With the Wild Beasts and Angels (Lent 1B)

 

 

With the Wild Beasts and Angels

First Sunday of Lent (Year B)
18 February 2023; 11 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at The Mission Church of the Holy Spirit

Sutherlin, Oregon

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP. Ph.D.  

Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-13

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

 

 

One of the details we usually miss about the story of the Great Flood, whose conclusion we read today as our Hebrew Scriptures lesson, is the reason that God decides in that story originally to destroy the earth and all flesh:  it is the violence that has become so common and the cries of those suffering from it.  God can't stand the screams of the victims and decides to unmake the world by letting the great Deep loose from below and above, causing the Flood.  This is not so much, I think, a story of God's intentional harm of his creation, but rather his desire to protect it and preserve it.  That is clearly the point of God's covenant with all creation that we read about today--the rainbow is a sign that God will never again destroy the earth.  God loves his creatures, but hates violence and injustice.  He is not its source.  

 

The reading from Peter links the Flood with baptism, and with the idea that God redeemed his promise to care for all creation by sending the slain Jesus, while his body was in the tomb, to preach the Gospel to the souls of those killed by the waters of the Great Flood.  Baptism is a sign of hope: not a washing of dirt from the body, 1 Peter says, but rather an appeal for a clear conscience.   And in the Gospel reading, Jesus in his own baptism hears the Voice of God declaring his love and acceptance--a verbal affirmation of the hope of God's bow set in the clouds.  

 

The baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist is one of the few events told in the Gospels that almost all biblical scholars and historians agree actually happened.  The story shows up in too many varied forms in too many differing early traditions to ignore.  And the various retellings and versions of the story show an acute embarrassment among some early Christians at the story of their sinless Lord and God seeking “baptism of repentance” from another religious teacher.  Such embarrassment makes it unlikely that early Christians made the story up.  

Mark’s story of Jesus’ baptism and temptation is short and sweet: Jesus comes to John and is baptized.  Coming up from the water, Jesus sees the heavens split apart and the spirit of God descends on him “like a dove.”  Then Jesus hears God’s voice, quoting the Psalms and prophets, “You are my son, this day I have fathered you. I love you, you make me happy.” Immediately, the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness where he remains for forty days, tempted by the Slanderer, living with the wild beasts, though “angels ministered to him.” 

 

What would receiving baptism from John have meant for Jesus and why would he have immediately thereafter gone to the desert to be alone with God?

 

John preaches in the wilderness of Judea, near the north of the Dead Sea. He is within a few kilometers of the community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, and there are clear links between him and that community.

The Judaisms of the period all agreed that impurity both ritual and moral could be driven away by following the prescriptions of the Torah—usually to wash in pure water and wait until sundown. As a result, mikvehs, or ritual baths are common objects in the Jewish archaeological sites from that period.

 

The Dead Sea Scrolls sect, with its dispute with the Temple leadership, believed that simply being born Jewish wasn’t enough to be part of God’s people.  You had to accept the right beliefs and practice the right rituals. They required a ritual washing in order to enter their exclusive community. Their rulebook says that this washing had to reflect a change of heart to be truly valid.

 

Both John the Baptist and the Qumran covenanters fled to the desert to escape what they saw as the corruption and false religion of the Jerusalem elites.   The desert is where God met with his people. God met Moses on Sinai and purified his people there as they wandered for 40 years after leaving Egypt (Exodus 2:11—4:31).  God met Elijah there (I Kings 19:1-18).  

 

John appears preaching what Mark and Luke call a “baptism of repentance unto the forgiveness of sins,” that is, “a washing showing your change of heart that results in your sins being set aside.” 

Why would a thirty-year old building contractor (that’s what the Greek word tekton means, not “carpenter”) from Nazareth be interested in this?  The Judean wilderness was a long way from Galilee for someone on foot.   Why would Jesus want to go to the Baptist, especially if he were not unduly burdened by a sense of guilt or sinfulness?  As a Jew, he would have been unable to avoid incurring ritual uncleanliness in the course of day-to-day life. But the regular washings prescribed by the Law would satisfy that. Why undergo John’s washing to signify a change of heart?

He was attracted to the Baptist’s message:  the Temple and political leadership are hopelessly corrupt and detached from God.  His baptism is something like what the Qumran covenanters practiced, but popularized and meant for all, not a hermetic ritual into an exclusive sect.  Masses of common people flock to Jordan for John’s baptism. 

 

Matthew and Luke give a fuller telling of the Baptist’s preaching: “Go and produce tangible evidence in your acts that you have indeed had a change of hearts.  If you are a soldier, don’t commit unnecessary violence and take advantage of people; if you are a tax revenue agent, only collect what is required and don’t skim the proceeds to line your own pocket.” 

 

The Baptist is preaching basic justice.  He is calling people to take God’s love of fairness personally, to make God’s will their own.  This personal involvement with God, this demand for social justice as evidence of our change of hearts--these are all elements that would remain part and parcel of Jesus’ own proclamation that the Kingship of God had arrived in our midst.

What would John the Baptist say today if we asked him to give examples in our society of tangible evidence of a change in our hearts. Would he ask us to stop walking past beggars without assisting? Would he insist that we stop paying less than living wages to those we employ?  Stop abusing spouses and children?  Looking down on those who differ from us?  Stop frequenting enterprises or buying goods and services based on the exploitation of, or the trafficking in, persons? 

Jesus seeks baptism at John’s hand because he takes to heart John’s message of justice, personal responsibility, and relationship with God.   He is himself having a change of heart.  He is moving from one part of his life to another: from his private life with his family and friends, his assisting in the carpentry/house building business, to his public ministry.   

 

Jesus sees in John’s baptism a call to refocus, to reorient, to redirect his life. For him, the “fruit worthy of a change of heart” would be the living out of the task to which God was calling him. 

 

Despite the pressures on him in Nazareth to do the conventional, to follow the norm, to settle down, possibly start a family of his own and make something of himself, Jesus makes the long journey to see this Wildman of God in the Judean desert.   His neighbors in Nazareth think he has abandoned his Mother and siblings.  Yet Jesus in baptism hears the voice of God.  The result is clear in Jesus’ public preaching when, alone of the religious voices of the day, he calls God, “Father” and says He is above all a loving Father.    

 

This is why he must leave for the desert, where must be tested, “live with the wild beasts” and sort out things to find out what his identity revealed in baptism means. 

 

When Jesus later returns to Nazareth later, his Mother and siblings try to get him to come home and start acting normally again, because they think he has gone insane (Mark 3).  He is no longer the Jesus whom they had known and loved.  He now is clearly a man willing to give up everything for God’s reign to be made more clearly visible, willing to die if necessary. The time in the desert has left its mark.

 

Wherever we hear and accept the Good News of God’s love, we find that the good news makes us look crazy to others.  Jesus puts us at odds with the economic and political systems of our world.  This gospel forces us to act, interrupting the world as it is in ways that make people—especially pious people—indignant. 

 

Friends, we are not what God intended when he created us.  We need all the more to have a change of heart and manifest it in our actions.  We too need to seek in quietness our true baptismal identity, and God willing, have angels minister to us also as we struggle with the wild beasts.  May we, like Jesus, remain undeterred from the mission on which God sends us, no matter how crazy this appears to those we love.

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

 

Who Knows? (Ash Wedsnesday)

Who Knows?

Ash Wednesday (Years ABC)
14 February 2024; 12:15 p.m. Said Mass with Imposition of Ashes 
Homily Delivered at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Grants Pass, Oregon  

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Joel 2:1-2,12-17; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21; Psalm 103:8-14

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. 

 

A few years ago, I read in the blog of a friend, a priest in Nahelem, that she was not “doing Lent” that year.  She was gravely ill with a degenerative respiratory illness, and did not, in fact, make it to Easter.  As I recall, she said, “I may be having a real life—make that real death—experience of ashes to ashes and dust to dust in the next few weeks.  I don’t need any extra reminders, since it is about all I can think of.  And I’m not sure that 40 days of effort are going to make any headway on my besetting sins—they are what they are and if I haven’t changed yet, I doubt whether one last heroic effort of a month or so will change anything.  And my time is so limited that I feel that a better spiritual practice for me is to enjoy the good things God gave that I know I love and value.” 

 

I felt very sad to hear how sick she was, but was in awe of how well she understood Lent and what it’s about. 

 

We often get Lent and Ash Wednesday completely wrong.  I’m not talking about the naughty choir boy’s snickering at the line in the liturgy, “Remember you are BUT dust.”   Our misunderstanding is far deeper and pervasive, and comes from not understanding the context of all the scriptural talk about sin, punishment, the wrath of God, and penitence.  We think it’s all about heroic efforts to convince God to not be so angry at us.   At a more pedestrian level, we think that it’s about showing to ourselves and others how pious, how spiritual, we are.  We keep those ash marks prominent on our foreheads and go boldly back into the world to let others see.  Or some of us wrongly think that we can take the ashes out into the world and give other people a chance to show off their spirituality without the inconvenience of actually getting their behinds into a church:  ashes to go, indeed.  But it’s all there in today’s Gospel:  Jesus says if you do a good thing for show, the show is all there is: “they have received their reward.”

 

For Jesus, it’s all about doing good things in secret, without trying to have anyone know.  “God, who sees in secret, will bless you.” 

 

Many of us usually start Lent out by making confession.  Many also don’t.  That’s OK:  we are Episcopalians and “All may, none must, but some should.”  I am usually in that last group and when talk with my Spiritual Director and make my confession, it is always greatly centering and soothing.  As we talk, and I go between my sins and the things in my life that drive them and trigger them, I find myself confessing like many other people I have heard over the years:  I told not only the hurts and harms I had done other people, but wondered about the hurts and harms done to me.  For, as much as we want to keep these two separate in terms of accepting responsibility and making amends, from the point of view of our heart, of how we feel, they often are one and the same.   This is not simply because of the collective, the corporate nature of sin, and the fact that all sin of all people is interconnected.  It’s more personal, deeper.  My own failings are often reactions, hurt reactions, to the failings of others.  And as most counselors and Twelve-Step sponsors know all too well, much of the harm we do is the result of addiction, compulsion, and things beyond the control of our wills.  An alcoholic will drink.  A junkie will shoot up.  A hurt person will lash out.  A person with low self-esteem may overcompensate and act with the self-absorption of a blissfully clueless narcissist.  Even though we are responsible for our actions, often our actions are beyond our control.  Again, the hurt we cause and the hurt we feel are in a real sense one and the same when viewed through the heart’s lens.   When we confess our own sins, it is important to focus on what we are responsible for, and not what other people are.  But that said, we often find that in plumbing our own hearts for the sources of sin we find the hurts we have suffered from others.  And in discussing such a thing in confession, we are actually talking about our need to make amendment of life and make restitution to those we have harmed, but also and, I think just as importantly, our need to forgive the others who have hurt us.

 

Our English word “confess” is odd, just like the Latin it translates, Confiteor.  It means not only fessing up and accepting responsibility for and rightly naming our misdoings, but it can also mean extolling and proclaiming our faith, like the Augsburg Confession or the Westminster Confession of Faith, or St. Augustine’s faith proclaiming spiritual auto-biography, the Confessions. 

 

We often misunderstand all these scriptures about penance and sin.  We think it is about judicial angels, no harps and angelic choirs, but with wigs and gavels and the occasional sword or trumpet to announce punishment thrown in.  But no:  these scriptures express how when we are hurt, or scared, or sick, we want the world to be orderly and make sense:  this hurt or sickness simply must be a punishment.   It must be from an angry God.  That way it at least makes sense:  having a mean angry God seems better that the void of randomness. So we think we need to change to make nice with the big guy up there who is putting us through the wringer.  Sickness feels very close to guilt, doesn’t it?  This emotional truth is what is behind the Great Litany’s conflation of all these things.  “Spare us Good Lord!” “Good Lord, deliver us.”  Not just from sin, and temptation, and rottenness, but from sickness, plague, flood, and fire, war, and “dying suddenly and unprepared.” 

 

But the heart of the matter is always this: God is love, not rage.  The passage from Joel expresses it well in passing: God is punishing us, right?  But if we repent and turn from our evil ways, “Who knows?  Maybe God will relent and turn.  And he may just leave us, from among the offerings we have put on the altar to placate the Deity’s anger, something for us to eat.”  Who knows?  Maybe God is kind and loving, just like Jesus taught.  Maybe those images of God’s wrath are more about our own feelings of conviction and self-blame than they are about the heart of God.  Maybe he already loves us and accepts us, and wants us to pull up our socks and get on with life.  Who knows?  Maybe God is better, kinder, and gentler than we ever imagined.   Jesus taught us to look for and follow our loving Abba, our papa. In this, there is hope indeed.  

 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

 

Journey to the West (Epiphany)

 

A Journey to the West
7 January 2024

Feast of the Epiphany (observed, transferred from 6 January)

 9 a.m. Spoken Mass

Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford Oregon  

Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12; Psalm 72:1-7,10-14

The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. 

 

Several years ago a teacher and I we were discussing the great Chinese epic, The Journey to the West. He remarked: “A big difference between Asian and Western cultures is that in your Western religions, you have to go abroad and spread the Gospel. In our Eastern religions, our greatest duty to go and seek the truth we do not yet have. Your Bible has the missionary, Saint Paul. We have the story of the Chinese monk Xuanzang going on his great Journey to the West to seek and bring back the Buddhist sutras. We are more humble than you.”

I tried to defend the West and Christianity. I cited humility as a virtue for Christians, and mission as rooted in love for others and a desire to share. I mentioned the Christian idea of Pilgrimage, and the Quest for the Holy Grail. But my teacher seemed unconvinced. 

 

“Are those things central? The Journey to the West is a parable about each of us. The pilgrims there represent every type of person. The monk is overly spiritual, naïve, and unable to defend himself against dangers. But he is calm. Zhu Bajie, the pig man, represents those of us too concerned with our bodily pleasures and comforts: totally controlled by his appetites, but able to enjoy unabashedly whatever good may come. Sandy, the handyman bodyguard, represents peasant practical wisdom and working-class street smarts: too focused on the task at hand, unaware of the greater goal, but essential in continuing the journey. Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, who fled millions of miles to escape the Buddha only to find he had always been in his palm, represents those of us too clever for our own good, whose will and audacity are both our strength and weakness. Too proud and willful, but able to tell a joke in a tight spot and nervy enough to face any new demon on the path.”

He continued, “I am on my Journey to the West. But are you? Do you want to go to strange places far from home, risking all, to gain the treasure of enlightenment?” 

 

Today’s Gospel is Matthew’s story of the strange Persian astrologers arriving in Jerusalem on their own Journey to the West. They seek to honor the child born “King of the Jews,” whose star they have seen rise while they were far off in the East. Matthew, that most Jewish of the four Gospels, uses them to represent the universal importance of God’s Messiah. He sees the inclusion of the gentiles as mysterious, fraught with danger. The Greek word Magoi (Latin: Magi) almost always carries a baggage of Mystery and the Occult; it is where our word “magic” comes from, and probably is best translated as "wizards." The magi’s appearance in Jerusalem tips off Herod of possible political competition, and the Massacre of the Innocents is the result.

However you read it, the story focuses on the Magi as religious pilgrims, strangers in a strange land not just bearing gifts, but seeking the greatest treasure of God.

A pilgrimage is not tourism with a spiritual slant. It is a quest to find God, to find forgiveness, healing, confidence, and oneness. We must leave where we are to set aside our normal lives, including habits of spiritual torpor and sloth. The place we seek is where the veil between us and the spirit world is thinner, a place that demands that we remove our shoes, a place where a bush will burn and yet not be consumed.

The trip is arduous, but worth it.  Psalm 84 says, “Happy are those … whose hearts are set on the pilgrims' way. Though they go through the desert valley they will find it full of springs.” A real pilgrimage is never easy. It will have desert valleys and rough spots. Having a heart set on the pilgrim’s way—remembering the yearning that moved you to set forth, and recalling the holy place you hope to go—means that the trip will be not only endurable, but at times sweet.

There are other ways to express this idea. A popular struggle song during the civil rights movement was “keep your eyes on the prize, hold on, hold on.”  Paul in today’s epistle says through such endurance fueled by grace, the hidden things of God become clear to us. 

Our journey in faith is often not a straight, direct path. Pilgrimage often appears to be a labyrinth, with turnings and twistings. That’s what the pillar of fire and cloud in the exodus story suggests. Wandering in the wilderness, we must not lose sight of the destination, must not become discouraged. Here, we should remember that there are two different kinds of nearness: what C.S. Lewis calls nearness of proximity and nearness of approach.

A hiker in the mountains comes out onto a ledge and sees, there beneath her, the small town where she wants to spend the night. It is only about 500 meters away—straight down. To get there, she must continue on the path, with its switchbacks and gradual descent. At moments, she must actually go farther and farther away from her goal—800 meters, 1400 meters as the crow flies—before the switchback turns. But all the time, she is actually getting closer to her evening resting spot.

The travel with its challenges and its twists and turns will itself change the pilgrims as they follow the path. As they near the goal, their perception of it will change because they have been changed. If this doesn’t happen, it means that something is wrong.

 

 

The Magi in today’s Gospel arrive at their intended destination—Jerusalem—only to find out that things are not as they imagined. The king whose star they follow is not on the throne or even a baby at court. They ask for directions from the local tyrant who is on the throne, citing the passages that brought them—probably Isaiah 60’s description of the great light to shine in Jerusalem, and Numbers 22’s description of the great star that would rise from Judah.

Herod asks his scholars where exactly these passages predict the birth will occur. They reply that the passages are silent on this. He demands, "Well, do you have a better text?" They answer with hesitation by citing Micah 5:2-4: “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah . . . from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old . . . he shall shepherd Israel.” The Magi thus discover that they are nine miles off track. It is Bethlehem, village of shepherds and the poor, rather than Jerusalem, city of the rich and powerful, where they are actually headed. But despite the change in understanding and reorientation, not only in destination but of the nature of the king they are seeking, their hearts remain set on the pilgrim’s way. They keep their eyes on the prize, and continue on.

Joan Puls in her glorious little book Every Bush is Burning describes the encounter with the strange this way: “We live limited lives until we 'cross over' into the concrete world of another country, another culture, another tradition ... I have left forever a small world to live with the tensions and the tender mercies of God's larger family.”

My teacher’s question still echoes, “I am on my Journey to the West. But are you? Do you want to go on a journey into strange places far from home, risking all, to gain the treasure of truth?”

We are headed into a new calendar year, and a new phase of our life.  Next Sunday is our first Sunday with our new rector here.  I pray that all of us will be intrepid souls as we embark on our new journeys this year.   

 

As we prepare for our own Journey to the West, our pilgrimage, our following that star, I hope that we all can take time to think of what we need to do to re-energize our spiritual life: new or renewed disciplines of prayer, meditation—perhaps walking a labyrinth or even going on a real pilgrimage; perhaps more study, service, or more vigorous efforts at performing the corporeal acts of mercy—visiting the sick, feeding and clothing the poor, defending the oppressed. This is not so that we can earn something from God, but rather that we better learn how to accept God’s grace. May our hearts joyfully be set on the pilgrim’s way.

In the Name of God, Amen

 

The Holy Name

 

The Holy Name

3 January 2024

10:30 am said Mass at the Rogue Valley Manor

Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 8; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 2:15-21

The Rev. Fr. Antony Hutchinson, Ph.D., SCP

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

January 1 is the Feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  Once called the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ, it commemorates the events recounted in today’s Gospel, the circumcision and naming of the baby Jesus.  In recent years the Church has focused this feast on the naming rather than the bris performed by a moyel, which was perhaps a bit too graphic for modern tastes of primarily gentile congregations. 

 

The principal idea of the Feast of the Holy Name is that just as Jesus was marked as part of God’s chosen people by the imposition of Abraham’s sign of the covenant, and just as he was marked as God’s agent for saving us by being given the name the angel had prescribed for him earlier, so Christ marks us as his own and gives us his name when we are baptized.  That’s why the other readings talk about God placing his name on his people, and of us having to follow Christ’s example of acceptance and humility. 

 

The importance of naming, and recognizing the right names for people and things is a key idea behind the Feast so re-conceived.  Myths of power established through naming are found in many cultures. 

 

We place a great deal of stock in the process of naming.  Note the care that new parents usually take to ensure that they have chosen just the right name for the newborn.  Think of the difference between the two expressions “to name names,” and “to call names.”  We say “you are calling that person names” implies that what you are saying is not truly who or what that person is.  But if you are truly going to tell the truth and not varnish it one bit, you “name” names. 

 

Playwright Eve Ensler says that “[T]he power and mystery of naming things… has the capacity to transform …, rearrange our learned patterns of behavior and redirect our thinking.”

 

Chinese philosopher Confucius’s key doctrine is the Rectification of Names. “Calling things by their right names is the beginning of wisdom” runs a Chinese proverb based on the idea (cf. Analects 12.11).

 

I spent 25 years of my life working as a spin doctor for the U.S. federal government.  I know all too well the power of the words you choose to call things, both to establish truth or to hide it.  Our military talks about “going kinetic.”  That means starting to move troops and weapons to actually kill people.  Our political leaders often talk about “preserving our way of life,” but what they usually mean by this is holding on to our possessions, our privilege, and our control of others.  One previous U.S. administration decided to use the words “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe what previously had always been called “torture” and thereby justified a horrible departure from our best national values.   

  

Given the centrality of Jesus to Christian faith and the importance of names, it is natural that Christians have always reflected on the names our Lord Jesus should have. 

John the Seer in Revelation 19:11-16, describes our Lord coming to set the world right:  

 

“Then I saw heaven opened, and there was a white horse! Its rider is named Faithful and True... his name is called The Word of God. … On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, "King of kings and Lord of lords.”

 

It is hard for most of us today to appreciate that Jesus of Nazareth did not stand out from his contemporaries simply because of his name “Jesus.”   Though common in Spanish, it is almost never used in English, so English speakers think the name refers to our Lord alone.  

But it was extremely common in Palestine at the turn of the era.  The Jewish historian Josephus mentions at least ten different people at the time who played historical roles that had the name.

 

The Greek word Iesous transliterates the Aramaic name Yeshua‘ (“Josh”) a shortened form of the Hebrew name Yehoshua‘ (Joshua).  Jews now prefer the Hebrew name “Joshua” for sons rather than the shortened Greek-form “Jesus” since the latter has become so deeply associated with Christianity. 

 

Both Matthew and Luke say that the name “Jesus” was given to the baby before his birth.  In Luke, the angel Gabriel during the annunciation tells the Blessed Virgin that she should name the baby Jesus (Luke 1:31), without giving any reason for the name.   Matthew, however, also gives a folk etymology for the name:  Gabriel says to Joseph, “[Mary] will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”  This play on words, shared also by Philo of Alexandria, is a little bit like claiming that a man was named Bill because his mother knew he would be working in Accounts Receivable, the billing department.

 

This explanation thinks that the name Jesus, Yeshua‘, is related to the verb “to save,” yasha‘.  But this folk etymology, however theologically satisfying it might be, is not correct.  Just as Bill is a shortened form of William, and has nothing to do with billing, Yeshua‘ is a shortened form of the Hebrew name Yeho-shua, or Joshua, and has nothing to do really with the verb “to save.” Yeho-shua combines the divine name of God, Yahweh, with the verb shawa‘, which means “help,” not “save.”   The original name Yeho-shua was the cry of a mother in labor—“Yahweh, HELP!” 

 

The one thing we learn for certain by Jesus being given that name is that he came from a pious and nationalistic Jewish family.  Joshua is the hero who followed Moses and brought the children of Israel into the Promised Land.  Other people in Jesus’ family have similar nationalist names. Mary, his Mother, brings to mind Miriam the sister of Moses.  Joseph, his legal father, brings to mind the patriarch Joseph who saved the Israelites by providing refuge in Egypt. Matthew 13:55 mentions four brothers of Jesus:  James, Joses, Simeon, and Jude.  All are names of great patriarchs from Israel’s past: James has the Aramaic or Hebrew name Jacob, the original name of the Patriarch later known as Israel.  Joses is the Greek form of the name Joseph.  Simon and Jude are Greek names for brothers of Joseph, Shimeon and Judah. 

 

The name of Jesus is thus a nationalistic call for help, understood as an assurance of salvation.  Jesus’ family gave it to him, under angelic instructions or not, in part because it evoked hope. 

 

We thus again return, as in most of our Christmastide readings, to the doctrine of incarnation:  God taking on human weakness and limitation, becoming fully human.  

 

“Yahweh, HELP!” we cry.  And we recount to each other the stories of God rescuing His people in the past through mighty acts of love beyond measure, mercy passing thought. 

 

“Yahweh, HELP!” we cry.  And we find hope for being saved. 

 

“Yahweh, HELP!” we cry.  And to us a baby of promise is born, a child ensuring peace is given. 

 

In our prayer life and quiet time this week, let us reflect and meditate on the Holy Name of Jesus.  And let us be honest and open in our naming of names, and calling out the demons in our lives who parade under false names or no name at all. 

 

In the holy name of Christ, Amen