Call His Name Jesus

Matthew opens his Gospel with a long list of names, the family line from Abraham down to Joseph. It can feel like the part you skim. But it earns its place, because by the time the angel speaks, Matthew has already shown us that this child is the rightful heir of David and a son of Abraham, the one in whom the old promises land. Then the genealogy snags on a problem. Joseph and Mary are pledged to be married, and she is found to be expecting a child that is not his. In that culture the betrothal was as binding as marriage, and Joseph, called a righteous man, is quietly working out how to release her without shaming her in public. That is the room the angel walks into. By long tradition Matthew is thought to be writing for readers who knew the Hebrew Scriptures well, and he keeps reaching back to them, so the naming of the child is not a sweet aside. It is the moment the whole opening pivots from human tangle to divine purpose. There is something else worth noticing too: by telling Joseph to name the boy, the angel hands him the act of a father claiming a son, and so this child is brought, legally and openly, into the house of David.

The short reflection already opens up the meaning of the name, so I want to sit instead with two small words that are easy to rush past: his people. The angel does not say he will save people in general, in some vague drift of goodwill. He says his people. In the first instance that phrase would have meant Israel, the nation the rest of Matthew keeps in view. So there is a fence here, a particular people with a particular history. And yet by the end of the same Gospel the risen Jesus sends his followers out to the nations (Matthew 28:19), which means the fence has a doorway in it. What looked like a word about one people opens out to anyone who comes to him. I find that order strangely comforting. He saves a people, not a crowd of strangers he happens to tolerate. To be saved by this name is to be claimed, named, brought inside, the way Joseph was told to claim the child as his own. You are not rescued and then left standing at the door.

Notice how specific the angel is. Not save his people, full stop, but save his people from their sins. That little phrase carries the weight, because it rules things out as much as it promises. It quietly tells Joseph, and us, what this child is not coming to do. He is not first of all a political deliverer who will throw off Rome, and he is not a teacher handing out a tidier moral code. The threat he names is the one we are slowest to name in ourselves. I can spend a great deal of energy wanting God to save me from my circumstances, the difficult job, the strained relationship, the diagnosis, and never once ask to be saved from me. This is also where the verse reaches forward into the rest of the story. John will point at Jesus and call him the Lamb of God (John 1:29), and the apostles will later insist that salvation is found in no other name (Acts 4:12). The cradle and the cross are already tied together in this one sentence. The name is a job description, and the job costs him everything.

Here is where it gets personal for me. It is a strange comfort to be told, before this child can even speak, exactly what he came for. There is no bait and switch. I do not get to the end of the Gospels and discover that the saving was conditional on my being the sort of person who deserved it. The angel announces sin as the target while Jesus is still in the womb, which means my failures were never a surprise that derailed the plan. In a sense they were the plan’s reason. I have sat with people, and sat by myself, in the particular shame of having done the thing again, the thing I swore I had left behind. What helps me is that this verse refuses to let me shrink Jesus down to a life coach or a good example to copy. He came to save, as the existing reflection puts it, with his own hands and his own life. So the honest response is not to tidy myself up first. It is to come as the very person the name was spoken for. That is harder than it sounds, because most of us would rather be admired for being good than rescued for being lost.

• When I ask God to save me, what am I usually hoping he will change: my circumstances, or me?
• The angel says he will save his people from their sins. Is there a particular sin I have stopped bringing to him because I have decided it is mine to manage?
• Joseph was told to claim this child by naming him. Have I let Jesus claim me, or am I still standing at the door?
• If this name is a promise of rescue, who in my life most needs to hear that promise from me this week?

If you would like to keep reading, you can move on through the rest of Matthew or find a verse for how you feel today.