WHAT'S IN A NAME? SAVING BLOOD

“HE IS/SAVIOR”

Saint Luke 2.21

The Circumcision and Name of Jesus: 1 January Anno Domini 2013

Father Jay Watson SSP

In Nomine Patris, et + Filii, et Spiritus Sancti

In Nomine + Iesu

In The Name + of Jesus

   The Name of the Lord begins the Mass.  It begins our Divine Service. The Trinitarian formula—echoing our Lord’s Name closes the Mass. It brings the Feast to a temporary close with the words given High Priest Aaron by God.

   While some view names as mere tools, man-made constructs to connect to a “thing” so as to facilitate control and dominance of “reality,” NAMES are real and come from our Creator.

   Engaged in “sub-creation” and tasked by the Lord, Saint Adam named each animal as it came unto him. The Name is the real, actual, constitutive, metaphysical nature of the thing.  Adam did not just “call” it a dog for convenience or utilitarian and functional reasons. When he called that four-footed, wet-nosed, tail wagging creature “DOG” it was, and forever will be dog!

   You are men and women, male and female created HE—The Trinity in His/Their Image.  You are man: “adam” named for your first father the proto-man, but sadly, too, the fallen and sinful man.

   So too, by you being from the fallen race, your name is fallen in so far as it is “man.”  “For there is not a just man upon earth.” [Eccl. 7.20]

   Of your fallen natures, your sinful selves, “man as man,” you don’t receive the Lord’s good names and their gifts, but rather you try to make things the “way you want them.”  “Their inward thought is, that their houses shall continue forever, and their dwelling places to all generations, they call their lands after their own names.”  [Ps. 49.11]  You rename and dis-name everything you can.  Words don’t mean things to the sinner’s heart; words become means of obfuscation and misdirection. But sin is sin. Coveting is coveting and gossip is gossip.  Hatred in the heart, cruel words and thoughts, are murder.  Lust is breaking of the 6^th Commandment and the Lord’s heart.  You are to turn the other cheek and you are to forgive your neighbor seventy times seven.  Words are real; NAMES are truth.  When Abram was named Abraham by the Lord it was and he was.  When Jacob was named Israel by the Lord it was and he was. 

    All names of the flock spring from the name of the Shepherd the way all streams bubble up from the source—the spring; all branches emanate from the vine; and all light beams pulse from the sun.  You are named in your re-births at the Holy + Font, a fountain filled with blood—your are re-named and “Christened” for you take your Christian Name when the Lord touches you and adopts you into His family.  You remain a “Smith,” “Jones,” “Wilson,” or “Schulz,” but you become so much more: a “little Christ” when Named in The Father, and the + Son, and the Holy Ghost.

   The Lord’s name is unpronounceable. The Holy Tetragrammaton, YHWH in the English, is reality of His Alpha and Omega, His omnipresence and omnipotence, and of both eternity and infinity.  But because He is “I AM” and because He loves you, lived for you, died and rose for you, and has placed you into Himself, you now too are everlasting and royalty.  “You are” in Christ Jesus. 

   Christ is not His new Name for Christ is but His title—He is anointed to be what He has always been.

His Name is Jesus, Jesu, Iesu, Joshua, Yeshua, JESUS!  His Name does not just mean “savior” but rather GOD the SON, the God/Man born of Mary IS SAVIOR.  He is now the Second Adam, the perfect Adam, the sinless Adam, not just The Son of Man but also the Son of God.  I AM—SAVES YOU!

   His Name saves because His Name is Himself; He is His Name. Jesus saves because the Savior is Jesus.  He saved when He allowed Himself to be Incarnate by the Holy Ghost. He saved when in His state of “humiliation” He rested in the womb of the Virgin. He saved when He deigned to be cut, circumcised on His Holy, Precious, and Innocent Flesh. + His shedding of blood as an 8-day old hearkening and pointing to His shedding of Blood as the Lamb of God, hearkening and pointing to His dipping you in the Blood of water + Baptism—the eternal eighth day; hearkening to His giving you to drink of His Holy Blood on this eighth day.

   His Evangel of remission—your sins are cut away and disposed of as the foreskin of self; and His sermon begins in His Name and ends in His Name. 

   Names do certainly mean things…but His NAME is a THING—Peace, Love, Family and Rest!

   “And she shall bring forth a Son, and thou shalt call His name Jesus: for He shall save His people from their sins.” [Mt. 1.21]  Jesus is His Name: “for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” [Acts 4.12]  And, even as the end of Mass ends in His Name, so too the end of time will conclude in His Name of Victory Resurrection.  The Apostle was Spirit—directed to write to the Philippians: “That at the Name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth.” [Phps. 2.10]

In the + Name of Jesus