JESUS’
COMMITS HIMSELF TO BE OUR SAVIOR
There’s a lot in a name – what other
people call you, what you call yourself.
Your name is your identity. It
says a lot about who you are. Or maybe
it says more about who your parents had hoped you would live up to. I myself am named after the Apostle John. If am to live up to my name, I have some
pretty big shoes to fill. It’s fitting
for me therefore that my name means “the
Lord is gracious.” Thank God. Lots of other names have important meanings
too. My daughter Nadia Christi has a
neat name. It means “Hope of Christ.” Her name
reflects that which she was given in her Baptism. I have a brother who is visiting today whose
name I have always liked: Stephen Keyser Preus.
His name means “Crowned Emperor of
Prussia.” Pretty cool, huh? But … he’s not an emperor; he’s just my
little brother. Some names, no matter
how great in meaning, do not always accurately describe who you are. Now, although he’s done a great job so far,
my brother, just like the rest of us, needs to make a name for himself, so to
speak. We all have to do this; we must
imbue our own name with our own character.
And perhaps with the New Year, and with all our resolutions and stuff,
we are particularly focused on this very task today.
But of course, I am not here to give
you tips on how to do that. We’re here
today to consider the name of Jesus.
Unlike the rest of us, Jesus is
what His name means. That’s why the name
was given to Him by the angel Gabriel even before He was conceived. The name Jesus comes from the Hebrew for “the Lord saves.” Jesus is called Jesus because He is our
Savior. “And [Mary] will bring forth a Son,” Gabriel told Joseph, “and
you shall call His name JESUS, for He will save His people from their sins.”
On Christmas we celebrate the
fulfillment of the promise of Jesus being born to be our Savior. The eternal Word was made flesh. Today we celebrate another kind of birth of
Jesus. We celebrate how the eternal Word
was made under the Law. St. Paul writes
in Galatians 4: “But
when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of
a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we
might receive the adoption as sons.” Jesus was born to
be a Jesus. This was the name given to
Him before He was made true Man. But Jesus didn’t receive this name as His own
until after He made it a name for Himself by submitting to the very law that
held in bondage those whom He came to save.
Jesus first submitted to the law by being circumcised on the eighth day
as the law had required. This is what we
celebrate today. When we consider the
name of Jesus, we should always think of how He obeyed the law in our
place.
Circumcision was the mark and seal of
the everlasting covenant that God had made between Himself and Abraham and all
of his dependents. All baby boys were to
be circumcised on the eighth day by the removal of flesh from the body. This, of course, was symbolic of the removal
of sin. Those who complied with this
command received in their flesh the seal of the Gospel that their sins were
forgiven on account of the future obedience of Jesus. Now, the mere act of doing this did not save
anyone. It was always faith alone in the
promise of Christ that saved those who were circumcised. Through circumcision God put His Old
Testament people into a relationship with Himself whereby they received His
grace and favor. By submitting to
circumcision, Jesus was brought into this same relationship—though not as one
receiving mercy, but as the One supplying mercy by fulfilling the law in our
place.
Jesus was born for this express purpose
– to be our Savior. This is a nice
thought: savior. People imagine all
sorts of things that they’d like to be saved from. And so, without regard for their own sinful
condition, people have invoked the name of God, specifically the name Jesus, to
serve as the banner for every sort of worldly cause. Even among so-called Christians, the name of
Jesus has been misused – taken in vain – in order to promote salvation from
something other than that which Jesus came to rescue us from.
What do we need to be saved from? What kind of Jesus do we need?
Around the time of the Civil War, in
their efforts to confront the problem of American slavery, many abolitionists
crafted the Gospel into a new message that appeared to address more accurately
the problems of the Southern slave. It
was a message of liberation from earthly taskmasters. And boy, isn’t that what they needed?! So
many people painted Jesus as a moral champion of human rights who came to
establish liberty and justice for all.
Unfortunately this worldly message often replaced the heavenly message —
that gave true freedom from the spiritual captivity to sin that held all men in
bondage. By confusing their true need
for Jesus, real sinners were deprived of their real Savior who came to save
them from a much more oppressive master than what the American South could have
ever produced.
Compared to the slavery of the 19th
century, surely our problems seem small.
But small or not, all the problems we face in life sure work to distract
us from our greatest need. We have bills
to pay, debt to deal with, relationships to repair, futures to plan,
reputations to defend … And many of the things that occupy our minds and
distract our hearts this morning will probably not even be solved by the time
this calendar year is ended – and it has just begun. Such is life, so they say. I suppose it becomes a sort of slavery. And as swiftly as our lives are filled with
problems from which we are incapable of freeing
ourselves, so swiftly do we go chasing after false saviors, so swiftly
do are hearts craft for themselves special jesuses, fit to rescue us from all
of life’s troubles. But the saviors that
we invent inevitably fail to give us true freedom. Another year past, and more trouble
ahead. You can count on it. But even more than we need to be saved from
all the burdens that our lives pile upon us, we need to be saved from a much
more oppressive master.
This oppressive master is our own
sin. It doesn’t just bind our hands and
our feet while we dream of freedom. No,
it binds our own heart and will so that even our hopes and dreams are by nature
evil and opposed to God. It is this
slavery of sin and doubt and disobedience to God’s holy law that we need more
than anything to be rescued from. We
need a very specific Jesus. We need the
Jesus who was born under the law to redeem those who were under the law. We need the Jesus who was named Jesus because
He will save His people from their sins by taking their sins away from them all
the way to the cross. This is the Jesus
we need.
It is good to know what Jesus’ name
means, because then we know what Jesus does.
He saves. But more specifically,
He saves sinners. As wonderful as it is
to know what Jesus’ name means, it is even more important to know what name we
should assume for ourselves. There are
two names that I’d like you to consider this morning as the most precious names
that you can claim for yourself. The
first is sinner. The second is
Christian.
Jesus does not save us by giving us an
example to follow. Have you ever
wondered why we don’t name our children Jesus?
It just seems kid of disrespectful, doesn’t it? But we name our kids after other great men
and women whose lives are exemplary in the hopes that they will also grow up to
imitate their virtues. But the life of
Jesus is different than anyone else’s life.
He does not fulfill His name by setting an example for us to
follow. He fulfills His name by placing
Himself under the very law that gave us the name of sinner. He fulfills His name by obeying what we were
too weak to fulfill, and by shedding His blood to spare us from what he was
unwilling for us to suffer.
But to be an example, Jesus would not
have needed to be circumcised. Instead,
Jesus submitted Himself to circumcision so that He could be under the law with
us, no more than that, for us – to be our savior. Circumcision was God’s sign to sinners, to
the unrighteous who needed forgiveness, because they could not keep God’s
law. When Jesus submitted Himself to
circumcision, He was placing Himself under the very law that demands everything
from you. It demands complete perfection
of the heart – of every thought, word, and deed. It demands what you cannot do. It demands a better name than you can make
for yourself. It demands that you call
yourself a sinner. And that’s exactly
what Jesus did for us. He allowed
Himself, who had no sin, to be called a sinner.
This is what God required of His Son when He required that He be
circumcised. He required that He “who
knew no sin to be sin for us,
that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
But if we will not be sinners then we
have no right to call ourselves Christians.
Christians are those who know their sin, and know the one who has taken
their sin upon Himself. At His
circumcision, Jesus began the long road of obeying the law in our place, and
received a foretaste of the pain and bloodshed that He would endure to save us
from condemnation. And the end of this
road was death for Jesus. It was on the
cross that God named Jesus the sinner, so that you could adopt a new name, a
name that God Himself would place on you in the name of His Son. That name is the name: Christian.
No longer does God command
circumcision. Jesus fulfilled it. No longer can the law demand from you that
you produce a righteousness worthy of life eternal. Jesus fulfilled this law in your place. No longer can death threaten you with its
dark grave as your time on earth goes rolling on. Jesus your Savior has died this death once
and for all, and in your Baptism has brought you with Him to join in His
victory over all your spiritual enemies, and weaknesses, and failures. It is here where you were joined not to the
covenant of future blood shed, but to the eternal covenant of your salvation
won where you were buried and raised together with your Savior. It is here that you were first called a
Christian, and the right to be called sons of God.
Dear Christians, you have been given
the name of Christ, the Holy One of God, the Lamb whose holiness is so pure
that angels blush before it. And this
holiness is yours. This is what it means
to be a Christian. It means having every
heavenly gift imaginable. It means being
called the very children of God. It
means that whatever the law said you were, said you owed, said you deserved to
suffer, has been replaced with the perfect obedience of the God Man Jesus
Christ whose quest for your salvation began as a little baby the day He
received the most precious name we can speak or hear: Jesus, Savior.
So what is the character of your
name? You know what name you have earned
for yourselves. You know the character
of that name. It has burdened you. It has weighed heavy on your conscience this
year and even now as the New Year dawns.
It is the name of sinner. But
hold on to this name. Do not let it
go. But thank God that “this
is a faithful saying and worthy
of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” And so, we rejoice in the name that God has
given us in our Baptism where He joined us not just to an empty name, but to
the righteous obedience and eternal life that belongs to the name of Christ
Jesus our Savior. We rejoice in the name
Christian, for this is the name which we are given. We are Christ’s and Christ is ours. He is our namesake.
Let us pray:
To
me the preaching of the cross
Is wisdom everlasting;
Thy death alone redeems my loss;
On Thee my burden casting,
I, in Thy name,
A refuge claim
From sin and death and from all shame—
Blest be Thy name, O Jesus! Amen.
Is wisdom everlasting;
Thy death alone redeems my loss;
On Thee my burden casting,
I, in Thy name,
A refuge claim
From sin and death and from all shame—
Blest be Thy name, O Jesus! Amen.
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