Let me begin by wishing you all a happy new year. With hope, happiness, strength, and purpose. Feliz Año Nuevo.
Today is, indeed, the first day of the new year, and in the calendar of the church, also the occasion to observe the feast of the Naming of Jesus.
Now, you would have to admit that to celebrate the Naming of Jesus is a somehow less strident alternative to celebrating the circumcision of our Lord. Such is the traditional liturgical feast associated with this day and, after all, this is precisely what the naming of a male child in the Jewish tradition in which Jesus was raised was about: you named a male child, clip, and he was then a son of Abraham.
In the case of Jesus, this was an event to be recalled by the gospel writer, since one of the several requirements for the Jewish Messiah was, precisely, to be a child of the Torah, the Jewish Law. And circumcision is kind of one of those ritual bits, no pun intended, which you just could not ignore -so the writer of this Gospel makes the point of consigning it as a chronological fact.
There is only so much, however, that we could say about the rite of circumcision that would make some impact in who we are here as Christians in this part of the world, today. The Naming of Jesus, on the other hand, is so much more of a fruitful way to look at this occasion in the church lectionary.
Our gospel for today actually begins earlier than the Naming itself. Reflecting the way things were in the days immediately following the birth of Jesus, we are told about some shepherds, folks engaged in one of the humblest and lowest regarded occupations at the time, the same shepherds to whom it was just announced by an angel the birth “in the city of David of a Savior, the Messiah”, the same shepherds who just witnessed the choirs of angels first singing Gloria in excelsis Deo ----we are told that these shepherds come and pay a visit to the Holy Family, during which they report to the proud parents of the apparitions and revelations that they had witnessed, concerning this child.
Why shepherds, precisely?
On the one hand, it is a most ancient, symbolic occupation, profusely featured in the Scriptures -Psalm 23 and so forth. On the other hand, being a shepherd made it very difficult to preserve any sense of ritual purity because of living with sheep -which was deemed impure by the Levitical code. Shepherds were not able to observe important religious festivals, because you could not really take holidays from herding flocks then. And because they spent so much of their time doing just that, shepherds were mostly away from other people and therefore unable to inflict much social change, even for their own sake.
The idea of God using shepherds as vehicles and witness of the coming of the Messiah is surely meant to show who and what this God is about.
God, who chose to come to the world in a (by all earthly accounts, illegitimate) child, born of a woman -two quarters of the value of a man back then- without a roof over his head nor possessions or power to inherit.
The whole proposition of the Gospel appears to be geared to upending assumptions about the place of God in our lives, in human society, in the world, assumptions of power, class, and privilege, which one could say are as common today as they were back in the times of the Nativity.
Then, the name of Jesus. Or Jeshua, in both Hebrew and Aramaic. Or Jesús, in Spanish. Jesus, Jesus. Both in Latin countries and Biblical times, it was very common to find the equivalent of the name Jesus. It is still so in Latin America, and in Cuba, Jesús -the endearing form being ‘Chuchi’.
In the Palestine of two thousand years ago, Jeshua also was a common name. It was quite a common name, to be perfectly clear, and as it has been said elsewhere, we could think of the name Jesus then as the Jack or Peter of our times. Now you can ponder how some of our most beloved prayers and devotions would look like if addressed to Jack -or Terry, for that matter.
But the Gospel had already told us, however, that ‘Jesus’ was the name revealed to his mother Mary, by an angel, even “before He was conceived in the womb”.
Some of us here may have a somehow similar story for the name we were given -not because it was common or easy one to remember, but rather because it otherwise held higher meaning for those giving it to us.
Jesus was named by Mary and Joseph after a divine revelation, and it is so recorded in the Gospels, I believe, because the earthly life of the Christ was to be one of perfect fulfillment of the will of God. From the beginning of his birth and naming, to its earthly, seeming ending on the cross.
But still one can see how the Gospel writer is walking a very fine line between underlying Mary and Joseph’s obedience to the will of God, in naming the child the way they did, and showing some tacit disregard for power-driven concerns for ritual purity, when none but shepherds -rather than priests, scribes, Levites and other “professionals of revelation”- are given a center spot and role in the drama of the birth of the Messiah.
The Feast of the Naming of Jesus is also, to put it this way, a stepping stone kind of day in our liturgical calendar, a bridge between Christmas and Epiphany, between the birth of a promised child Jesus, and his Manifestation as Messiah and Savior to all Peoples, symbolized in the Wise Men and the rest of that small community gathered near some random, humble manger in Bethlehem. The event of the Incarnation, realized in the Virgin Mary by the operation of the Holy Spirit, is continually proclaimed by the Church as we follow the earliest account of the life of Jesus, the earliest manifestations of His teaching and ministry.
Last Sunday, Father William Roberts spoke to us about the central, crucial place of the Incarnation, the coming of God in Jesus to our humanity and to our complete reality, in the Anglican proclamation of the Christian faith.
Of course, this is not a concern limited in any way to our tradition as a church, but it is something to hold dear, that ability and openness of our Anglican ethos to find God in the messy, daily, non-coated experience of our lives as human beings and children of God redeemed by Jesus.
Our spirituality, however diverse, usually shows the marks of the lived experience of the people of God, our lives being earthily, beautiful vessels that show something like that kind of patina one can often see on old church furniture, produced by years of use -the signs of our sanctification.
It is indeed as we recall, and more than recall, as we own in our prayers and spiritual life and reflection and wisdom, the chronicles of the Incarnation, and the implications of these Christmas gospels, that we can more fully appreciate what Saint Paul is talking about in the Epistle lesson for today.
The self-emptying of God in Jesus, so God could fully inhabit the experience, the joy and the angst, of humanity, and more so, of humanity in relationship, of humanity as concerned with others -hence the saving power of both the humility, the obedience, and the sacrifice, of Jesus. Hence the homage to be given to that name, hence that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess, that it is this Jesus, God made flesh, in humanity, in the world, to teach justice, reconcile, forgive, and heal.
Thanks be to God.
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