A Boy Named Jesus

A Boy Named Jesus Matthew 1:18-25 What’s in a name? One of the things I used to do during VBS was have the children call out their name, and then I would look it up in a book about the origins of names and tell them what theirs meant. Some trending names today for girls are Grace which means Charm (in addition to alluding to the grace of God) or Charlotte which means Free. A newborn son may be named Finn which means Fair, or Elias which means The Lord Is My God. That’s cool that Elias is a trending name for today. When my son was but a zygote, I named him Gabriel. I knew his seed was to be a son and that he was sent from, a gift from God and destined to be a servant of God. So what is in the name Jesus? The naming of a child is an important part of the Scripture passage today. In fact, there are two important names given, both belonging to the same person, but each helping us to know more about Him. “He shall be called Jesus.” Both the given and symbolic names of Jesus tell us that God is with us in our present situations; that God wants to make a connection with us. Matthew tells us that before Jesus was born, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream, informing him that the child Mary was carrying was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and that he should not fear to take Mary as his wife. Further, the angel even told Joseph what to name the child — Jesus. Jesus was a common name. It was the “Bob” of the first century. We know of one other person in the New Testament itself named Jesus. He was a companion to the apostle Paul and is mentioned in Colossians 4:11 in a list of people sending greetings to the church at Colossae. And Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, mentions no fewer than 20 different men named Jesus. So, the child whom God sent to be the Savior of the world was given a name common to the time and place, one that by itself did not set Him apart from the rest of the human race. “Jesus” was the name that would have been entered into whatever official birth records were kept in those days. In the case of our Jesus, His name was sometimes used in combination with further identifiers, such as Jesus of Nazareth; or Jesus, son of Joseph; or Jesus, son of David (referring to His ancestry), but all these were actual labels referring to the one who was born to Mary around the beginning of the first century A.D. 2 But while it was a common name, it was not a meaningless one. While Bob is a nickname for Robert, which means Bright Fame (a good name in itself), Jesus, however, means “God is salvation.” The angel who appears to Joseph alludes to that meaning when he says, “you are to name Him Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” This child was given a name that would be a constant reminder of the saving grace of God. But then we also have, “They shall call him Emmanuel.” Once Matthew has told us what the angel said, he goes on to make his own observation. He tells us that the angel’s announcement to Joseph about the divine origin of the child and the naming fulfilled something Isaiah had written about centuries earlier, and Matthew then quotes Isaiah 7:14: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name Him Emmanuel.” Though Isaiah may have had another intention for the name, looking for someone to save them at that time from foreign domination, he also believed that there would one day be an ultimate visitation by God to save all people from the domination of sin. Matthew saw Jesus as the fulfillment of that hope, that prophecy. That name, Emmanuel, as Matthew hastens to tell us, means “God is with us.” So between His given name, Jesus, and His symbolic name, Emmanuel, this child to be born to Mary makes two important affirmations about God: one, that He saves us and two, that He is with us. The name Jesus, then, tells us that God is the author of our salvation. But what does that word mean? We so often hear it applied to being forgiven of our sins that we may miss its fuller impact. One way to understand it is to appreciate that God created us to have connection, close association, communion with Him. Question: Why did God create? Answer: To be known, to have a relationship with His creation and especially with those made and born in His image: you and me. But to have that connection, we have to change and become fit for it. Among the things that make us unfit are our sins and self-centeredness, but when we turn to God, He makes it possible, through Jesus, for us to change, to become fit for communion with God. In other words, Jesus saves. Sometimes that phrase has a silly application. The Smiths (fake name – true story) gathered in New Jersey for the wedding of the oldest son. The Jersey community was not far from New York City as the crow flies, but in terms of ground transportation, it required some effort to get there from the Big Apple. The first 3 event of the weekend was a dinner for family and friends at a local restaurant. Rachel, the groom’s sister, was living in Boston at the time, and she traveled by bus to New York City. From there, she had planned to take a train right to the Jersey town where the dinner was, but when she got to New York, she discovered that the train wasn’t running that day due to a fire at a crucial junction point. Learning of that development, Rachel called her brother Alex for another idea, who turned her over to his Hispanic friend, Jesus (pronounced Hey-sues but let’s call him Jesus for now), who was a long-time resident of the area. Jesus directed her to take a different train, which got her into New Jersey, but in another location, and said he’d be there with his car to pick her up when she arrived, which he was. Jesus got Rachel to her brother’s wedding dinner right on time. So the point of the story was, when Jesus drove up with Rachel in his car, someone - predictably - observed that Jesus had “saved” her, and everyone had a good chuckle. But maybe that application of the term is not so silly after all. It is simple, though, and speaks to our relationship with our Jesus. What God did with Jesus was to send Him to move us from where we are, from where we cannot be in communion with God, from where we are separated from God, to where we need to be - to sit at the table of fellowship with Him in the daily round of life as well as in the kingdom to come. “God is salvation.” That’s what the name Jesus means. God is our salvation and Jesus is the way He provided for salvation to come to us. Jesus’ symbolic name, Emmanuel, adds a further dimension to our understanding of God. “God is with us” is a message we especially need to hear today. Our world has layer upon layer of troubles and our own encounters with life are not all sweetness and light either. So the reality of God being with us is critical. Here’s another true story. Back in 2001, the president of Sony Corporation was thinking about the future of his company, and he was envisioning how, in just a few years, the electronic gadgets that we use every day, from computers to cell phones to global-positioning systems to other digital devices, were increasingly going to be able to communicate with each other and pass information from one platform to another. In fact, he pictured putting wireless devices on or in everything that moves by itself, from our pets to our children to our senior citizens and in everything that is handled, including the products on store shelves and in our homes. In those cases, he was thinking of super-small chips that use radio-frequency identification 4 technology that can be imbedded in almost anything and can “talk” to computers and other devices. Eventually, chips could be imbedded in food items to notify the refrigerator when their expiration dates have passed. Now a lot of what he thought about is already coming to pass. Anybody got their dog micro-chipped? When the Sony leader was thinking about all of this, he was seeking a term to describe the direction he wanted the company to go. He considered the word “network” but rejected that because it sounded too much like hardware, and he also thought of “mobile” but didn’t like that because it was too limiting. He finally thought of the word “ubiquity” which means “present everywhere at once, or seeming to be.” He was drawn to that in part because he’d heard that it originally meant “God is everywhere,” and he liked the idea of his company’s products being thought of as also being everywhere. It wasn’t long before other electronic companies jumped on that word, too, and it came to be understood as a vision where everything is linked to a network that is accessible from anywhere. That’s a little scary, but true and it’s here today, if you want it. That story and reality makes the point of the name Emmanuel, God with us. When it comes right down to it, however, we are probably less concerned with the fact that God is everywhere, than we are with knowing that God is present where we are — in whatever actual situations we find ourselves. Likewise, it’s less important that God can be “accessed” from anywhere, than that God will hear us from where we are. The message of Jesus’ symbolic name is not that God is everywhere, even though that is true, but that God is here with us. God is ubiquitous, yes, but more to the point, God is also specific. God is with us where we are. Earlier I said that when God brings us salvation through Jesus, He makes us fit to be in communion - in connection - with Him. Salvation makes us “interconnected, networked” with God. It’s an ever-present, everywhere network, to be sure, but God’s presence ensures that we can access Him from anywhere we are. In the naming of Jesus, there were to be two powerful testimonies to remind us of how God comes to us, if we will allow Him to. No matter what we go through, He is present with us where we are, and He comes with salvation. That’s plenty of reason to celebrate the birth of the boy named Jesus.