Jesus! Name
of mercy mild, given to the holy child, when the cup of human woe, first he tasted here below. Hymn # 252
Until I was in my 30s, when the ’79 Prayer Book came out, today was called The Feast of the Circumcision, which puts, as my childhood music teacher and choir master would have said, the emPHAsis on quite a different sylLABle. Whatever you call it, Jesus was both named and circumcised today.
We were lucky enough to have Jack Lindquist, speak at our Advent series this year. One night, he was talking about the two natures of Christ - that Jesus was both “true man and true God”, or more accurately put, in Christmastide, not divine and human, but rather the divine IN the human. He remarked that, while non-christians have no trouble accepting that Jesus was human, they cannot accept that he was divine, while Christians embracing the divinity of Jesus, sometimes have trouble accepting the fact that he was truly and fully, totally human, with all that implies. Jesus doesn’t just identify with us, he become one of us, which is pretty radical if you think about it.
We were lucky enough to have Jack Lindquist, speak at our Advent series this year. One night, he was talking about the two natures of Christ - that Jesus was both “true man and true God”, or more accurately put, in Christmastide, not divine and human, but rather the divine IN the human. He remarked that, while non-christians have no trouble accepting that Jesus was human, they cannot accept that he was divine, while Christians embracing the divinity of Jesus, sometimes have trouble accepting the fact that he was truly and fully, totally human, with all that implies. Jesus doesn’t just identify with us, he become one of us, which is pretty radical if you think about it.
And so here we are, 8 days after his birth, and Jesus, this “God in man made manifest", is brought to be circumcised, as any Jewish baby boy was, and still is today, as a sign in his flesh of the covenant Yahweh made with Abraham so long ago. He is given the name that the angel told mary (or Joseph, depending on who's telling the story ) and he is circumcised: divine and human in one small child.
Today’s quote, from a hymn I love entitled “Jesus, Name of wondrous love “ talks about the giving of the Name. But it also has the words I quote, and I can remember the first time I realized that it was talking about the pain Jesus felt at being circumcised, Becoming human was not a painless venture and this was not the last time that he shed his blood for us. Nor was it the first OR last time his mother suffered because of Jesus’ humanity.
Check out Jesus’ little face in the picture. It’s not the face of a an 8 day old but it’s marvelous all the same - WHAT!!!? he seems to say.
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