January 1, 2006
(The Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ)
What's in a Name?
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Exodus 34:1-8 • Psalm 8 • Romans 1:1-7
• Luke 2:15-21
(From
The Lectionary Page)
It was a Saturday afternoon and I was maybe 8 years old, playing with my best friend Nina at her house. I furnished the dolls and Nina, as usual, set the stage. It was a Russian winter and one of those hand-crank cheese graters, filched from her mom’s kitchen, was a troika.
“A what?” I remember asking.
“A troika,” Nina said. “A sled pulled by three horses. And this,” she said, picking up my Barbie and thrusting her into the cheese grater, “this is Natasha and she is escaping from the wolves and Cossacks.” Well I didn’t know what a Cossack was either, and I could see that Barbie didn’t exactly fit into the cheese grater, but because I was who I was, I gave voice instead to a troubling point of order.
“You can’t just change her name,” I protested.
I remember Nina looking at me as though I had just grown another head. “You can too,” she said. “You can change her name whenever you want to.”
Well this was a stunning revelation to me because my dolls were named with the finality of a birth certificate. Change a doll’s name? That would be like changing my own name, for heaven’s sake. We are confined by our identity, right? Change that rule and you change everything. Which, of course, was Nina’s point exactly, but I didn’t get that when I was 8.
Today we observe the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. In its Aramaic form, it would have been pronounced something like Yeshura which means, Yahweh Saves. Which, in turn, is a wonderful summation of the Book of Exodus – indeed, of most of the Hebrew Bible. Yahweh saves.
Yahweh, of course, is the best we can do when it comes to pronouncing the unpronounceable. When God appeared to Moses from the midst of the burning bush, God said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” Moses, having lived in a polytheistic culture all of his life, pressed God for a name. “How shall I identify you to my people?” he asks. But God is not about to be pinned down. “I am who I am,” God replied. Or, “I shall be who I shall be.” The Hebrew is purposely obscure. It can also be translated, “I cause to be that which I cause to be.” God is the first cause and the final purpose, but has no proper name. The best we can do is derive an acronym from that ambiguous answer. That acronym, translated from Hebrew into English, is YHWH. Throw in some vowels that the original Hebrew would not have countenanced and we have something pronounceable, but not at all concrete. Fluid, dynamic, always in movement, un-pin-down-able. God, we learn from today’s reading from Exodus, is known not so much by a proper noun as by a series of action verbs: God is slow to anger, God steadfastly loves God’s people, God forgives iniquity and transgressions, God is filled with boundless mercy and grace. As we read the whole of the Hebrew Bible, we find that God is disclosed to humankind through God’s saving acts in history: leading the Israelites out of bondage and into freedom, giving them the covenant, leading them to the Promised Land, and restoring them to the land once more after Exile in Babylon.
And, of course, as Christians we believe that God’s disclosure of self finds its highest expression in the incarnation of Jesus – Yeshura – Yahweh saves. That God did this – took on human flesh – is a stunning reminder of just how committed God is to us, to our existence. The God who hid his face from Moses, who spoke through dreams and visions to the Patriarchs, who inspired the prophets and who remained and remains mysterious and ineffable is also a God with a human face and with a name. As one writer put it, God chose to be named because we need to know God face to face, to have contact with God’s love from within our existence. God chose finitude not because God can somehow be contained, but rather so that we might see the limits of our existence not as something to resist, but as something that God knows and has hallowed.
As W. H. Auden put it in his Christmas oratorio For the Time Being, today the Unknown seeks the known and in so doing, seeks to be known in a brand new way. God has a name, and we are invited to call upon it. And as God’s identity was once revealed only in a series of action verbs, the name of his son, Jesus, is active as well: Yeshura. Yahweh saves.
And so it should come as no surprise to us, that we who are baptized into the name of Jesus are also called to a life of active verbs: praying, teaching, breaking bread, persevering in resisting evil, repenting, returning to the Lord, proclaiming the Good News, seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, striving for justice and peace, respecting the dignity and freedom of every human being. Grammar notwithstanding, “Christian” is not a noun so much as a verb. Our reality is defined by the holy name of Jesus.
Which brings me back to the Saturday afternoon several decades ago. My friend Nina understood at age 8 that a name should define, but never confine reality. Clearly, that Saturday afternoon, it was unthinkable for Barbie to be escaping from the wolves and Cossacks. That was a job for Natasha. In the same way, we who are named Christian by virtue of our Baptism, are called to respond with the whole of our lives to our God who creates, redeems and sustains us.
