A Time to Build Ourselves on the Name of Jesus, Memorial of Jesus’ Holy Name, January 3, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
2025 Leonine Forum National Conference: “A Time To Build”
JW Marriott, Orlando, Florida
Memorial of the Holy Name of Jesus
January 3, 2025
1 Jn 2:29-3:6, Ps 98, Jn 1:29-34

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• During this national conference focused on a Time to Build, today’s Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus gives us the opportunity to focus on erecting our lives on the name, meaning ultimately 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 for 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, Jesus, means “God saves,” and in the readings today for January 3, we see precisely how God saves and how we’re supposed to respond to and remain in — in other words build our life and help others build their lives — this gift.
• In the Gospel, John the Baptist points out Jesus and calls him by a phrase that periphrastically expresses his 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 after him and institute the Sacrament of Baptism, which would bring about what John’s baptism could only symbolize. He would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire, a baptism that would reach and cleanse the soul. In baptism, Jesus relates to us precisely as Savior. To live our Baptism, to ground our existence on the divine filiation, incorporation into the Church, and indwelling of God that baptism makes possible, is, in other words, to build our life on the Holy Name of Jesus and its meaning. In the Jewish mentality, as we know, names are super significant. God famously changed the names of Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Jacob to Israel and Simon to Peter to describe the realities he wanted those names to signify. Likewise, God told Hosea what to name his children to show his relationship with the people of Israel and 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 doesn’t just 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. That’s exactly what Jesus came to do, to save us, to save us from sin and from sin’s worst consequence death. There is, in fact, no other name under heaven and earth by which we can be saved (Acts 4:12). Today is a special day, in other words, on 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 save us! It’s to build our life on his saving love: to recognize that we need to be rescued, that he comes to our rescue, and to reach out and grab his hand as he engages in that ongoing life-saving and sanctifying work.
• This gift and mystery of the name of Jesus receives even greater depth with the readings today. Jesus’ name, Jesus’ saving work, is one he wants us to remain in and share. St. John tells us in today’s first reading, in one of the most important passages in Sacred Scripture: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God.” It’s a mind-blowing reality that we are 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 heirs to all his wealth, or a King adopted us as members of the royal family; 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 King of Kings. We know from our own life how names and associations can change people. For the last few years, I have seen what happened when young people, especially the first of their families to go to college, began to associate with their new identity as Columbia University students; they’d 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 for her since her wedding to get used to people calling her by a new last name, publicly identifying with the man she loves and to whom she’s committed the rest of her life. For the last few weeks, I, too, 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 “tu” form and the intimate address of “father” to using the far more formal “usted,” or “lei,” or “vous” or “vôce” form, which has forced me to focus on whether I’m living up fully to the dignity of the priesthood and humbly giving all the honor to God, who is the one true Signore. How much more should our life change by our being called sons and daughters of God! We are labeled Christians, or little Jesus Christs. 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, as St. John indicates, this honor doesn’t stop merely with our being called children of God. St. John says, “Yet that is what we are!” God has chosen us to become his sons and daughters through the wondrous reality of spiritual adoption in Baptism. In today’s Gospel, St. John the Baptist points to the reality of the One coming after him — Jesus, God saves — who will “baptize with the Holy Spirit.” This is the Spirit who changes us within so that we may cry out “Abba, Father! (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6), so that we may relate to God as a beloved “Dad.” Through God’s own work, we have actually become sons and daughters in the Son of God. That’s the ultimate meaning of salvation. That’s the purpose of the incarnation of the Word: Jesus took on our humanity, as we prayed on Christmas day, so that we might become sharers 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 does not know us is that it did not 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 were made in God’s image and likeness and God wants to bring that to fulfillment when we look upon him face-to-face in heaven. Jesus really does want to make us sharers in his divine filiation, in his divinity, and that is what will happen provided that we remain in, we build our life, on his name!
• John, however, then makes our response to this gift more precise. We who bear the name Christian not only have a tremendous privilege, but also a serious responsibility: to give authentic witness to the saving power of Jesus’ name! He says, “Everyone who has this hope based on Him makes himself pure as He is pure.” If we hope to see God face to face, then we need to be pure, because, Jesus tells us in the Beatitudes, only the pure of heart see him. If we have this hope to become holy as God as holy, to become truly like God, then we will strive here on earth to do everything we can to be like him, to behave like him, to forgive like him, to love like him, to take on his virtues, to live according to the Holy Spirit. With Christian hope, we will start to align our choices here on earth 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 live yet 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 as true children of God. We forget that God-saves is with us always until the end of time precisely to help us remain united to him. We forget the depth and power of their Christian dignity.
• On Christmas Day, St. Leo the Great reminded Christians throughout the world in 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: “Christian,” he wrote, “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.” This summons to purity of life, to live up to our Christian dignity and the holiness of Jesus Christ’s name that we share, is something for which we need constantly to implore God. The gnostics to whom St. 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. So many of them lived lasciviously. True Christians, on the other hand, John insisted, allow the Lamb of God to take away their sins, allow him to fill them with himself and his grace upon grace so that we may become sharers in the divinity of him who humbled himself to share our humanity. To remain pure is not the result fundamentally of our will-power. It’s the gift of the power of Jesus’ name. Jesus himself promised us that if we asked the Father for the gift of living coherently with our exalted dignity and title, he would grant it. During the celebration of the first Mass, Jesus promised the apostles and through them us, “Anything you ask the Father in my name, he will give you!” There’s no greater guarantee. And so today we ask for that grace, to build our life on Jesus’ name and to live with the incandescent purity we see in Jesus, in Mary and Joseph, in John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, in the saints in general.
• 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 vestment there are the letters IHS, which are the three consonants in Greek for the holy name of Jesus — Iota, Eta and Sigma — and they also constitute a Latin abbreviation, Iesus Hominum Salvator, which means “Jesus, Savior of Human Beings.” It’s a forceful reminder for us that at Mass we encounter Jesus who comes to us as our Savior, as we prepare to receive his salvation in the flesh and be made capable of living truly saved lives. It’s through Holy Communion with Jesus that we enter more profoundly into his divine filiation and are strengthened from within to live as sons and daughters in the Son, keeping ourselves pure so that we might receive him here in all his purity. That’s why the Mass is the prayer that most distinguishes us as Christians, that makes us little Christs not just in name but in fact, and that strengthens us to live in such a way that people are reminded us the One whose holy name we are so privileged to bear. 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 sends us out, with the power of his name, to transform the world. It’s time to build our whole life on this reality and this ineffable gift!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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