Names

Programming Note: I have been blogging in 1 John. However, this week our church begins a journey through the Gospel of Matthew, so I'm going to switch gears and blog along with that journey. If I had planned better, I would have been done with 1 John by now. As it is, I'll return to his letter once we finish Matthew.


Read Matthew 1.

Names, names, names...more names than you or I can remember. Matthew 1 is full of names, especially those first few verses, the genealogy that traces Jesus back to Abraham. Some of the names we recognize, some we don't, and others we honestly just don't care enough about to even look up. But there they are, the names of those who came before Jesus. (Or most of them.) Each of them some mother's son, given a name carefully chosen, often given as an indication of what the father hoped that child would become.

In the latter part of the chapter, Matthew narrows his focus down to just a few names, or really one in particular. Yes, there are the names of the mother, Mary, and the adoptive father, Joseph. (Interestingly, we are NOT given the name of the angel who visits Joseph, though we always seem to assume it's Gabriel, the same angel who visits Mary in Luke 1:26.) But one name that is given will be the focus of the next twenty-seven chapters, and it's the one the angel gives Joseph: "You are to give him the name Jesus" (Matthew 1:21).

As the songwriter said many years ago, there is something about that name. In Hebrew, the name is Yeshua, often Anglicized into Joshua. It wasn't an uncommon name in Hebrew history or in Israel of the first century. For that matter, it's not an uncommon name today. (I've known people to get upset that in some Hispanic cultures, Jesus is a common name given to babies by their parents, yet those same folks don't get upset that Joshua is a similarly common name in our culture. They're the same name!) It wasn't that this baby to be born was given a unique name; it was that he was going to fulfill the role his name indicated more than any other who bore that name.

Yeshua, Joshua, Jesus—the name means, "The Lord saves," and the angel wanted to make sure Joseph knew that the name, especially this time, was vitally important. It was not just something for this baby to be called by, but just the way he would know when his mother was calling him in for the night. This name was a description of what he came to do. He came to save. And what that means, what that looks like, how that happens—well, that's what Matthew is writing to tell us about.

Names are important, and knowing what your name means can be enlightening (did your parents pick a name because it sounded good, or did they intend for you to fulfill a hope embedded in that name?). But there is still only one name that ultimately matters, "for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).


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