The Name Above Every Name: The Circumcision and Holy Name Of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Luke 2:15–21)

January 1, 2026, The Circumcision and Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Red-Letter Holy Day, Season of Christmas

Luke 2:15–21, Psalm 8, Romans 1:1–7, Exodus 34:1–9

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you on this Feast of the Circumcision and Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is January 1. The world is marking the day in the way it always does: with resolutions, with hope placed in human effort, with the particular mixture of expectation and anxiety that comes with a new year. The Church is also marking the day. She is simply marking it for a different reason and with a different Name. On January 1, the eighth day after Christmas, the infant Jesus was circumcised and given his Name. The Church keeps this day not to compete with the world’s calendar but to remind us that every day belongs to Christ.

The appointed Gospel for this feast is Luke 2:15–21. The passage begins not with the infant but with the shepherds in motion. They had heard the angel’s announcement and gone with haste to Bethlehem; now they are returning, and they go back speaking: “When they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child.” (Luke 2:17, ESV) They could not be silent about what they had seen. They went back to their ordinary lives glorifying and praising God. This is the first model of what it means to bear the Name: to take what we have witnessed back into ordinary life and speak of it.

Luke adds a note about Mary between the shepherds’ witness and the circumcision: “But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19, ESV) She does not immediately explain or proclaim. She keeps and ponders. Bearing the Name is not always immediate proclamation. Sometimes it is the long, quiet work of holding what we have received and letting it form us from within. The shepherds and Mary together give us the two movements of a life shaped by this Name: the going out and speaking, and the sitting still and pondering. Both are faithful. Every Christian life needs both.

Then verse 21, the single sentence that holds the feast: “And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” (Luke 2:21, ESV) The eighth day was, according to the covenant command first given to Abraham and received within the Law of Israel, the day appointed for the circumcision of a male child. The command goes back to Abraham: “He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised.” (Genesis 17:12, ESV) This was the sign of the covenant, the physical mark that identified a son of Abraham with the covenant people and the promises God had given. By receiving circumcision on the eighth day, the infant Jesus entered fully into the covenant life of Israel. He did not receive it because he needed cleansing from sin. He is the sinless Son. But he had truly been born under the Law, and, as the Collect says, he “fulfilled the covenant of circumcision for our sake.” He entered Israel’s covenant obligations as the faithful Son in whom the promises reach their fulfillment.

This is the theological pattern that will govern his entire life. He who is without sin enters fully into the condition and obligations of the people he has come to save, so that in him we might receive what we could never earn. He was baptized, though he had no sin to confess. He was tempted, yet without sin. He was crucified, though he deserved no death. And on the eighth day of his earthly life, he bore in his flesh the sign of the covenant he had come to fulfill. The circumcision belongs to the same obedient human life that reaches its saving climax at the Cross: he takes what belongs to our condition and fulfills the righteousness we could not fulfill for ourselves.

Already, only eight days into his earthly life, Christ is living the obedience by which he will fulfill the covenant for us. The number eight later came to carry rich significance in Christian reflection. Seven completes the biblical week of creation. Jesus rose on the first day of a new week, and Christians came to speak of the Lord’s Day as both the first day and the eighth day: the day beyond the completed week and a sign of the world to come. We should not imagine that this later symbolism is Luke’s hidden explanation for the timing of Jesus’ circumcision; the immediate reason is simply that God commanded circumcision on the eighth day. Yet once the whole Gospel is known, the resonance is fitting. The Child circumcised on the eighth day is the same Lord who will rise bodily from the dead and become “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:20, ESV) Paul writes in Colossians 2 that in Christ we have been “circumcised with a circumcision made without hands” and immediately joins that reality to Baptism, burial with Christ, and resurrection through faith in the powerful working of God. (Colossians 2:11–12, ESV) In union with Christ, the deeper reality toward which the covenant sign pointed has come: the old sinful life is put off, and we are given new life in him.

Then the Name. The Name given to this Child was not chosen by Joseph or Mary. It was given by the angel before his conception: “You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21, ESV) The name Jesus is the English form of the Greek Iēsous (ee-AY-soos), which translates the Hebrew Yeshua (yeh-SHOO-ah), itself related to Yehoshua (yeh-ho-SHOO-ah), meaning the LORD saves or the LORD is salvation. It is not a decorative name. It is a theological declaration. Every time his Name is spoken, it speaks of what he came to do.

The Old Testament reading appointed for this feast is Exodus 34:1–9, Moses’ encounter with God on Sinai after the breaking of the first tablets. What God does on that mountain is extraordinary: he proclaims his own Name and character. “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”(Exodus 34:6, ESV) We should not collapse the divine covenant Name revealed to Moses and the human name Jesus as though they were linguistically identical. The connection is Christological. The eternal Son who receives the human Name Jesus is the incarnate Son of the God who revealed himself to Moses as merciful and gracious, and the Name Jesus announces what that covenant God has come to do through him: the LORD saves.

Psalm 8 is appointed for this feast, and it opens and closes with the same line: “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:1, ESV) The Psalm meditates on the strangeness of human dignity, that the God who set the heavens in place should be mindful of creatures as small as we are. The writer of Hebrews gives Psalm 8 a Christological reading, applying its language to Jesus, who was made for a little while lower than the angels and is now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death. (Hebrews 2:5–9) The Psalm appointed for the circumcision and naming of Jesus therefore reaches naturally toward the incarnate Son in whom humanity’s calling is fulfilled. And it is the right prayer with which to begin a new year: not a resolution, not a plan for self-improvement, but the confession that the Name of the Lord is majestic in all the earth.

Paul’s great Christological hymn in Philippians 2 moves from the humility of the Incarnation to the obedience of the Cross and then to the exaltation of Christ, and it culminates in the Name: “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”(Philippians 2:9–11, ESV) The Name given to an eight-day-old Child is the Name before which every created thing will finally bow. The infant held in Mary’s arms carries the Name at which every knee will bend and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

There is one more place the Name has been placed, and it is closer than Sinai or Bethlehem. At Baptism, God’s Triune Name was placed upon us. We were baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Today we remember the Name given to Christ on the eighth day and the Name placed upon us in Baptism, by which we are publicly marked as belonging to the Triune God and joined visibly to Christ and his Church. The Name we bear as Christians is not one we invented or earned. It is received. We carry the Name of the one who called us and made us his own.

The Epistle reading for this feast, Romans 1:1–7, confirms the mission the Name carries. Paul sets apart his entire ministry for the Gospel “concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.”(Romans 1:3–4, ESV) Paul is not saying that Jesus became the Son of God at the Resurrection. He has already identified him as God’s Son. The Resurrection declares him in power as the Son who has conquered death. Then Paul describes his apostleship as bringing about “the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations.” (Romans 1:5, ESV)The mission of the Church is carried out for the sake of the Name. This is what January 1 says: the year ahead is not primarily about what we will accomplish. It belongs to Christ, and we are given another year in which to bear his Name.

Acts 4:12 states it with the plainness it deserves: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12, ESV) In a world of competing names and competing claims, the Church observes January 1 as a quiet act of theological confidence. The new year does not belong to luck or fate or human resolution. It belongs to the one whose Name means salvation.

The Collect appointed for this feast, on page 600 of the BCP 2019, turns the day’s theology into a petition. It asks God to give us grace “faithfully to bear his Name, and to worship him with pure hearts according to the New Covenant.” (BCP 2019, p. 600) These two requests echo the two movements of the Gospel we have just read. The shepherds went back into ordinary life and spoke: bear his Name. Mary kept and pondered: worship with pure hearts. The Collect is not asking for two separate things. It is asking for the whole life, both its outward and inward dimensions, to be shaped by the Name.

To bear his Name faithfully begins with the shepherds. They did not abandon ordinary life after the manger. They went back to their work, but they went back glorifying and praising God and making known what they had heard and seen. The Name we carry into the new year goes with us into the same ordinary places we have always inhabited. We do not have to turn ordinary Christian faithfulness into a performance. A life marked by gratitude and wonder, by obedience, and by a willingness to speak of what Christ has done is itself a bearing of the Name.

The Name makes specific demands on how we live. The God who proclaimed his Name and character on Sinai is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Those who bear his Name should increasingly bear the family resemblance: merciful when we have been wronged and the other person has not apologized; gracious when someone has not earned our goodwill; slow to anger, not because righteous anger is never appropriate, but because anger must not become our master; steadfast in love when faithfulness costs something. The question the Name puts to us is not whether we are performing Christianity adequately, but whether, by grace, the character of Christ is becoming more visible in ours. January 1 is a reasonable time to ask it honestly.

Mary’s movement is the other half. She treasured and pondered. We live in a culture that rewards immediate response, quick production, and the appearance of having processed everything and arrived at a confident conclusion. Mary did none of that. She held what she had received and let it work in her quietly. To worship Christ with a pure heart involves this kind of pondering: sitting under the Word, returning to the promises of God, receiving the Sacrament, and allowing the truth of Christ to search what is hidden within us. The inner life of a Name-bearer is not empty. It is full of the things Mary was pondering: the angel’s words, the shepherds’ testimony, the Child in the manger. These mysteries do not exhaust themselves quickly. They form us slowly.

To worship him with pure hearts is to come without the pretense that we have earned our place. We carry into the new year the weight of the previous one: the places we did not bear the Name well, the failures of mercy, the moments when patience ran out, the prayers that felt hollow, and the sins we confessed only to find ourselves struggling with them again. Pure hearts does not mean hearts without a history of sin. The Collect asks God for grace because purity is his work in us. Christ fulfilled the covenant for us. Christ bears the Name of salvation. Christ has acted first. And because he has acted first, sinners may come in repentance and faith and ask him to purify divided hearts.

There is one more distinction worth naming between a resolution and a covenant. A resolution is a promise we make about what we intend to do. The New Covenant rests upon what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. That does not make Christian obedience optional; the Collect asks us to bear his Name faithfully. But the foundation is different. A resolution says: I will make myself into something better. The Gospel says: Christ has come to save sinners and make us new. When a resolution fails, we often begin again with diminished confidence in ourselves. When we fail to bear the Name, as every Christian does, we return to the one whose Name means salvation. We repent, confess, receive forgiveness, and begin again under grace. The covenant does not depend upon the strength of our New Year’s resolve, and the Savior does not change when our resolve weakens. His mercies are new every morning because his faithfulness is great. (Lamentations 3:22–23, ESV) His Name remains the same every morning: the LORD saves. That is what we are entering the new year under. Not confidence in ourselves, but confidence in Christ.

The world will move through January with its resolutions and its anxiety. Some of those resolutions are good, and there is nothing wrong with the hope that a new year offers. But the Church begins the year with something more stable than a resolution. She begins it with a Name. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8, ESV)The Name the angel gave before conception, the Name that means salvation, the Name given to the Child on the eighth day, the Name proclaimed among the nations, the Name into which his people are baptized, and the Name before which every knee will bow.

The Collect for this feast gathers both movements of the Gospel into its petition. The shepherds went and made known what they had heard: bear his Name faithfully. Mary treasured up all these things in her heart: worship him with pure hearts. The Collect does not ask God to make the new year go well for us. It does not promise health or prosperity or freedom from grief. It asks for grace to bear Christ’s Name faithfully and to worship him with pure hearts. This is what the Church offers to January 1: not merely the optimism of a fresh start, but the covenant faithfulness of the God whose Son bears the Name that does not change with the calendar. The year ahead will contain difficulties we cannot anticipate and mercies we cannot yet see. The Name carries us through both because the one who bears it is faithful. And so the Church begins the year with the confession of the appointed Psalm: “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:9, ESV)

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.