jesus wasn’t your average eight-day-old. He is the eternal Word, who was with God and was God in the beginning. When he came to earth to become a human being, he knew what he was getting himself into. So when he was eight days old, he had already decided to keep God’s law for us and to suffer to be our Savior. His circumcision and naming were important, though, because he was revealing those resolutions in a visible and audible way. By his circumcision, he was committing himself to keeping the whole law. By shedding those first drops of his holy, precious blood, he was foreshadowing the blood that he would spill on the cross. By taking the name “Jesus,” he was promising to save his people from their sins.
I’ll bet that none of you think it is weird that we’re talking about Jesus’ name today. Yet some of you may still be wondering why in the world we are talking about Jesus’ circumcision. I’ll admit that it feels a little strange going into such detail about it. But among the Jews, this was a big part of their lives. It must be important, because it is discussed in several places of the Bible. As strange as it may sound, we need a Savior who was named Jesus and who was circumcised. We need a Savior who would not only die for us, but who would keep God’s law perfectly for us in every way.
When we make resolutions, they usually fail. If you are making a New Year’s resolution, how long will it take for it to fall through? Some of you don’t make resolutions because you know they will fail. Can you imagine how fast it would fail if you would resolve to live perfectly under God’s law and never sin? You would fail in no time! We can’t keep from sinning with our best efforts, because we don’t just sin. We have inherited sin from our fathers. And yet perfect obedience is still what we owe to God. Since we have failed to keep all of God’s law and since we can’t keep ourselves from failing, no matter how hard we try, we should be the ones whose blood is shed. We deserve to be cut off from God’s family. We deserve to be named “not God’s people” and “we will suffer for our own sins.”
Because we can’t give God the obedience we owe him, and because we can’t save ourselves from our sins, Jesus was circumcised and named our Savior. He fulfilled the entire law in our place. He shed his blood and died on the cross.
Because of what Jesus has done for us, the New Testament explains that we don’t need to be circumcised anymore. Circumcision was a sign of the promise of the coming Savior, but that promise has been fulfilled in Jesus. Now God has a different sign of his promise, a different way of delivering his blessings to us. The Lord brings us the blessings of what Jesus accomplished in Holy Baptism. Like circumcision, Baptism is something the Lord tells us to do. But it is not a good work by which we earn anything from him. Baptism is actually something the Lord does for us. It is not a law that we keep, but the way God brings his blessings to us. Baptism saves us, because we are saved through faith in God’s promise, trusting in what Jesus has done for us.
We might prefer not to talk about Jesus’ circumcision, because it feels weird, or because we’d rather focus on the cute baby in the manger and not on the pain he experienced. But the circumcision reveals that already on the eighth day, this is the reason he entered the world – to keep the law and shed his blood. So also Jesus’ name reveals that he would die, because that is what he had to do to save us from our sins.
Jesus was resolved to carry out God the Father’s plan. He would do everything that God commanded he do. He would suffer everything that needed to happen to him. He would live, die, and rise again. Now, the name of Jesus is above every other name in heaven and on earth, because Jesus’ resolutions never fail.