The Holy Name in the Holy Family
How the Circumcision and Holy Name stand at the start of the life of the Holy Family together.
How the Circumcision and Holy Name stand at the start of the life of the Holy Family together.
Editor’s Notes
In this passage, Fr. Coleridge tells us:
How St Bernardine of Siena sets forth the Holy Name as a living power for Catholics at all stages of the spiritual life.
That he orders devotion with sobriety and doctrine, showing grace working through faith, perseverance, and rightly ordered prayer.
Why the Name of Jesus restores sinners, steadies the soul in trial, fructifies preaching, and crowns the saints in glory.
He shows us that devotion to the Holy Name is not sentiment, but a disciplined path by which Christ forms, sustains, and consummates the whole Christian life.
For more context, see Part I and Part 5.
The Imposition of the Holy Name
The Thirty Years – Our Lord’s Infancy & Hidden Life
Chapter VII
St. Luke ii. 21; Vita Vite Nostræ, § 10.
Burns and Oates, London 1885 (1915 edition).
Headings and some line breaks added.
Pregnancy of God’s works
These considerations [in this series on the Circumcision and the Holy Name] are very short and imperfect, if they are compared to the importance of the works of God which are summed up in the mystery of the Circumcision of our Lord. But they may at least serve to show how very great and how pregnant in their consequences and fruits these works were.
Within a few days of the Birth of our Lord, He had already shed His Blood, and by so doing He had ratified, and filled with heavenly power, a sacred rite which, in the ages before He came had fitted thousands upon thousands for admission into the Eternal Kingdom, much as Baptism was to do the same in the ages which were to follow. The holy rite was not a sacrament, but it was, in the counsels of God, an essential condition for some of the effects which were afterwards to be conveyed by the great Christian sacrament. A few drops of Blood shed in the little chamber in Bethlehem had been the figure and the application of the Sacrifice of the Cross, and their effects had stretched back over a long series of generations.
More than this, the spiritual renovation and transformation of man by means of the grace of the Cross had been foreshadowed in the same simple ceremony. Then, the whole had been crowned by the giving to the Infant Saviour the Name which signified at once the extremity of His humiliation in becoming Man for us, and the boundless efficacy of the redemption which as Man He was to work for us, the Name which is above every name, and at which, according to the decree of God, every knee is to bow in Heaven and on earth and under the earth.
The Holy Name in the Holy Family
Two more remarks may be made, before we conclude this account of the Naming of our Lord.
In the first place, it is probable that this first formal taking on Himself of the Holy Name must have been the beginning of a constant and familiar use of it in the Holy Family, and with them it must have been used with a perpetual sense of its Divine meaning present to their minds, so that at every mention of it there must have been a renewal of the joy with which it was first given, and a revival of grace, in reward for the affection with which it was pronounced. It was probably out of reverence that it was not always used to our Lord, for our Lady seems to have called Him “Son,” as He called her Woman or Lady.
But we gather from the Gospels that it was the common way among the early disciples to speak of Him as Jesus, though in addressing Him they would use the name Master, and the like. It was to them more than an appellative, for its very sound recalled to them His office and work and dignity as the Lamb of God, as its first giving to Him was connected with the first shedding of His Precious Blood.
Again, the mystery of the Circumcision and Naming of our Lord must have been one of the occasions in which our Blessed Lady and St. Joseph would probably receive large increases of grace, as it was the rule for God to mark every onward step in the working out of the great mystery of the Incarnation with fresh bounties of this kind.
The Name had long been the treasure of the hearts of our Lady and her blessed spouse, to both of whom it had been revealed. And now that the time had come when they could use it of Him with full right, it must have been the cause of singular joy to them as connected with the great favours of which it reminded them. Thus the Evangelist specially mentions that “He was so named of the Angel before He was conceived in the womb,” as if to record our Lady’s grateful remembrance of the promise which had been so faithfully and so bountifully fulfilled.
Mary and Joseph began and handed on to the Church the devotion to the Holy Name, and His loving foreknowledge of all the joy and all the blessings with which that devotion was to be rewarded would be, from the very first, a great consolation to His Sacred Heart.
The Circumcision
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