The Baby in the Manger #25: Jesus

Jesus (heb: yᵊhôšûaʿ grk: iēsous)

She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus... (Matthew 1:21)

Hope has a name, and his name is Jesus.

Over this season of advent I have worked my way through so many different names and titles for Jesus.  They have been descriptive, figurative and theological.  They have drawn on images we can relate to from everyday life, or Biblical themes of old.  They have given us different aspects of the ministry of Jesus - his identity, his purpose and his work, and how we should relate to him.  However, at the centre of all this is a person.  A person who was born as a baby, and who had a name, a very human name: Jesus.

Jesus (or Yeshua, as those around him would have called him), means 'the Lord Saves', and that's hugely significant (see Saviour), but it's also just a standard Hebrew/Aramaic boys name!  The English equivalent is Joshua.  Both my children have friends called Joshua.  Just like these little boys I know, the boy Jesus would have played with his friends, been taught the things he needed to know, and felt all the range of emotions, highs and lows, hardships and excitements, that growing up involves.

God could have just given us a theology textbook.  Instead he gave us a person.  No matter how baffled you might feel by the doctrine of the Trinity, or the Jewish sacrificial system, or the concept of 'anointing', God's witness to us of who he is is a person.  If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus.

And it's not just God's communication to us that is a person.  God's rescue is a person as well.  A person who came down into the depths of human experience - who wept because his friend had died and was moved with compassion for the lost, and who came in order to take in all on for himself in death - sweating drops of blood at the thought of the ordeal, only to rise again, bringing us with him.

Finally, although the incarnate (human) Jesus no longer stands among us, but sits in the throne room of Heaven, his ongoing ministry is also as a person.  As the writer of Hebrews writes: For we do not have a high priest who is unable to feel sympathy for our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need (Hebrews 4:15-16),

Maybe Once in Royal David's City sums it up best.

For He is our childhood’s pattern:
Day by day like us He grew;
He was little, weak and helpless;
Tears and smiles like us He knew:
And He feeleth for our sadness,
And He shareth in our gladness.

And yet...

And our eyes at last shall see Him
Through His own redeeming love,
For that child so dear and gentle
Is our Lord in Heaven above;
And He leads His children on
To the place where He is gone.

Not in that poor, lowly stable,
With the oxen standing by,
We shall see Him; but in Heaven,
Set at God’s right hand on high,
When, like stars, His children crowned
All in white, shall wait around.

Happy Birthday Jesus!