Jesus Archives - Kyle Matthew Oliver

(Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:15-21)

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At first glance, today is a very literal sort of feast. We celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus because it is the eighth day of Christmas and, as our Gospel reading says, “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus.”

Aside from reminding us that Mary got the name from her Angel visitor, that’s pretty much all Luke gives us. Since we couldn’t very well have a one-sentence Gospel lesson, the lectionary leads into that verse with the details that come before it, of the shepherds’ visit to the Christ-child.

And so I found myself playfully revising the message of the Angel: “you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger—and wait ‘til you get a load of what they’re calling him.”

But our commemoration and our Gospel reading start to make sense when we consider what the name actually signifies. You may know that Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua, which means “God has saved” [translation by Marion Lloyd Soards in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, p. 97].

And actually, that part is in the Angel’s words to the Shepherds: “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” God has saved. That’s what the shepherds went to the stable to see. That’s who they went to see.

So there’s a more substantial reason to celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus today, or at least during the season of Christmas, our great feast of the Incarnation of God in Christ. By speaking “God has saved” on, if you will, the liturgical anniversary of Jesus’s circumcision and naming, we remind ourselves that Jesus’s whole life was his saving act for those who would be baptized into it. His whole life was his saving act.

There will be other reminders of this insight along our path as we walk with Jesus from Creche to Cross and then beyond. When we sing the Great Litany during Lent, we will ask the Lord’s deliverance not just “By thine Agony and Bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension,” but also “By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity and submission to the Law; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation.”

Yes, when the shepherds brought their flocks, when the Magi brought their gifts, when Mary and Joseph loved and cared for him, Jesus was saving us. Each time he read Torah, each time he swung a hammer, each time he healed the sick, each time he welcomed a child, each time he taught the crowds, Jesus was saving us. His whole life was his saving act. His whole life he was saving us.

So perhaps there’s one last reason why it’s a good and holy thing for us to celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus on this particular day. For many of us, New Year’s Day means a renewed commitment to live lives more in touch with our deepest desires: health, wholeness, relationship, thanksgiving, generosity.

If, with God’s help, we are to succeed, we’ll do a little bit each day—with every decision, with every simple act. Thus, we’ll experience God’s gift of salvation and fullness of life in the same way Jesus offered it.

So remember that the next time you’re feeling bored or overwhelmed by what feels like a trivial task, or dozens of them. Remember it when you fall back into old habits despite your best efforts, or fall into new ones by a power you didn’t know you had.

Remember it when you meet someone who’s having a bad day, or someone who can’t remember the last time he or she had a good one. Remember the baby, the boy, the man whose mother named him “God has saved.”

And remember how he did it: with his whole life, for our whole lives. Thanks be to God.

Thursday in 1 Advent, Year 1 (Isaiah 26:1-6, Ps 118:19-24, Matt 7:21-27)

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Image source: idleformat CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

In college, I worked as a writing tutor. As word of this avocation got out to my friends, they started asking me to help with resumes and with statements for various applications. Probably the most useful idea I shared with them was something I’d been told, and tried to follow, when I was writing my own statements. “To get the readers to remember you,” the advice went, “you have to get them to imagine you doing the things you mention.” In other words: show, don’t tell.

And so I might recommend adding a paragraph that, to take a particular example, drew a picture of my friend’s experience building concrete canoes for a civil engineering competition. Yes, it was great that in so doing he had learned to be mindful of the intricacies of mixing ratios, but that message was more likely to stick if his readers actually pictured him out on the river for that first precarious test-paddle. We both hoped that the image helped the idea become better integrated in the mind of the reader: “Oh, Mike So-and-so, yeah, he was the concrete canoe guy, right?”

Of course, the great power of pictures and symbols, of metaphor and imagination, is not news to the inheritors of a tradition shaped by the likes of John the Evangelist, Augustine of Hippo, and Ignatius Loyola. They each knew that forming and nourishing disciples is about much more than presenting ideas to us. It’s about helping those ideas gain some purchase within, in our minds, yes, but even more so in our hearts. They knew, and we know, that biblical and theological imagery can, if we let it, get inside us, becoming, in one author’s words “part of ourselves … absorbed into our very life” [Martin Thornton, Christian Proficiency (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1988): 77.].

If we believe the words of scripture can act upon us in this way, then liturgies like today’s present an embarrassment of riches for our spiritual nourishment. At the center are Jesus’s words from Matthew’s gospel: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock” (Matthew 7:24-25). Jesus and his teachings are our bedrock, our sure foundation—vast, dependable, and in an important sense unbreakable.

You probably noticed these images of rock and stone throughout our lections today, and each appearance offers its own richness, its own power to reach our inner nooks and crannies. My moment of intimate encounter came with the recapitulation of the image in our Communion Hymn: “On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand.” When we drop the conceit of the house and put our own two feet squarely on that rock, or in that sand, it seems to change things.

“Sinking sand” reminded me immediately of my inbox, and my relationship with it, of how quickly the dream of tidiness and control slips through my fingers as requests, reports, and referrals pile up. My strategies are sinking sand, my plans for getting through the day on my own efforts rather than by trusting that I am supported and saved by a rock and redeemer who doesn’t care what my inbox, or even my resume, looks like. All other ground is sinking sand.

An image can do its full formative work on our hearts and souls only if we invite it in and bid it stay a while. That’s what these contemplative seasons are all about. What will your image be? Advent, of course, has plenty of worthy pictures for us to choose from and sit with: light in the darkness, a highway in the desert, hills toppled and valleys raised, strange messengers from earth and heaven. But I think, in what for us is a season of papers, exams, grading, shopping, and last-minute travel, we could do worse than to spend our time with the image of our “everlasting rock” (Isaiah 26:4). Our houses, and our hopes, can be built on nothing less.

Tag: Jesus

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