Names and weddings

Christmas is not over yet, though many of us resume work and classes tomorrow. Today is the eighth day or octave of Christmas. In the Bible, an octave is associated with weddings, which are celebrated over eight days.

God, in being born, showed that he fully assumed the human condition. On the first Christmas Day, for better or worse, heaven got wedded to earth. It is only right that the Church devotes an octave to celebrate this marriage.

On wedding day, a wife customarily adopts her husband’s last name. Their children will carry the family name. They will probably inherit mother or father’s first name if not a portmanteau of their names: Juliana for the daughter of Julio and Anacleta; Victor for the son of Vicente and Toribia.

The wedding that was the first Christmas affected how we are called, too. We in the Church, Christ’s Bride, are now called Christians, after God’s Chosen One.

Christmas, above all, occasioned the clearest revelation of the Name of God to us men and the universe.

As Saint Luke narrates in today’s gospel, Saint Joseph, eight days into the first Christmas, gave the name Jesus, which means “God saves,” to the Christ-child who was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

It was not always possible to address God in such a familiar way. Until now, adherents of Judaism, historically the first monotheists, refuse, out of sheer reverence, to utter the Tetragrammaton or “YHWH,” the name of the God of Israel.

Out of respect for the Tetragrammaton as “an expression of the infinite greatness and majesty of God [that] was held to be unpronounceable,” Francis Cardinal Arinze, then prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, wrote to bishops in 2008 forbidding the use of “Yahweh” in liturgical celebrations, songs and prayers. Just as the Jews use Adonai and the Greeks Kyrios as a substitute for “YHWH,” Catholics are to use as its equivalent Lord, Signore, Seigneur, Herr or Señor.

We who believe that Jesus Christ is Lord are blessed by his birth and naming. In mythology, mere humans are said to gain power over spiritual entities once they know their name. In the reality of the Incarnation, God made himself vulnerable before men by becoming a baby and giving to Saint Joseph the power to name him. God’s Name, his presence, as it were, becomes an everlasting gift to mankind.

Just as the fusion of the names of husband and wife signify that they have a claim on each other, the naming of Christians and the naming of God in Jesus on the first Christmas means that God has a lover’s claim on us inasmuch as we have been given access to him.

I believe this is why Pope Saint Leo the Great, 44th Successor of Saint Peter, in a sermon one Christmas Day, said:

“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 are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom.

“Through the sacrament of baptism, you have become a temple of the Holy Spirit. Do not drive away so great a guest by evil conduct and become again a slave to the devil, for your liberty was bought by the blood of Christ.”