The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus
Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews
New year, new you? After focussing all their efforts on getting us to over-indulge at Christmas, the advertisers now will try to appeal to the resolutions we may have made that things will be different in a new calendar year. New kit to support our efforts to be fitter; recipes and gadgets to help our resolve to eat more healthily; memberships or subscription services to make us commit financially, if not actually, to the places where our desires to be thinner, or more cultured, or better at cooking or craft can be practised. They hold out the promise, however unrealistic, that this year the better version of me can finally emerge, if only I can muster the self-will, the discipline, and the perseverance to create her. The 2023 version of Anna can indeed be a kinder, fitter, healthier and better-read model…
Maybe until January 2nd. And if you have more self-will and discipline than me I don’t want to put you off your new year’s resolutions. But I do want to let the good news of this eighth day of Christmas challenge us about who that new me and new you might be.
‘After eight days had passed,’ St Luke tells us, ‘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.’ On the eighth day of Christmas, the child born to Mary was circumcised in obedience to the Law, and given the name ‘Jesus’.
Circumcision is the sign of the covenant God made with Abraham, that he would be the father of many nations, and that through him all peoples would be blessed. The mark of the covenant would be inscribed on human flesh, in the command that every male among Abraham’s people should be circumcised when he is eight days old. In circumcising Jesus, Mary and Joseph are faithful to the covenant: Jesus is made a member of God’s chosen people, Israel, and an heir to the promises made to Abraham.
This baby, worshipped by shepherds, proclaimed by angels, the centre of millions of nativity scenes across the whole world, this one we acclaim as ‘very God, begotten not created’, the second person of the Trinity in human flesh, is born as one of us, and born very particularly as a member of the Jewish people. ‘Born of a woman, born under the law’, as St Paul puts it, ‘in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.’
In Jesus, God’s age-old promise to Abraham is being fulfilled. Marked as a son of Abraham, a member of the people of promise, Jesus receives the mark of the covenant in his flesh even as he is also the sign of the covenant’s fulfilment. The God who does not abandon his covenant with his people, however much the people may act in ways that abandon him, is born under the law in order to fulfil it by his perfect obedience.
When we profess that ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’, we are committing ourselves to the belief not that God took on humanity in abstraction, nor that his coming among us was the putting on of some sort of costume or semblance of humanity, nor that what the incarnation is really about is God reminding us that our humanity can be elevated if only we will pursue enough goodness and truth and beauty. This feast day will not let us wriggle out of the very particularity of the human flesh God takes on: it is a real human life, born of a woman, born under the law: a brown-skinned, Jewish life lived in the shadow of an occupying empire, with a history and ancestry of promise and covenant and struggle with God.
The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us, full of grace and truth, in Jesus of Nazareth. And this has perplexed people from the beginning. ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ asks Nathanael. ‘Where does this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him?’ ask his fellow villagers when they hear him teaching in the synagogue. ‘Isn’t this Mary’s son?’ And they take offence at him.
They take offence because he is one of them. They know him: know his family, his background, his trade. All that wise teaching and the deeds of power might give him ideas above his station but they know better: they remember him when he was running about Nazareth as a boy. Now they’re supposed to believe that he is the Messiah, the long-awaited Saviour?
This is what his name means. It was common enough at the time, this name given by the angel before he was born. It’s from the Hebrew Yeshua or Joshua, meaning ‘God saves’. Up till now the bible has shown great restraint around the name of God. At the burning bush, when Moses asks God his name, he replies rather enigmatically ‘I am who I am’. In Jewish tradition, to say someone’s name is already to indicate some form of power over them, to define them, to possess them. God’s answer to Moses refuses that dynamic. In the Old Testament God puts his name on his people – they are to be the ones through whom his character is made known – but his actual name is too holy to be spoken, apart from once a year, by the high priest in the holy of holies. But after the destruction of the temple in 70AD even this practice died out, so no one knows quite how to pronounce the name of God.
But now, in Jesus, the unutterable is spoken. He is called Jesus, ‘God saves’. This son of Abraham, marked with the sign of the covenant and member of the people of promise, is also son of God, the one in whom all the fullness of God is pleased to dwell. In him we see God made visible, God’s life translated into human flesh. We see it in the teaching and the deeds of power that compelled and confused Jesus’ neighbours. We see it in the people he mixes with, his particular love for the young, the poor, the marginalised, the overlooked. We see it in the baptism, in the temptations, in the passion and the resurrection: this is how God saves us, in the person of his Son. He shares our life and dies our death so that we can share his life and become heirs of the promise and children of God.
All that lies ahead of him as he gurgles up at Mary. But already in this feast on the eighth day of Christmas the passion and resurrection are foreshadowed. Centuries of theology and spirituality have seen in the first blood spilled in the circumcision an anticipation of the cross, where Jesus’ blood will be shed for us and for many for the forgiveness of sins. And the eighth day matters: seven is the number of completion in the Jewish tradition, for God rested on the seventh day of creation. Eight becomes then the number of the new creation: it’s the day of resurrection, of new life, of eternity.
And so it’s here that our new life is to be found. Here our identity is given. Here our new year finds its origin: in this child of Bethlehem, born of a woman, born under the law, that we might also become children of God and heirs of the promise. In him our lives are made new because in him we too can be full of grace and truth, as he takes on flesh in us. Despite my fond imaginings and the best efforts of the advertisers I am not going to find my true and better self at the gym or in a book or through the effort of my own will but at this crib, where my humanity is made new and fresh and vulnerable, and where I learn that the Word who became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth goes on taking flesh still, in you and in me.