Heading from the Holy Gospel according to Saint John. John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He is the one of whom I said, A man is coming after me who ranks ahead of me because he existed before me. I did not know him.
But the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be made known to Israel. John testified further saying, I saw the spirit come down like a dove from the sky and remain upon him. I did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me on whomever you see the spirit come down and remain. He is the one.
who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. Now I have seen and testified that He is the Son of God, the gospel of the Lord. In this national conference focused on a time to build, today's feast to the holy name of Jesus,
gives us an opportunity to focus on erecting our life on the name, meaning ultimately on our relationship with the person of Jesus. It's basically a continuation of the ancient feast of Jesus' circumcision when the infant Lord, like every Jewish male, formally received his name. St. Luke tells us, as we read two days ago at the end of the Gospel on the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God,
When eight days were completed for his circumcision, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. That name, Yashua in Hebrew, Jesus in Greek, means God saves. And in the readings today, for January 3rd, we see precisely how God saves and how we're supposed to respond to and remain in
In other words, to build our life and help others build their existence on this gift. The Gospel, John the Baptist, points Jesus out and calls him by a phrase that perifrastically expresses this name. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Three decades earlier, the angel Gabriel for God had told St. Joseph to name
him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. John had been baptizing bodies with water as a sign of repentance and the need for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus would come later and institute the sacrament of baptism, which would bring about what John's baptism could only symbolize. Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire, a baptism that would reach and cleanse the soul.
And baptism, Jesus relates to us precisely as Savior. He takes away our sins in that great sacrament. To live our baptism, to ground our existence on the divine affiliation and incorporation of the Church and the indwelling of God that baptism makes possible is, in other words, to build our life on the holy name of Jesus and its meaning. The Jewish mentality, as we know, names are super significant.
God famously changed the names of Abraham to Abraham, Sarai to Sarai, Jacob to Israel, and Simon to Peter to describe the realities he wanted them through their names to signify. Likewise, God told Hosea what to name his children to show his relationship with the people of Israel. Through Gabriel commanded Zechariah to name his son John to show literally God's graciousness.
When we hear, say, or use the name of Jesus, we celebrate the incarnation of God's saving will. God just doesn't have a name, but because of His divine simplicity, He is His name. To pray, for example, in the name of Jesus means to try to pray in the person of Jesus, to ask for what Jesus Himself would ask and is asking.
To celebrate the name of Jesus means to celebrate the reality that Jesus is our saving God. And that's exactly what Jesus came to do, to save. To save us from sin and from sin's worst consequence death. There is in fact, as St. Peter reminds us in the Acts of the Apostles, no other name under heaven or earth by which we can be saved.
Today is a special day, in other words, in which we celebrate Jesus as our Savior and respond to His salvation. To invoke Jesus' name well is to relate to Him as Savior and to allow Him to do that saving work, to build our life on His saving love, to recognize we have to be saved, that Jesus comes to our rescue, and then to reach out and grab His hand as He engages in that ongoing life-saving and sanctifying labor.
This gift and mystery of the name of Jesus receives even greater depth with the readings today. Jesus' name, His saving work, is one He wants us to remain in in sheer. St. John tells us in today's first reading, in one of the most important passages ever written, see what love the Father has bestowed on us, that we may be called children of God.
It's a mind-blowing reality that we're even able to be called God's sons and daughters. We've heard the expression so many times that we're children of God, that what it means can escape us. Imagine for a minute if a billionaire adopted us and made us ear to all as well, or a king adopted us as members of the royal family and made us his successors.
Neither comes close to how exhilarating St. John the Evangelist's words would have sounded to his first listeners to say that they were now the children of the creator of the universe and the King of Games. We know from our own life how names and associations can change people. For the last few years I've seen what happened when young people, especially the first in their families to go to college, began to associate with their new identity as Columbia University students.
that immediately start getting and wearing sweatshirts, t-shirts, hats, and other gear to show and joyfully grow into their new identity. A recent bride told me how much of a sweet adjustment it's been since her wedding to get used to people calling her by a new last name, publicly identifying with a husband she loves and to whom she's committed the rest of her life.
For the last few weeks, I too have been adjusting to people calling me by a new ecclesiastical name, even though it's just an honorific. It's almost as if everyone I know has gone from speaking to me with the informal to form, in the intimate address of father, to using the far more formal usted or lei or vous, which has forced me to focus on whether I'm really living up to the dignity of the priesthood.
and humbly giving all the honor to God who is the one true sinure. How much more should our life change by our being called sons and daughters of God? We're labeled Christians or little Jesus Christ. If every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth should bow at the name that is above every other name,
Imagine our dignity being associated with that name in whom we have been both saved Jesus and anointed Christ. But a Saint John indicates this honor shouldn't and doesn't stop merely with our being called children of God. Saint John says that is what we are. God has chosen us to become his sons and daughters through the wondrous reality of spiritual adoption and baptism.
Today's gospel, St. John, points to the reality of the one coming after him. God saves in the flesh, who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. This is the Spirit who changes us within so that we might cry out Abba, Father, so that we might relate to God as a beloved dad. To God's own work, we've actually become sons and daughters in the Son of God. And that's the ultimate meaning of salvation.
that's the purpose of the words incarnation. Jesus took on our humanity as we prayed on Christmas Day and will pray when the drop of water was placed into the chalice full of wine so that we might become shearers in His divinity, partakers in His own divine life. St. John tells us that this mind-blowing reality won't be acknowledged by the world any more than Jesus' incarnation was acknowledged.
For the reason the world doesn't know us and that dignity is because it didn't know him. But that is nevertheless the truth of who we are. And St. John goes on to say that we've got an even greater destiny still in store. Beloved, we are God's children now. What we shall later be has not yet been revealed, but we know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
We're made in God's image and likeness, and God wants to bring to fulfillment that image. When we look upon Him face to face in heaven, Jesus really does want to make us shearers in His divine filiation, in His divine life. And that's what will happen, provided that we remain in, that we build our life on His name. Saint John, however, then makes our response to this gift more precise.
We who beer the name Christian not only have a tremendous privilege, but a serious responsibility to give authentic witness to the saving power of Jesus' holy name. He tells us everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure as he is pure.
If we hope to see God face to face, we need to be pure because Jesus tells us in the beatitudes only to pure heart, see him. If we have this hope to become holy as God is holy, to become truly like God, then we will strive here on earth to do everything we can to become like him, to behave like him, to forgive like him, to love like him, to take on his virtues and to live according to the Holy Spirit.
With Christian hope, we'll start to align our choices to what God wants and expects, to how children of God ought to live, to how God would want to love through and together with us. One of the reasons why so many Christians do not yet live as saints is because they do not actively nourish what St. John calls this hope based on Him. We forget that God wants to help us to become like Him to children of God.
We forget that God saves us with us always until the end of time, precisely to help us remain united to Him. We forget the depth and the power of our Christian dignity. On Christmas Day, St. Louis, we are the great reminded Christians throughout the world and the liturgy of the hours, not to forget who we are. To remember the salvation we've received and to make ourselves pure as God is pure. He wrote in famous words, Christian, remember your dignity.
And now that you share in God's own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you remember. Don't forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God's kingdom. To the sacrament of baptism, you have become a temple of the Holy Spirit.
this summons to purity of life to live up to our Christian dignity and the holiness of Jesus' name that we share is something for which we need constantly to implore God. The Gnostics to whom Saint John was writing thought that because spirit is good and matter is evil, then it really doesn't matter what you do in the body. Some of them lived lasciviously and still called themselves Christians. Two Christians on the other hand, John insisted.
Allow the Lamb of God to take their sins away. They allow Him to fill them with Himself and His grace upon grace so that they may become shearers in the divinity of Him who humbled Himself so much. To remain pure is not fundamentally the result of our willpower. It's the gift. It's the power of Jesus' name.
She's himself promised that if we ask the father for the gift of living coherently with her exalted dignity and title, he would grant it. During the celebration of the First Mass, he promised the apostle and threw them us. Ask the father anything in my name and he will give it to you. There's no greater guarantee even from all the used car salesman in the world.
So today we ask for that grace to build our life on Jesus name, to live with the incandescent purity we see in Jesus, in Mary and Joseph, and John the Baptist, and John the evangelist, and in every saint we've ever encountered. Today on this great feast of the sweet name of our Savior, we remember how God the Father wishes to give us this gift
and to help us live according to this saving hope and summons. On the back of my vestments today, by coincidence, actually, you can see the three letters, IHS, to the three consonants in Greek for the holy name of Jesus, Yota, Eta, and Sigma. And they also constitute a Latin abbreviation, Jesuus hominum solvator, Jesus, Savior of human beings.
It's a force for a reminder for us that at Mass we encounter Jesus who comes to us as Savior, as we prepare to receive a salvation in the flesh and be capable of living truly saved lives. It's the Holy Communion with YEZWIS-HAMINUM-SALVAT-DOR that we
enter more profoundly into the divine filiation and are strengthened from within to live as sons and daughters in the sun, keeping ourselves pure so that we might receive him here in all his holy purity. That's why the Mass is the prayer that most distinguishes us as Christians who live by the name of Jesus, because it's through the Mass that we become little Christ, not just a name, but in fact,
as we receive the little Christ, one little particle of whom is enough to save the whole world. The mass is the place in which in response to the church's perpetual cry, come, Lord Jesus, our Savior does come to transform us and not just to transform us, but to send us out in the power of His name to transform the whole world.
It's time to build our whole life on this reality, in this ineffable gift. Jesus.
