Listen to the sermon with the player below, or, download the audio.
+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Eight days after the Christ Child was miraculously born to Mary and gloriously announced to shepherds, as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, the Child was circumcised and called Jesus, the name given to Mary by the angel Gabriel before the Child was conceived in her womb (Luke 1:31). And so, eight days after the Church celebrates the Nativity of the Lord, She celebrates the Circumcision and Name of Jesus. This morning as we consider the Gospel Reading, we realize that “Jesus was circumcised and named for us”.
Circumcision is at the center of some of today’s society’s pretty‑heated debates. For example, a major doctor’s association in Denmark last month recommended ending circumcision for boys, saying that the procedure should be “an informed personal choice” that men make for themselves in adulthood (McCann). And, earlier this year, United Nations officials said they wanted to circumcise 25 million young men in areas with a high incidence of the virus that causes AIDS (Frost). Cultural factors are said to play a role in how different medical associations interpret some of the same data, as experts debate the medical benefits of circumcision and whether a child’s body should be so permanently altered without the child’s informed consent—even though the most‑basic acts of child‑rearing shape children’s brains, in some cases, such as teaching reading and music, literally altering the brain’s architecture (Lindsay). And, of course, raising children in the Christian faith impacts the eternal state of their bodies and souls!
Although some debates about circumcision predate Jesus’s birth (Meyer, TDNT 6:72-84), as far as we know, Mary and Joseph had no qualms about circumcising Jesus. For them, Jesus’s circumcision was not a medical matter or a matter of self‑determination but a religious matter. God commanded circumcision on the eighth day both as part of His covenant with a re‑named Abraham and his offspring and as the sign of that covenant (Genesis 17:1‑14; confer Scaer, CLD XI, 30-33), and circumcision also was included in the covenantal commands God that gave to Moses (for example, Leviticus 12:3). Mary and Joseph did not seek the consent of their Child but were concerned with doing everything according to the Law of the Lord (Luke 2:39).
In our time, not only parents but also the rest of us are often far‑less concerned with doing everything according to the Law of the Lord. Parents, perhaps with the best of intentions, often try to give their children choices, when what the children need are direction and discipline. If we ourselves do not say, do we not hear others say that they will let their children, maybe even those who have been baptized, decide when they grow up whether or not to be religious? Yet, those same parents feed their children physical food, permanently altering the children’s bodies without their informed consent! Of course, as children and adults, we all resist the Law of the Lord, having received original sin from our parents and adding to it all manner of actual sins, both doing things that we should not do and failing to do things that we should do.
By nature our hearts are hard and our ears are plugged, and so God calls for those organs of our bodies to be figuratively circumcised, or else, God says, we will suffer the punishment of His righteous wrath on all sin (Deuteronomy 10:16; Jeremiah 4:4; 6:10; 9:25). God’s call enables us to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust Him to forgive our sin, and to want to do better than to keep on sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives our sin—our sin of failing to raise our children as we should or however else we have failed to do everything according to the Law of the Lord. God forgives it all by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
Out of love for us, the eternal Son of God united with His Person a fully-human soul and body—a body that was fully male. (His complete maleness was so important that earlier artists did not cover the baby Jesus in modesty as later artists did and still do.) The Child did not express it to Mary and Joseph, but, at the age of eight days, He with perfect information nevertheless consented to His circumcision and, later, to everything else He did and suffered for us and for our salvation. Excerpted from Psalm 40, today’s Introit used Jesus’s words of coming with open ears, as prophesied, to do God’s will, with His law in His heart (Psalm 40:6-8). As we heard two Sundays ago in the Gospel Reading and again this morning in the Appointed Verse, some time after the Child was conceived in Mary’s womb, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and also told him to call Mary’s Son “Jesus”, for He would save His people from their sins, and, in a half-verse shorter than today’s Gospel Reading, St. Matthew reports Joseph’s doing just that (Matthew 1:20-21, 25). That name “Jesus” indicates and reveals His office as our Savior (Pieper, II:331). The drops of blood He shed in circumcision (and at the same time receiving His name) were the first of many drops of blood that would come later, in the soldiers’ scourging and in crucifixion on the cross, all for you and for me. He was innocent but suffered the punishment we deserve. And then, as He was circumcised on the eighth day, He rose from the grave on the first day of the new week of God’s re‑creation and appeared to His disciples again a week later, speaking of faith (John 20:1, 26). Circumcised physically or not, as we believe in Him, we are true offspring of Abraham and, like to Abraham, our faith is counted to us as righteousness (Romans 2:28‑29; 4:9-12).
We are no longer bound by the ceremonial law of the Old Testament that required that kind of literal circumcision. John the Baptizer arguably began the challenge to such circumcision and people’s thinking they were saved simply by descent from Abraham (Meyer, TDNT 6:72‑84), and later the first Church Council in Jerusalem decided circumcision no longer was necessary (Acts 15:1-30). We have a different kind of circumcision, one St. Paul writes to the Colossians is a circumcision made without hands, being buried and raised with Christ in Holy Baptism (Colossians 2:11-15). As we heard in today’s Epistle Reading, at the Baptismal Font, we are clothed in Christ, and all are equal as God redeems us, although created differences between men and women and their vocations remain. Baptized, we have God’s Triune Name put upon us, and we are heirs according to God’s Gospel promise, individually absolved in that same Triune Name, calling on Him in faith and tapping into His power and Presence (Bietenhard, TDNT 5:243-283). As those once circumcised could eat the Passover (Exodus 12:48-49), so those baptized eat the Lord’s Supper, the Body and Blood of Him Who was circumcised and named for us.
The Old Testament people of God could not live a day without at least remembering the sign of their covenant with God, and we should not either. We who are baptized at least desire to stop sinning, not only to raise our children but also to do everything else according to the Law of the Lord, without resisting it. As we sang in the Gradual, God puts His laws into our minds and writes them on our hearts; He is our God, and we are His people; and, for the sake of Him Who was circumcised and named for us, He remembers our sins and lawless deeds no more (Hebrews 8:10; 10:17). He answers our petition in today’s Collect by granting us the true circumcision of the Spirit that our hearts are made pure from all sins, through Jesus Christ our Lord. For, there is no other name under heaven given among people by which God brings about our salvation (Acts 4:12). As in today’s Old Testament Reading (Numbers 6:22-27), we are blessed with God’s Name, and it has “positive impact on our everyday lives in this fallen world” (Mech, CPR 27:1, 29).
Time may tell how our modern circumcision debates will be settled, but there is no debate that “Jesus was circumcised and named for us”. He consented to performing everything according to the Law of the Lord, and He shed His blood for our failure to do so, suffering our penalty so we would not have to be cut off from God forever. His Name reveals Him to us as our Savior and is put upon us in Holy Baptism, saving us and making us God’s children. We conclude now as our Hymn of the Day concluded (Lutheran Service Book 900:6):
Jesus! Name of wondrous love, / Human name of God above;
Pleading only this, we flee / Helpless, O our God, to Thee.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +