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.

The mission was not bolted on later. It was folded into the name from the first day, so completely that you could not summon the boy without saying it. Mary calling him in from the doorway, a friend shouting across the street: without thinking, they were saying the Lord saves. The whole gospel sat inside an ordinary word a household would use a hundred times over. The rescue Jesus came to bring was never meant to stay locked in a temple or kept for a holy hour. It belonged in kitchens and workshops and dusty lanes, in the plain run of a life. Long before he preached a single sermon, his name was quietly preaching one for him, in the mouths of people who had no idea what they were announcing.

There is a gap in this scene that I find almost unbearable when I stop on it. The angel hands this child the largest task ever given, to save his people, and the child cannot so much as lift his own head. He will need feeding, carrying, keeping warm. The one named for rescue could not at that moment rescue himself from hunger. And yet the plan was already in motion. It did not wait for him to grow strong or to agree to it. The whole of it rested on God’s word spoken over a cradle, not on anything the baby could do. That steadies me, because it tells me where salvation starts: with God deciding, and saying so, and setting it running while we are still unable to help ourselves. The rescue began before he could speak a word. He grew into the name. The name did not wait for him to be ready.

I have heard this verse read at baby dedications and christenings, as if the point were transferable: name your child, and something of that meaning rubs off. It does not. The command “you shall name him Jesus” was addressed to Joseph about one specific child, at one moment, carrying an unrepeatable freight: this baby, and no other, would save his people from their sins. Read it over a font with the parents’ own choice of name and the words become a nice bit of poetry about hope, cut loose from the reason the angel spoke at all. The other misuse I have seen is at the end of an evangelistic talk, pulled out as a neat trick: did you know Jesus means the Lord saves? Say it, collect a small gasp at the etymology, then move to the appeal, and you have used a fact about the name without letting Joseph’s actual crisis, or the sin the angel names, get anywhere near the room. The etymology is real and worth telling. But this verse works by naming a specific rescue from a specific problem, and if the sermon never says sin out loud, it has been raided for a nice phrase and left standing empty.

If you are teaching this passage rather than just this verse, do not stop at verse 21. Matthew quotes Isaiah two verses later and gives the child a second name, Immanuel, God with us (Matthew 1:23). That gives a talk its spine without you having to import one. Verse 21 answers what he does: Jesus, the Lord saves, an active rescue from sin. Verse 23 answers who he is while he does it: God with us, a presence that does not save from a distance. Preach the first name alone and Jesus can sound like a solution delivered from far off, a saviour who fixes things and departs. Preach the second alone and you end up with warm company and no rescue, a God near but not necessarily doing anything about the sin killing you. Matthew needs both, so hold them together rather than picking whichever your congregation finds easier that week. Notice, too, that the order matters. Joseph is told to name the child before the second name has even been quoted, obedience first, ahead of the full picture, and Matthew fills the rest in for readers who already know how the story ends.

This verse earns its place read aloud on Christmas Eve, at the point in a service of lessons and carols where the readings turn from promise to arrival. It sits well at a baptism or confirmation too, when someone is publicly given a name and an identity in Christ, because the pattern matches: God speaks first, and the naming is obedience to what has already been said over the person. I would also put it near the start of a prayer of confession rather than at the end, because “from their sins” gives the confession somewhere to land before anyone has been asked to name anything of their own. Where I would be careful is a hospital bedside. The angel is exact about what the rescue is for, and someone lying awake waiting on a scan result is not asking that question. Quote it there and you may sound as though you have quietly moved the subject from their body to their soul, which is a cruel swap to make on another person’s behalf, however kindly you meant it. If you want this name in that room, and I usually do, use it in prayer rather than as a text. Pray to Jesus by name over them and let the meaning work without being explained. Save the verse itself for when sin is honestly the thing on the table, and let Psalm 23 do the sitting up at night.

Matthew names Joseph’s father two verses before this scene: Jacob (Matthew 1:16). I cannot prove Matthew meant anything by that, and both names were common enough in first century Judaea that it may be nothing at all. But once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it. There was already a Joseph, son of a Jacob, who dreamed dreams nobody around him believed, and whose dreams ended up keeping his family alive through a famine that should have finished them (Genesis 37, Genesis 45:5). Another Joseph. Another dream. Another rescue that no one in the story could have arranged for themselves. And both of them, of all the places on the map, sheltering in Egypt.

What grips me harder is what a dream was worth as evidence. Matthew never tells us this Joseph’s trade. Much later, someone in Nazareth sneers at Jesus as the carpenter’s son (Matthew 13:55), and honestly, every picture we have of Joseph’s workshop, the sawdust and the measuring, hangs off that one aside. So I will not pretend to know what he did with his hands. What I do know is that he had nine months of plain arithmetic telling him one thing and a single night’s dream telling him another, and he was asked to build the rest of his life on the dream.

We read this scene as though Joseph’s part were the easy half, all the real drama kept for Mary. I do not think it was easy. He gave up his right to be the wronged party. He let the version of events in which he looks like a fool become, for the rest of his life, the official one. That is what it cost him to take this promise, before a word of it had been proved.

I cannot write about this verse honestly without going two chapters further than most sermons do. The angel tells Joseph that this son will save his people from their sins. Some time later, and Matthew is vague about how long, Herod becomes frightened for his throne, sends soldiers into Bethlehem, and has every boy of two years old and under put to death (Matthew 2:16). Matthew reaches for Jeremiah’s picture of Rachel, weeping and refusing to be comforted over children who are simply gone (Matthew 2:18). Jesus is saved. A dream sends the family out by night into Egypt (Matthew 2:13 to 14). The rescue named over his cradle worked, for him.

It did not work for the other households in that town. No angel came to their doors. No dream sent them running. Their sons died, it seems, in the same stretch of nights that this one son lived, and nothing in the text explains why the warning went to one house and not the others. I have sat through Christmas services that hurry past this on the way to the fulfilled prophecy, as though those children were scenery. I will not do that here. If you are the reader this verse lands badly on, the one who waited for a rescue that never came, who watched somebody else’s prayer answered while yours went quiet, you are not bringing a strange modern complaint to an ancient story. The story already knows about you. It buried real grief two verses after announcing its joy and it never explains the gap. I trust a God who let that stand, unexplained, in his own book far more than I would trust one who had tidied it away before we could ask.

Set Matthew 1:21 beside Romans 7:24 to 25 and the word save starts to shift tense under your feet. Paul is no new convert by then. He is many years into apostleship, and he still calls himself a wretched man, still asks who will deliver him from a body of death, still needing precisely what the angel says this child came to give. He thanks God for the answer in the very next breath. He does not thank him by claiming the fight is over.

I should say plainly that people have argued for centuries about who is speaking in Romans 7: Paul now, Paul before Christ, or Paul dramatising Israel under the law. I am not going to pretend that is settled. But he wrote it in the present tense, in a letter he expected to be read aloud to a whole church, and he was not embarrassed to.

I used to hear save his people from their sins as one finished transaction, something with a date on it, a font or an altar rail. Paul will not let me keep that comfortable shape. The rescue promised over Joseph’s household is the same rescue an apostle is still leaning on, mid sentence, mid struggle, at the far end of his life. That reads as good news to me now, though it once felt like failure. The name was never a promise that sin stops bothering you the day you believe. It was a promise about who keeps turning up to deal with it, every time it does.

Every December I hear the same soft version handed to children: Jesus came to save us from bad things. It is not false. It is vague enough to mean almost anything, and children spot vagueness far faster than we credit them for. The honest version has to include that the bad thing is in us and not only around us, and that is a much harder gift to put into a small pair of hands without frightening them.

What has worked, for me, is staying small and concrete and not reaching for the word sin straight away. A child who has taken the biscuit they were told to leave alone, and then said they did not, already knows in their own stomach the exact ache the angel is talking about: having done wrong, and wanting to hide. You are not teaching a new idea. You are naming a feeling they are already carrying, and telling them there is a person whose whole reason for coming was to deal with that ache, in them and in everybody else, and that he is not put off by it the way people sometimes are.

Children can hold that. What they cannot hold, and must never be handed, is the weight of guilt without the rescue attached in the same breath. This verse does not separate them. The problem and the Saviour arrive in one sentence, before the child is even born. Say the ache and the name together, or do not say the ache at all.

Charles Wesley wrote “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing” in 1739, on the anniversary of his conversion, and it ran to far more verses than any congregation sings now. It does not open with the words I love best. Those come a few verses in, once he has warmed up: Jesus, the name that charms our fears. And then, more exact than any modern carol dares to be, he breaks the power of cancelled sin, he sets the prisoner free. That is Matthew 1:21 set to a tune nearly three centuries old, and Wesley clearly thought the saving was the part worth singing loudest, not the birth on its own.

Cancelled sin is such a strange thing to put in a song. It is nearly a legal phrase, a debt struck through, marked closed by somebody else’s hand. Christmas cards never get near it. And Wesley will not let cancelled do all the work either, because in the same line the thing still has power that has to be broken, which is exactly the trouble anyone honest runs into: the ledger says paid and the habit says otherwise. He does not resolve that for you. He just puts both halves in one line and hands it to a room full of people to sing.

I find it quietly funny that every congregation belting that verse out over a piano at Christmas is repeating the angel’s sentence to Joseph back to God, mostly without noticing.

• 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.