(Sung to the tune of
Good news from far abroad I bring
Glad tidings for you all I sing,
I bring so much you’d like to know,
Much more than I shall tell you though.
And then they’d add a new verse, a riddle they made up, singing it to a young woman of their choosing. If she couldn’t answer the riddle, she had to give her garland to the singer! And around and around they’d go, taking turns singing and trying to solve the riddles, and exchanging the garlands around their necks. It reminds me a bit of the old tradition of giving your college ring to your sweetheart, except the Garland Game is more gender-free than this American tradition.
Anyway, Luther liked the tune of the song and used it, as he did with a number of popular Pub songs in his day, and made it into a hymn for church. He wrote a whopping 14 verses, and he used the riddle format, you could say, in that, the name Jesus is not revealed finally until verse 12! Today we sing it as our Hymn of the Day, but we won’t make you sing all 14 of the verses!
Luther is credited with rewriting the music, and is the one we have printed in our hymnals. It’s a catchy tune, and even Bach used it in his Christmas Oratorio, and at least seven other of his works.
It’s not the kind of name-game we choose to play today. But the melody is easy to learn, and the verses aren’t bad either, for the Christmas season!
Names! They have intrinsic meaning, as Paul Tillich, a great theologian of the 20th C. used to say. Spoken words carry meaning within them so that they point to the thing which they represent. For example, Jesus is the Logos, or word of God, as we learned last Sunday, reading from John’s Prologue. Jesus was “with God” in the beginning, and indeed “was God,” the word of God, which is exactly how creation came into being in the Genesis story. God spoke, and it was.
In our gospel reading, the new born child, only a week old, is gathered up by his parents from his manger in Bethlehem for his first journey just up the road a piece, to the Temple in Jerusalem. “After eight days had passed,” Luke tells us, “it was time to circumcise the child.” A, matter-of-fact bit of information! But also a reminder that Mary and Joseph were fulfilling the equivalent of the baptismal requirements of the day, and that Jesus was brought up according to the Jewish laws that all children were. “And [on this day] he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel…”
Normally a first born son would be given the name of the father. We already saw this come up in Luke’s story in the naming of John the Baptist. There was a controversy over his christening! Should he be named from heaven above, or from the culture below? When Elizabeth and Zechariah brought him to the temple on the eighth day, and when the priests were about to name him Zechariah, Elizabeth said “no,” the angel told us, “he is to be called John”. But they didn’t believe her, and went running to Zechariah, who was still struck dumb by angel Gabriel, unable to speak – and he had to write it on a chalk board, and show it to the priests: “his name is John.” And immediately Zechariah’s “mouth was opened and his tongue freed” to speak again. Names are important!
Just so, Jesus was named, not after his father Joseph, but was given a name from heaven above, “given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb,” the name Jesus, which means, God saves. So, the Jesus story contains a double whammy! First of all, at least from the perspective of the culture around him, Jesus is not named in the tradition of his family, raising more questions, no doubt, about his unwed parents. And secondly, this child born in a manger, a feeding trough, is to be called: God saves? Really?! A bit presumptuous, don’t you think?
The date of this feast day has shifted back and forth over the years. In the fourth century, when Christian pilgrims kept coming to Rome on January 1st, St Augustine greeted them one year, and is reported to have said, “I see you have come here as if we had a feast today!” And sure enough, as Christians were want to do in those days, they transformed the pagan celebration, in this case New Year’s, a time of widespread license and wild debauchery, and turned it into a Christian holy day. At first, to offset the pagan partying, it was more like a Lenten day of fasting and solemnity. Augustine said in his sermon that day, “During these days when they revel, we observe a fast in order to pray for them.”
But as times changed, so did the commemoration day. By the 7th C. Pope Boniface called it “The Octave of the Lord,” like the eight days of the Easter Feast, and it became a joyous and celebrative festival.
And eventually, calling today, the Name of Jesus has come to win out over, the Circumcision of Jesus. The Jewish tradition was to combine both together, of course, but the gospel emphasizes the naming of Jesus, and made circumcision optional.
As Jesus grew, he received many different titles, in an attempt to define all that he was and is: Son of God, Son of Man, Emmanuel, Christ, Prophet, Rabbi, High Priest, Name above every Name, Prince of Peace, King of Kings, Light of the World, and Bread of Life, among others. But none was more apt than Jesus, meaning, God saves.
Jesus is both a riddle and the most well known name there is. From heaven above he comes, though he’s born of a woman, here below. He is savior of the world, but he also empties himself taking on our sins. He is innocent, a man peace, but he dies a criminals’ death. He was a poor wandering teacher with no where to lay his head, but he debated the scholars of his day and was raised up by God as our king. He holds both heaven and earth together in one miraculous whole, a riddle we struggle to apprehend. But as every Sunday School child knows, the answer is always the same: it’s, The Name of Jesus, “the name given by the angel, before he was conceived [in the womb].”