What’s in a Name?

January 3 is the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Jesus. Does that feast make sense to people today?

To appreciate its meaning, we need to give up some modern thinking and recover biblical thought.

In the biblical world, one’s name was indicative of one’s identity. Your name was not a “cutesy” choice of your parents, designed to trip off the tongue or alluringly alliterate. If it was the name of an ancestor, it was not just a throwaway honor: you are who you are because of where you come from.

That’s why in the ancient (and not just biblical world), a person’s name often also included his father’s, as in “Jesus, son of Joseph” (Yeshua ben Josef). It’s true in some places today, such as in modern Poland, a person is often legally identified in documents as “Jan Kowalski, syn Jozefa, ur. 01.I.1959 r.” (John Kowalski, son of Joseph, born January 1, 1959).

Jesus receives His Name even before He is conceived. When Mary is invited and agrees to participate in God’s salvific plan, the Archangel Gabriel tells her she will “conceive and bear a Son and name Him Jesus.” So it’s not Mary and Joseph thinking what would be a “nice” name for their boy child. His identity is established from on high: “He will save His people from their sins.”

The same is true, by the way, of John the Baptist, whose name is passed along by Gabriel to Zechariah when he speaks of Elizabeth’s conception. All this obviously has implications for pro-life perspectives: you don’t name “blobs of tissue” or “clumps of cells”. No, it’s clear from a biblical perspective that we are dealing with a person with an identity before as well as after birth. Indeed, that person is already part of God’s plans “even before I was knit together in my mother’s womb” (Jer 1:5).

Likewise, to change a name indicates a change of identity. Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, and Jacob becomes Israel. In the New Testament, Simon becomes Peter, a rock. Note one thing: these changes of identity are not self-assumed or self-made. They come from authority, divine authority. It is God who renames Abram, Sarai, Jacob, and Simon. Just as in a vocation–because a name should be revelatory of a vocation–”you did not choose me, I chose you” (Jn 15:16).

That is why, for all these reasons, to “know” someone’s name was not just to have some handy information about what to call this guy when you needed him. To “know” someone’s name was to know something about that person, to enter into the mystery of his personhood, to begin to be part of his life. To know a name—and even more so, to confer a name—was an act of relationship.

To our modern world, where identity is “self-made” and now apparently an ongoing life project, such ideas seem alien. The contrast between most of human history, which recognizes a person fitting within a broader social web, and our fluid and isolated individualism, could not be starker.

That is why the Second Commandment prohibits “taking the Lord’s Name in vain.” To invoke someone’s name is to invoke the dignity and identity of that person. When that Person happens to be God, the stakes are that much higher. To use the Lord’s Name as a cover for lies or dissimulation or simply as an expletive or curse, is not just simply saying a “bad word.” It is to degrade God’s dignity for banal, mundane, even corrupt purposes.

When she appeared to two children at LaSalette, France, in 1846, Our Lady had three complaints and requests. Among them was the fact that religion had become so ancillary to peoples’ lives that the farmers who drove their carts regularly and casually used Jesus’s Name as an expletive, while they were working. Our Lady identified that practice as among the things that angered her Son.

Well, if your name became a routine curse word, wouldn’t you be?

One need but listen to modern conversation, including those on mass media, to recognize a general coarsening of our culture. Back in the 1970s, there was even a Supreme Court case about “seven dirty words,” i.e., curses and swear words that were banned from use on radio. Many of them today are routine. And, in their midst, is plunged the sacred Name of God.

So, the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus should be an occasion on which we consciously examine how we speak. Whether we actually slur the Holy Name or sloppily truncate it for our low purposes (“oh, Jeeez”), we ought to ask ourselves whether our speech reflects what we really believe. Because, as St. Luke reminds us, “there is no other name under heaven given to men, by which it is necessary for us to be saved” (Acts 4:12). Because, “at the name of Jesus, every knee must bend, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth” (Phil 2:10).

Catholics often see the image “IHS” (it figures prominently in the seal of the Jesuits). It is an abbreviation for the name “Jesus,” using the first three letters of that name (ιησους) as they appear in Greek. As one commentator notes, this is the correct interpretation of that abbreviation, not the claim that it means “Jesus hominum salvator” (Jesus, the Savior of man). The sentiment is not untrue, it’s just not historically accurate in terms of its origin.