The 1st of January is always the Feast of the Circumcision and Naming of Jesus. This year it falls on a Sunday so it coincides with our Sunday Eucharist. Jesus, so Luke tells us in the Gospel reading, was circumcised, as was required by the Law, eight days after his birth;
‘After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child.’
According to Genesis 17, God had made an everlasting covenant with Abraham and taught that the sign of this covenant was that every male child had to be circumcised. Luke goes out of his way in his account of the birth of Jesus to place it in the context of the Old Testament promises. With antisemitism still rife in many countries, it is worth remembering that our Lord and Saviour, Jesus, was Jewish. Anti-semitism has no place in the Church.
At a circumcision it was usual for the child to be formally named. We may recall Luke’s account of the birth of John the Baptist:
On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him Zechariah after his father. But his mother (Elizabeth) said, ‘No; he is to be called John.’ They said to her, ‘None of your relatives has this name.’ Then they began motioning to his father to find out what name he wanted to give him. He asked for a writing-tablet and wrote, ‘His name is John.’
Mary’s child. like Elizabeth’s, has a divinely ordained name. In this case it is ‘Jesus’, and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. ‘Jesus’ is the Greek form of the Hebrew name ‘Joshua’ which means ‘God saves’.
In the Old Testament the phrase, ‘the name of God’ means the character or nature of God. We have this usage at the end of our Old Testament reading:
‘So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.’
God’s name is put on the Israelites. It means that God comes to his people, is active among them, in short, ‘blesses them’ as it says: 27 So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.
This same God, the God revealed to Abraham, Moses and the prophets and kings, now reveals himself in Jesus. Just as he saved Israel at the Red Sea and many, many times afterwards, so now he comes to us in Jesus to save us.
What does this salvation look like? The blessing in the OT reading tells us:
24 The Lord bless you and keep you;
25 the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
26 the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.
This is called the ‘Aaronic Blessing’. (It has relatively recently been set to music by John Rutter.) It is used in both Synagogue and Church up to the present day. Aaron, the brother of Moses, was head of the priestly family of the Israelites as they journeyed through the wilderness. These words are given for him and his family to pronounce over the people: ‘The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, “Thus you shall bless the Israelites”’.
First and last, God blesses. Israel’s God blesses his people. God is a God of blessing. Blessing carries a whole host of connotations: goodness, well-being, health, protection, intimacy, creativity, abundant living. This is what God gives us and longs to give us.
He gives us all this in the one called Jesus. Jesus blessed the little children brought to him and taught us by this that to receive God’s kingship meant receiving it with the simplicity of a child. Receiving God’s kingdom and its blessing, involves a process of untying the sophisticated adult knots we’ve managed to entangle ourselves in.
‘The Lord bless you and keep you.’ the Aaronic blessing continues. We now have the protection that God gives us, his ‘keeping’. Psalm 121 elaborates it for us:
The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
… The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in
from this time on and for evermore.
Those last words are used in our worship when a new incumbent is installed.
The one called Jesus reveals and embodies this same protecting God. He protects his disciples on the lake in the storm. On the night of his betrayal Jesus prays his priestly prayer to his Father, in John 17. It includes the words:
‘Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me.’
One way of summoning God’s protection is to call on the name of Jesus. The Jesus Prayer has a very ancient history: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God have mercy on me.’ Ask anything in my name and it shall be granted, says Jesus.
The blessing continues:
‘The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace’
This expresses the profound intimacy of the blessing. Moses was the one who met with God as they journeyed through the wilderness. He had met God on the summit of Mount Sinai and met with him in the ‘Tent of Meeting’. Deuteronomy, recounting the death of Moses says,
‘Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired, and his vigour had not abated … Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.’
The shining of the divine face on us is God’s meeting with us and our meeting with him. For the Christian community this finds expression in communion, holy communion, when we are promised, in bread and wine, to come before the face of Jesus Christ, the divine light.
As St Paul tells us, ‘For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness”, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’ And, as Jesus himself says, twice in John’s Gospel, ‘I am the light of the world.’ He also says to the disciple, Philip, ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father.’
In Jesus we are moved from darkness to light, imprisonment to openness, from compulsion to freedom, gloominess to joy, to the place where we can let God look at us as we are and so see him as he is. It is a common experience that when we have fallen out with someone, we can’t look them in the eye. The openness of face-to-face communion is lost. It is the physical expression of our hurt, shame, and failure.
But God is all light, Jesus is all light. God is all love and Jesus is his self-sacrificial offering of love that will not let us go. We hide our faces, but in Jesus, God comes to save us and lifts up his countenance upon us and gives us peace. This is the blessing God places upon us, the blessing of the one whose name is ‘Jesus’.
Service: Canon Bill Croft, 1st January 2023. (St John The Baptist Church Peterborough UK)
Referenced Scripture: Numbers 6.22-end, Galatians 4.4-7, Luke 2.15-21