The American Church takes the teaching of preaching much more seriously than we do they call it homiletics. I once heard a professor of homiletics give the following story as a dramatic example of extending the biblical story to make a point which no amount of explanation could bring home so effectively.
The visitors to the stable have all gone home and Joseph is beginning to think that Mary and the baby are strong enough to make the return journey to Nazareth, when suddenly he remembers why they came to Bethlehem in the first place. The journey was caused by the Roman need to count heads, to produce a census. Wearily he takes Mary and the baby off to the census office to register there’s a long queue and they are the last in the queue and it’s getting cold and dark. Eventually they reach the desk and the bored looking official who’s filling in the forms. He doesn’t even look up ‘Name?’ he says, and Joseph replies, ‘Joseph son of Jacob, carpenter of Nazareth.’ ‘Wife’s name?’ and she replies, ‘Mary also of Nazareth.’ ‘Kid’s name?’ There’s a slight pause and then Mary says quietly but firmly, ‘He is called, “Wonderful counsellor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace.” ‘
Jesus was called many things in his life time. He is also called Emanuel meaning God with us; he is called Lord, Master, Rabbi or teacher, the Prophet, Son of God, Saviour or Messiah meaning anointed one, which in Greek translates as Christ, hence Jesus Christ . He often refers to himself as Son of man. Today we celebrate the feast of his naming and his circumcision according to the Jewish covenant; we celebrate the giving of his own proper name by which his parents and friends knew him and he knew himself. We heard in our gospel this morning of Jesus being circumcised and named eight days after his birth and tonight we hear one example of the way in which Jesus’ name was used by the apostles as a name of power for bringing about healing. So Peter says to the crippled man at the Beautiful Gate, ‘Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth walk.’
Juliet once asked, ‘What’s in a name that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ But here by the Beautiful Gate she is proved wrong. There is power in this name and there is authority and there is healing no other name will do. But we are not here in the realms of magic. It isn’t that the name gives Peter special powers; it isn’t a matter of simply speaking the name to make the miracle happen. We hear elsewhere in Acts of pagan miracle workers trying to use the name of Jesus in this way with disastrous consequences for themselves. The name is effective only because Peter has invested his life in this name it has permanent significance for who and what he, Peter, is: it is as important to him as his own name if not more so. Which forces us to ask what this name means to us. In last month’s magazine we were reminded that word’s can do things there is what can be called a ‘performative truth’ about certain words because they can make things happen. So when a child is born it is given a name and immediately it is no longer it Ben or Bethany are introduced to a world of relationships because of the name by which they are called. And so many things can be brought about simply by the utterance of a name. So we can wonder whether Mary ever spoke the name of her first born son in the following ways: ‘Jesus’ (angry) Jesus? (where are you) Jesus (what have you done?) Jesus (please) Jesus (I love you). Just by the saying of his name in different ways he is made to realise that he has upset his mother, that his mother is looking for him, that she is surprised by his action, that she wants him to do something, and that she loves him. At least it can work that way in English I don’t know about Hebrew. So how are we to use the name?
It is remarkable how rarely Jesus is addressed by his actual name in the gospels he is invariably given a title. The demons call him by name, presumably in order to get power over him. His name is printed with the title, ‘King of the Jews’, on the cross. And then a blind man called Bartimaeus, one of the rare minor characters in the gospels cries out to him, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me’. And that simple phrase has been the basis of one of the most important traditions of prayer in the Eastern Church, known as the ‘Jesus prayer’. At its briefest it involves a simple slow repetition of the name Jesus; at it’s fullest it consists of the repetition of a version of Bartimaeus’ prayer, ‘Lord Jesus Christ , Son of the living God, have pity on me a sinner.’ And you can use any variation of those words you chose. But the key element is saying the name Jesus. It may initially sound rather a silly thing to do or worse for some people it may sound rather ‘evangelical’. But as those first disciples found it is the only name given to us whereby God becomes as personal to us as does anyone whose name we know and use often. It may be that we feel we don’t know much about Jesus – what he said or did; or it may be that by dint of having heard the gospel so often we know more than we think we know but our knowledge just doesn’t coalesce. But may be by repeating the name in different ways at various spare moments in the day in the garden on a bus or tube or on the street the character will begin to coalesce around his name the power of the name will begin to grow on us and make us more aware of God’s presence with us, naming us and shaping us to his glory.
Many centuries after the census we began with, another queue formed of people waiting to register. But this is in Maastricht and it is February 1942. And the queue of people are there to register their applications for visas. And the bored official is a Gestapo officer at a desk in the police station. And as he gets to the last person in the queue he also fails to lift his head as he barks out his question. But this time he is taken aback not by an answer but a greeting, ‘Gelobt sei Jesus Christus ‘ Praise be to Jesus Christ’ to which the answer would normally be, ‘In ewigkeit’ ‘to all eternity.’ He looks up and is startled to find a Carmelite nun standing in front of him. He fails to make the appropriate reply and instead asks for her identity card and on seeing it begins to get angry. It is not stamped with a large J as it ought to be, nor is the name Edith Stein, preceded by the name Sara which is prescribed for all Jewish women. Edith Stein or more properly Sr Teresia Tenedicta of the Cross, later explained to her Revd Mother that her dangerous greeting was an act of resistance. In the police station the conflict between Christ and Lucifer was being played out. And as an enclosed nun, whose only contribution to the war was her prayer, it was the only thing she could do to name her Lord in the darkness, ‘Praise be to Jesus Christ’. Amen.
Stephen Tucker