"Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this." Rev. 1:17-19.

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Anchoring a Name


          “How great is Jehovah,” we sang one recent Saturday night and at the Christmas Pageant. I loved this new song; I loved the way it claimed for us the justice-loving God of the Old Testament Prophets. I couldn’t help but cringe, though, at the Jehovah chorus and the way in which we were throwing around the sacred name of God, the very name that those same prophets would not utter aloud. For Jews, both in ancient times and today, God’s Name is too holy to be spoken. When Moses asks God for God’s name at the Burning Bush, God answers Moses mysteriously, “I will be who I will be.” God is beyond any name, any limitation or definition that we human beings might place upon God. When praying or reading aloud from scripture in English, Jews refer to God as the “Holy One,” or even as “Hashem,” the Name.   
        Where then, you might wonder, does this word “Jehovah” come from? When writing God’s most holy name, the Hebrew Scriptures use the four consonants of the Hebrew verb “to be,” the verb disclosed at the Burning Bush. One cannot, after all, just leave a blank on the page! Later, Medieval Jewish scholars, who would not change even a letter of the sacred texts that they were copying, added the vowels for “adonai” or “Lord” underneath these holy consonants, so that readers would know to say “Lord,” rather than God’s Name, as they read. When we Christians refer to God as “Jehovah” or “Yahweh,” we are cluelessly taking the four sacred consonants of God’s name and pronouncing them together with the vowels for “adonai,” as if the holy combination is supposed to be a regular name. Using Jehovah or Yahweh as a friendly first name for the Holy One is an abomination for Jews and might also give us Christians pause. To name something is indeed to have power over it, to define it, to pin it down. How can we creatures give a name to the Creator of all that is?  
 Today in our church calendar we are celebrating the Feast of the Holy Name, a remembrance of the day, described just briefly in our Gospel reading from Luke, when the 8-day-old baby Jesus, like all Jewish baby boys, was brought to the priests be circumcised and to receive his name. On no other day is the particular Jewishness and maleness of Jesus more strongly emphasized. Today we see the tiny, fragile newborn boy marked with the sign of the covenant between God and Israel. We see him become part of the chosen people, receiving the name whispered to Mary by the angels: the Hebrew name Joshua, like the strong leader who brought down the walls of Jericho and led his people into the Promised Land. The name that the baby boy was given, whether we translate it as Joshua or Jesus, means, “He saves.”
The paradox here, of course, is that Joshua, the little naked Jewish boy squirming helplessly on the table as the knife is sharpened, is also, for us Christians, the great “I am,” the incarnation of that same Creator God who is too mighty to name. How can the unpronounceable, universal Name become this particular baby Jesus? How can God, who is neither masculine nor feminine, be circumcised? How can the Creator become flesh that bleeds? As W.H. Auden puts it, “How could the Eternal do a temporal act,/ the Infinite become a finite fact?”[1]
African-American theologian Jacquelyn Grant points out some of the theological choices that we make in wrestling with this paradox of names in her book, White Woman’s Christ and Black Woman’s Jesus.  She believes that white believers are most comfortable thinking about Jesus as The Christ, the universal and abstract Savior who rose from the dead to sit at God’s right hand. Black believers, on the other hand, are more comfortable with the human Jesus, the fellow-sufferer who knows and condemns oppression firsthand. We all tend to fall on one side or the other of the naming question. While I can marvel on Christmas at the miracle in the stable, I find that, left to my own devices in my personal prayers, I am often praying to a Father who is an abstract “ground of being,” and to a Jesus who has somehow left his maleness and his Jewishness on the pages of the Bible, becoming for me the detached voice behind his teachings, a risen Christ who left earthly particularities behind at Easter. I can’t help but relate to the shock of the altar guild member who was scandalized when author Barbara Brown Taylor looked at a church painting of a bare-chested Jesus and dared to wonder aloud why the painter did not paint him with any body hair.[2] We know that Jesus was a man, but our sense of his holiness washes away the down-to-earth details.
Instead, what the African American portrayal of Jesus brings to our spirituality is exactly what today’s Gospel intends to point out to us: that Jesus, as a real man being made part of God’s Covenant, living as a real first-century Jew in a real body, blesses our real lives and our real bodies, planting the wild freedom of the Creator within the tiniest corners of creation, giving the infinite significance of the Name above all Names to our particular names, binding each of us inseparably to the heart of God. Just as God blesses the Israelites in our Old Testament reading by “putting God’s Name” upon them, so God blesses humanity by putting God’s Name upon a baby who is both God and man.
A friend of mine recently wondered if the pejorative name, “anchor baby,” might not be a helpful contemporary metaphor for the scandal of the Incarnation. If you have been following the heated debates over immigration in this country, you will know that an “anchor baby” is a child born to illegal immigrants, a child born to “anchor” the rest of the family to this country, since all children born on U.S. soil automatically become citizens. On the one hand, this name, full of racist overtones, presents us white Americans with the challenge of imagining God coming to us as a baby given the name “Jesus” (Spanish pronunciation) by the angel--God as an illegal immigrant, the ultimate outsider—God who has “emptied himself and taken the form of a slave,” as the Apostle Paul writes in our Epistle for today. On the other hand, this name provides us with the image of the anchor, something that holds us fast, something that gives us security in the storm. We can imagine God stubbornly anchoring Godself within creation, holding on to each of us with the desperation of a family looking for a way to survive.
An invincible anchor and a vulnerable child unwanted and ignored by society … such is indeed the paradox of Jesus’ name, and of our own names, too. We are all vulnerable children, wandering through an uncertain landscape, watching people, places, and years come and go, foreigners to others and to ourselves. Yet we have also been anchored, in our very creation, to the One who was, and is, and is to come. In the little baby named Salvation, who grew up like we do to live, and love, and suffer, and die, yet who shows us what God’s life looks like on this earth, our names, too, glow with the glory of our Creator. What a marvelous Anchor for us to grasp, as we are carried into a new year …


[1] W.H. Auden, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.”
[2] In Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for this compelling eye-opening challenge for all of us who call Jesus Lord!

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