Name of Jesus (January 1, 2011)

·         Numbers 6:22-27

·         Psalm 8 (1)

·         Philippians 2:5-11

·         Luke 2:15-21

You know what's funny? We talk a lot about the name of Jesus, the power of his name, the worship of his name, etc etc, but really, how many people even know what Jesus's name really is?

First of all, we don't know Jesus's name insofar that Jesus is God and we can't know God's name. Why not? I don't know. The ancients believed that names had special power. In some cultures, a person can't speak his or her own name. In others, a person might have a "real" name which is secret, and names for daily use which others give him or her. Many cultures and cults believe that knowing a person's true name gives you power over them; for casting spells on them, for example. Even today there are people who devote considerable time to researching what a name entails for the personality and fate of the person who bears it.

It's probably all of the above, to some extent. We can't know the name of God because it would give us too much knowledge of God, and perhaps some kind of power over God. Or maybe it would just blow our minds. We probably can't even pronounce the name of God. It probably has sounds that we can't even hear, let alone reproduce.

We Christians call God "God", "Lord" and "Father", but these are not names, they're titles. And some Christians prefer female or other names for God, which is quite acceptable since the original God in the Old Testament is neither male nor female. In fact in Genesis, God is "elohim", that is, "godS." Plural. God could be the "myriad creatures" of the Tao Te Ching; neither male nor female, singular nor plural. God is what is; everything that is, is God. In Genesis 3:14, God says to Moses something that we translate as "I am who I am", or "I am what I am", or "I will be what I will be", or "I will be present where I will be present", or "I am the one who is". Which goes to show, we have no idea what his / her / their statement even means. The root of the word that is used indicates the idea of "being present"; so we can say "I am the one who is here", or "I am what is here". Or we could say "we are what exists." Everything that is, is God.

So we don't know God's name, and he gives us a name of sorts for himself and we don't even understand what that means. And we don't know how it sounds, because Moses, or whoever wrote the book of Moses, wrote it down as Y-H-W-H. Four consonants, that aren't even real consonants, and no vowels. We can't read a word with no vowels. We think it was pronounced "Yahweh", but then the Hebrews thought even that was too much speaking the name of the Lord, so they called him just "Adonai", that is, "Lord". Then someone came up with the idea of taking the consonants of God's name and the vowels from "Adonai", which would be Y-A-H-O-W-AI-H, which nowadays we read as "Jehovah." But "Jehovah" isn't God's name any more than "Yahweh" or anything else we can think of.

And then there is Jesus. I always thought that Jesus was supposed to be named "Emmanuel." We have a weird story in Matthew 1:22-25:

All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means "God is with us." When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

But, as always, we have to be careful with what we read. First of all it's not "the virgin", it's "the young woman"; but that's not today's topic. Second, the author of Matthew is using this bad Greek translation of Isaiah to connect Jesus to the promises about the Messiah, but that particular prophecy is weird and vague and doesn't really seem to have anything to do with Jesus, but more something about the war with Assyria.

If we really want to make Isaiah 7:14 work as a foretelling of Jesus, we have to read not "she shall name him" but "he shall be called". Big difference. Take for example Che Guevara. His parents named him Ernesto; his revolutionary friends called him "Che" because he used that word all the time. Or Gandhi. His parents named him Mohandas; his admirers called him "Mahatma", which means "Great Soul." So Jesus will be called "Emmanuel". Is that actually what Isaiah wrote? Nothing has come to my attention so far to support that reading, except the fact that we need to read it that way to make it work. So that's our explanation for why Jesus's name isn't Emmanuel. His parents named him "Jesus", but he was called "God is with us," which is indeed what we say about him: that he was God living with and among us.

Now what about the name "Jesus"? Obviously Jesus's name wasn't [scare quotes gesture] "Jesus", because that's not a Jewish name and it doesn't even mean anything. It's just the mangled remains of his name after being transliterated incorrectly into who knows how many languages. In his own language, however, his original name was "Yeshua", which means "salvation".

So, we don't know the name of God, who is everything that is; but when he took human form to live among us, his name was "salvation." Which is logical enough since he was here among us to achieve our salvation.

Remember therefore, that when you are praying to Jesus, you are praying to the God of our Salvation; and when you're about to say "we ask this in Jesus's name", try saying "we ask this in the name of our Salvation", and see if your request still makes sense. Does your prayer actually have anything to do with salvation? If not, why are you taking Yeshua's name?

Praise be to God, the Watchful, the Responsive, the All-Encompassing.