The Circumcision and Naming of Jesus

Sermon preached at the Eucharist at St Edward's, Cambridge on 1st January 2006 by Fraser Watts, Vicar-Chaplain of St Edward's

On January 1st, the Church keeps a festival known in the Book of Common Prayer as The Circumcision of Christ, and in the Alternative Service book as The Naming of Jesus. Common Worship brings both together and calls it The Circumcision and Naming of Jesus. It is a commemoration of the event described briefly in the last verse of this morning's gospel. ‘After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the Angel before he was conceived in the womb.’ Circumcision and naming were linked then, as baptism and naming are linked for us. I believe we need to keep both in view to understand the meaning of this festival.

Jesus’ circumcision reminds us first of his Jewishness. That is helpful because we can't really understand Jesus at all unless we remember his national and religious background as a Jew. As an adult, Jesus became very inclusive in his attitudes, emphasising that salvation was for Samaritans as well as for Jews. However, that inclusiveness came from someone rooted in the Jewish tradition.

Jesus’ circumcision also tells us about his observance of religious customs (or at least the observance that was enacted on his behalf). The adult Jesus became iconoclastic about religious observances, such as what you could and couldn't do on the Sabbath. But, however radical his attitudes became, he began his life by paying respects to the religious tradition that nurtured him.

Jesus was rooted in tradition, and inhabited the tradition that formed him until the end. However, he was not confined by that tradition. That is a model for how we should relate to our own religious traditions, inhabiting them, but not being confined by them.

Circumcision is a Jewish religious practice that Christians struggled over in the early decades. There is no doubt that the requirement to circumcise is in scripture. However, the interesting, and probably unique, thing about circumcision is that the scriptural requirement to be circumcised is set aside within scripture itself. Acts 15 records the decision to set aside the requirement to be circumcised set out in Genesis 17. St Paul is adamant that in Christ there is no distinction between circumcised and uncircumcised, between Jewish and Gentile Christians. The importance of this is that it makes clear that the authority over Christians of the Jewish codes of practice set out in the Old Testament is qualified and not absolute.

Blood would have been shed at Jesus’ circumcision, as it always is. It was the first of bloodshed of Jesus’ life, though not of course the last. Jesus’ circumcision is in part a continuation of the story of his birth, but it also points forward to his crucifixion. In that it is like the fuller story of the Presentation in the Temple that comes next in St Luke's gospel, where Anna prophetically speaks of the ‘piercing of the sword’ when she sees the infant Jesus.

Jesus is already poised at circumcision between birth and death. Indeed, there is a sense in which everything in Jesus’ life is poised between birth and death, between the manger and the cross. Jesus is born the Son of God, born to witness to his heavenly Father, but also born to sacrifice, to suffer and to die.

It may be helpful for us to ponder how our own lives are also poised between birth and death. Our lives to are partly an unfolding of the potential with which we were born, but they are also partly a preparation for death, and for the ultimate perspective of judgment that death brings.

Let me leave circumcision there for now, and turn to the other part of today's story, the naming of the child born in a manger as Jesus, a name that means ‘Yahweh saves’. The name ‘Jesus’ this incorporates the holy and mysterious name of God himself, ‘Yahweh’, ‘Jehovah’, ‘I AM’. It is to be through Jesus that ‘I Am’ saves.

We have all grown up with the Greek version of the name ‘Jesus’, but it always strikes me as rather odd, given the importance of this name, that we make no attempt to get back to the name that the Son of God was actually known by. ‘Joshua’ would be better, ‘Yeshua’ better still. Yeshua of Nazareth would probably not have answered to the name Jesus. To refer to him as Yeshua would remind us of his Jewishness, as does his the circimcision.

It is also a name that reminds us of his humanity; not ‘Christ’, a kind of divine title, but ‘Jesus’, a human name, bestowed by his human parents, albeit at the behest of an Archangel. It is this human name that, as St Paul says in Philippians, has been exalted above all other names. The exaltation of this human name cuts across the distinction theologians sometimes make between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It is the human, historical name that is exalted.

But what's in a name? Does it matter what Jesus was called? Is the name more than a label by which we can refer to the Son of God, incarnate in human form?

t depends what you think names are. Our culture doesn't attach much significance to them, but there was an older, more magical, and animistic culture that saw the name of something as revealing its true nature, and we should not dismiss that older culture too lightly. From this point of view, to know someone's name was to know much more than how you should address them; it was to know the most intimate thing about them. Indeed to know someone's name gave you power over them, and to acknowledge their name accorded them a certain respect and gave them a certain influence over you.

It is out of this older culture that we can understand what it means to pray in the name of Jesus, to heal in his name, to bring deliverance in his name. We can do this because this name has been exalted; there is spiritual power in the name. It is not a name to be used idly, any more than Jesus would have talked idly of Yahweh. I wish we could recover more reverence for that name, more sense of the power encapsulated in it.

Is there a link between these two halves of the story, circumcision and naming? Yes I think there is, and we only have to adapt slightly St Paul in Philippians 2 to see how. St. Paul says that Christ emptied himself, took the form of a servant, humbled himself and became obedient. Ultimately, he became obedient to the point of death, but we might add that the first thing to which he was obedient, at eight days, was the requirement to be circumcised. It is because of this humbling, this obedience (of which circumcision is the first example) that the name Jesus is exalted above every name.

You might like to ponder one of the great hymns about the name of Jesus, either John Newton’s ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds’, or J M Neals’ great hymn, based on a late medieval Latin text, ‘

To the name of our salvation, laud and honour let us pay
Jesus is the name we treasure
’Tis the name for adoration
’Tis the name that whoso preacheth speaks like music to the ear
In this name whene’er assaulted we can put our foes to shame
Therefore we, in love adoring, this most blessed name revere.’ Amen.